A pattern

[Callie]

Appeals to nature are usually not meaningful, unless they're in direct rebuttal to a likewise fallacious appeal to nature. My parents indoctrinated me to believe that homosexuality was somehow unnatural and abominable, yet our two male cats would frequently employ a certain numerical position on the couch. You have never heard two cats purr so loudly. Chimpanzees were thought to be inane and nonviolent creatures, but they actually engage in violent, cannibalistic, territorial warfare. Carl Linnaeus gifted science with binomial nomenclature, but he classified the whole of humanity into four different subspecies. Linnaeus' view is egregious, considering that our number exhibit a surprising lack of genetic diversity.

 

As for humans, we have some demonstrably unusual sexual characteristics. Humans are notably less sexually dimorphic than some other primate species. Hidden estrus and menopause are unusual traits in the animal world. Males lack an os penis, and have disproportionately large genitals. Females have protuberant breasts during their entire adult lifespan and are fertile year-round. There are many other examples, and such traits are often noted when discussing presumed natural sex differences. In nature, the bonobo displays the sexual behavior most similar to humans. I don't know about you, but I would hate to have a relationship the way a bonobo does.

 

Our intelligence transcends whatever our hypothetical, natural, inherent aspects may supposedly be. Are we naturally inclined to study physics or attempt to discern our own nature? I think not. Observations of reality are ultimately tainted by cognitive biases. The conclusions our forebears set forth about our nature are now comically inaccurate and indicative of prejudice. To claim that our current selves are liberated from such bias would require a great deal of hubris and naïveté. We are not necessarily damned to false conclusions, but must take caution to avoid doing so.

 

I find it interesting that in heterosexual couples, the male is generally older than the female. Our fiction frequently involves a narrative in which a heroic male is rewarded with a young, attractive female. I've not seen any gender reversals of that trope. Many female protagonists in the Hollywood universe are princesses of some sort (princesses were, historically, treated as diplomatic objects… yuck!). The princess is somehow fulfilled in life by gaining a relationship with an older man. Often, the man is markedly unappealing or a literal beast. Again, how often does the gender-inverted trope occur? Society apparently believes that women should gladly accept a man's flaws without reservation, but the man should always expect a young, improbably attractive, virgin woman as his bride. Of course, what's considered attractive varies wildly by culture, but the culture usually enforces a patriarchy that grants heterosexual males sexual gratification. Gender roles are unsettling and bizarre.

 

Notice that I don't have any direct evidence for causation; I just posited that the age difference is due to societal gender roles. I like conjecture, but my conjecture probably contains bias that I am not consciously aware of. We should certainly study the means by which we arbitrarily divide ourselves, but I do strongly believe that we should not make assumptions about human sexual behavior without an earnest attempt to remove our prejudices.

 

I deny that anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing — the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.

[Dikiyoba]

Linnaeus' view is egregious, considering that our number exhibit a surprising lack of genetic diversity.

In fairness to Linnaeus, he was working a few centuries before DNA and genes were discovered. And taxonomy is notoriously unstable. When entire families can come and go, getting subspecies wrong is a small error (which is not to say that the Western classification of modern humans in general wasn't tainted by racism, because it very much was).

 

Dikiyoba must point out that, to Dikiyoba, your post contains the word "naïveté." Oh, where would SW be without obscure uncorrectable bugs?

[Lilith]

Dikiyoba must point out that, to Dikiyoba, your post contains the word "naïveté." Oh, where would SW be without obscure uncorrectable bugs?

 

must be your browser. it looks fine to me: it's "naivete" with the french accents put in because uh i guess excalibur is in a hoity-toity mood right now

[Callie]

must be your browser. it looks fine to me: it's "naivete" with the french accents put in because uh i guess excalibur is in a hoity-toity mood right now

i took french in high school and very much like the language

 

naiveness just doesn't have the same ring as naïveté

[Slawbug]

Height is a REALLY interesting point... especially since you can do all sorts of interesting things, comparing what heights people of different heights are likely to end up with. I wish there were data on that.

[Lilith]

Height is a REALLY interesting point... especially since you can do all sorts of interesting things

 

this sentence didn't go in the direction i expected it to from here

[Randomizer]

when you die you can ask Mickey Rooney about his eight wives.

[Kelandon]

Height is a REALLY interesting point... especially since you can do all sorts of interesting things, comparing what heights people of different heights are likely to end up with. I wish there were data on that.

There is some. I read a 538 analysis of dating site data that went into this a bit.

Short men prefer short women, and tall men prefer tall women.... All women prefer taller men, but tall women display a stronger preference for tall men.

It didn't analyze successful relationships, only expressions of interest, so there may be some differences there.

[Dintiradan]

(I guess it's my fault for not writing posts in one sitting, but here's some responses to posts from over a page ago. )

 

In terms of WoT, I do not think that the female characters are any worse than the male characters. And the female characters do grow and change and have female mentors which was one of the complaints at the start of this thread.

Yeah, I was the one who voiced that complaint, and I've read every book in the series at least once, so I should have thought of it. And you're right in multiple respects. There are a lot of female mentor figures. Moiraine is the obvious one -- she's the Gandalf of the series earlier on, but very soon afterwards her role shifts as her proteges start rejecting her authority. Due to the nature of the magic system, nearly every mentor-student relationship is a woman (or group of women) teaching another woman magic. Outside of that you've got... Lini? There's also the Nynaeve-Egwene relationship, which was done well at some points and poorly at others. But yeah, you're right, WoT is a definite counterexample to "no female mentors".

 

As for how well women are written in general, I agree, there are some well-written roles and some stinkers, just as with male characters. And character development is one of the main points of the series. One of the things I discovered while rereading the series is how much I liked characters I previously despised, like Nynaeve or Faile. But, and this is a biggie, while I liked most female characters on their own, it was their relationship with men that really bothered me. I like Faile, the arrogant runaway who suddenly finds herself in way over her head. I like Faile, the POW trying to break out. I like Faile the leader with troops well behind enemy lines. But her relationship with Perrin? Not so much.

 

In WoT, relationships between men and women (romantic or otherwise) always have this undercurrent of antagonism. Gender roles are embedded into everything. Romantic relationships are discussed in terms of domination and submission; hell, with the characters who received a Seafolk wedding, these roles are explicit.

 

There's a bunch of other issues regarding how women are written, with varying degrees of severity (for instance, I noticed a lot of male costume porn as well on my reread, I guess describing period costumes is something RJ liked), but the previous paragraph outlines my biggest concern. There's a counterargument that due to the magic system and the fallout of the Breaking, the series depicts a culture where aspects of the patriarchy have been flipped, and gender roles cut both ways. I can see this in some aspects, like how women in political power are more common and accepted than they were historically. But... a lot of the same negative stereotypes are held about women (and accepted by them), and the idea of your gender being a defining, binding thing is constantly brought up, especially whenever men and women interact. And most damningly, interviews with the author and editor (a couple) say that they intended the main romantic relationships in the series to be good, ideal ones.

 

Pretty much what Nalyd said. If he's gay, bi, pan, or otherwise romantically interested in men, then Dumbledore's relationship with Grindelwald is drastically different than if he is heterosexual, asexual, or otherwise not romantically interested in men.

 

But all we can do is speculate, because Rowling doesn't tell us until after the fact. The series is about love and equality and relationships and discrimination, but she doesn't tell us anything about how the wizarding world views sexual orientations. She writes frankly (though avoiding direct references to sex) about all sorts of heterosexual relationships and families, from the ideal to the seriously messed up, without ever including a same-gender pairing or non-heterosexual character until we get one after-the-fact token gay character. That's a pretty glaring absence.

In terms of the story, what's important (from my reading, at least) is that Dumbledore's relationship with Grindelwald blinds him to what Grindelwald is doing until it's almost too late. Dumbledore's orientation would cast the relationship in a different light, but in any case he's in a situation where he finds he's on the wrong side of a war, and has to make himself switch sides and make amends. Harry discovering his mentor is flawed, but still able to do the right thing in the end, plays a large role in him being able to empathize with and forgive Snape and Malfoy. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it, I dunno.

 

As for Rowling staying silent on how the wizarding world views sexual orientations, while we don't get any indication from Dumbledore himself, there is the bit where Rita Skeeter spreads rumours about Harry being groomed/abused by Dumbledore. Now, maybe she picked that specific rumour because of maximum shock value, but maybe the wizarding world follows the logic of "Dumbledore has never married" -> "Dumbledore must be gay" -> "All gay men are pedophiles". The second leap of reasoning is still common here, and might be common in that setting too. Again, I might be reading too much into it.

[Harehunter]

I have been reading this discussion on age difference between men and women with some amusement. You see, I am probably as far outside the standard deviation of the means as one can get. The age difference between me and my wife is 15 years. Strike one. She is more senior than I am. Strike two. I have been married once, still and that was almost 30 years ago. Strike three. I'm outta here.

[Sudanna]

Our intelligence transcends whatever our hypothetical, natural, inherent aspects may supposedly be. Are we naturally inclined to study physics or attempt to discern our own nature? I think not.

 

oh dear. ha. aha. next thing you'll tell us you think free will is a thing

[Slawbug]

Anecdotally, now that I think about it, I can't actually think of a single same-sex couple I've met with a height difference of more than a few inches. Anecdotal, but still striking.

 

If that is a legit thing (I'm not at all sure it is) and there is some reason for it, that could explain my first conjecture a bit better, since both gender and height would both be unavailable as surface-mechanisms. As Lilith pointed out there might be other outlets besides age, but the more that are closed off the more expression we'd expect to see in the open outlets.

[Student of Trinity]

Then stop generating and participating in debates?

I haven't tried to generate any debates, or knowingly participated in any for years. I can't help it if other people react to my posts by debating. I always wondered why you seemed to be so adversarial.

 

If it helps, I can add a 'please don't consider this a debate' to any threads I start from now on. Debates have their place, in legislatures at least, but otherwise the idea that discussion should by default be a contest between defined and fixed propositions seems strange to me. It is so rare for any idea to be precisely defined. Once an idea is clearly defined, there is rarely much left to discuss.

[Sudanna]

"So I had this idea here's my justification."

 

"I think your idea is wrong."

 

"Okay, lemme change my justification."

 

"I think your idea is wrong."

 

"Okay, lemme change my justification."

 

"I think your idea is wrong."

 

"I still have this idea, but I'm just gonna stop providing new justifications or responding to your criticism now."

 

"I still think it's wrong, and now I'm annoyed."

 

"Stop being so adversarial! I'm not trying to debate or anything!"

[Student of Trinity]

I guess this means we're not getting any clarification on the criteria, after all.

 

No, I take your point, Slarty. From the amount of confusion about whether I'm just saying some characters are bad, it's clear that the pattern I'm seeing isn't actually that obvious. I'll try to work out a little list, along the lines of 'you might be a redneck if'. What are the extraordinary-versus-ordinary things in which male and female major characters seem to differ, in all these books I'm noticing? I'm on vacation this week, though, and internet access may be a bit spotty. It may take me a week or so.

 

I'm not trying to say any characters or authors are bad, any more than someone who is concerned about a corporate glass ceiling is saying that secretaries don't contribute or that any particular male executive is no good or that any particular female employee has somehow either failed or been shafted, just because she doesn't have the corner office.

 

I'm going to have to bow out of the Harry Potter discussion. I'm still not convinced that Hermione or Bellatrix or Luna are really peers to Harry or Dumbledore or Hagrid, but I do admit that all three characters are pretty decent, in one way or another, so I don't really consider it a point worth much more argument. I haven't read the books for years, now, either.

 

I would like to respond to the mention of C.J. Cherryh. She used to be a favorite author of mine, until the things I liked least about her work (plots that seemed to meander aimlessly until a sudden violent ending that could apparently just as easily have happened two hundred pages earlier, or never) began to seem more and more salient. An awful lot of her stories followed the perspective of a male ingenue who had to deal with a powerful and enigmatic female. One (The Paladin) had the perspective of a powerful male mentor figure with a tragic backstory, and yet the female ingenue was somehow the powerful one in the relationship, and the focus of the book; the abrupt shift to her point of view, at the very end, was very effective despite being easy to miss. For all her faults as a writer — and they eventually exasperated me — Cherryh did seem to know how to avoid the pattern I'm describing. Morgaine counts, in my thinking, as extraordinary.

[Student of Trinity]

I guess this means we're not getting any clarification on the criteria, after all.

 

No, I take your point, Slarty. From the amount of confusion about whether I'm just saying some characters are bad, it's clear that the pattern I'm seeing isn't actually that obvious. I'll try to work out a little list, along the lines of 'you might be a redneck if'. What are the extraordinary-versus-ordinary things in which male and female major characters seem to differ, in all these books I'm noticing? I'm on vacation this week, though, and internet access may be a bit spotty. It may take me a week or so.

 

I'm not trying to say any characters or authors are bad, any more than someone who is concerned about a corporate glass ceiling is saying that secretaries don't contribute or that any particular male executive is no good or that any particular female employee has somehow either failed or been shafted, just because she doesn't have the corner office.

<p>I'm going to have to bow out of the Harry Potter discussion. I'm still not convinced that Hermione or Bellatrix or Luna are really peers to Harry or Dumbledore or Hagrid, but I do admit that all three characters are pretty decent, in one way or another, so I don't really consider it a point worth much more argument. I haven't read the books for years,%2

[Student of Trinity]

"So I had this idea here's my justification."

 

"I think your idea is wrong."

 

"Okay, lemme change my justification."

 

"I think your idea is wrong."

 

"Okay, lemme change my justification."

 

"I think your idea is wrong, and now I'm annoyed about it."

 

"Stop being so adversarial! I'm not trying to debate or anything!"

 

It's not actually a good idea to think that any idea is so simply wrong. Ideas aren't like that. Being wrong isn't even like that.

[VCH]

I haven't tried to generate any debates, or knowingly participated in any for years. I can't help it if other people react to my posts by debating. I always wondered why you seemed to be so adversarial.

 

If it helps, I can add a 'please don't consider this a debate' to any threads I start from now on. Debates have their place, in legislatures at least, but otherwise the idea that discussion should by default be a contest between defined and fixed propositions seems strange to me. It is so rare for any idea to be precisely defined. Once an idea is clearly defined, there is rarely much left to discuss.

 

To be a bit adversarial myself, I'll say that your posts often come off as "I like the sound of my own voice; let's hear more of that...". Just sayin.

[Slawbug]

It's not actually a good idea to think that any idea is so simply wrong. Ideas aren't like that. Being wrong isn't even like that.

...now you're actually trolling us, right?

 

Yes, OF COURSE there are shades of gray; intuitions or insights that turn out to be incorrect on the whole, often sprang from important kernels of truth; and that is as true of your propositions as of anyone's.

 

But no one here is rejecting your ideas outright. What is being rejected, is your refusal to engage in a dialogue about them. Sometimes this is an outright refusal. Frequently you keep talking, but the conversation reads as a series of your monologues interrupted by dialogue that you do not enter into; other people respond to your monologues, but you never respond to the responses; you just launch a new monologue later on, ignoring most of the responses entirely. If that's intentional, then I have to suggest that a blog would be a better format for your ruminations than a message board post. But even then I think your approach is antithetical to the co-operative pursuit of knowledge.

 

Walter Kaufmann wrote in his _Critique of Religion and Philosophy_:

 

"The great philosopher is a poet with an intellectual conscience... What is wanted is a wealth of intuitions, observations, and insights, and the relentless passion to examine them. Under rational scrutiny, hunches are abandoned, insights modified, and observations found out to be partial."

 

It seems to me that you want to share your wealth of intuitions, observations, and insights — but are reluctant to examine them; and feel slighted that other people might dare to do so.

[Lilith]

 

I haven't tried to generate any debates, or knowingly participated in any for years. I can't help it if other people react to my posts by debating. I always wondered why you seemed to be so adversarial.

 

If it helps, I can add a 'please don't consider this a debate' to any threads I start from now on. Debates have their place, in legislatures at least, but otherwise the idea that discussion should by default be a contest between defined and fixed propositions seems strange to me. It is so rare for any idea to be precisely defined. Once an idea is clearly defined, there is rarely much left to discuss.

 

hahahahahahaha dude you can't make weird provocative statements and then keep people from disagreeing with you by tacking a this-isn't-a-debate disclaimer on to them. that's not how human interaction works

[Harehunter]

SoT, Be careful who you call Redneck.

Those who are not will take offense.

Those who are will take it as a compliment.

Do I really have to say which category I belong to?

[Balladeer]

Has anyone else read the Dragon Prince series by Melanie Rawn? I was trying to think of other series I had read lately that haven't been mentioned already. The series as a whole waffled between 'boring' history and 'riveting' personal encounters for me but that's personal taste. I think that the balance of male to female superpower mentors was handled pretty well in it. It started with both men and women mentors for both men and women students. As the series progresses over a few generations, those who were learning in earlier books become the mentors in the next. Well rounded characters if all a bit tortured.

[Callie]

Our intelligence transcends whatever our hypothetical, natural, inherent aspects may supposedly be. Are we naturally inclined to study physics or attempt to discern our own nature? I think not.

oh dear. ha. aha. next thing you'll tell us you think free will is a thing

Nope: if I am pressed, I am inclined to lean towards hard determinism, but I do not feel strongly about it. I do like to comfort myself with the illusion of free will, though, if that is the case.

 

(Late reply, I know, but I haven't had internet access)

 

Edit: Wrong term

[Sudanna]

I don't get where you're getting the idea that human intelligence is in any way distinct from what's "natural" or "inherent" about humans, then.

[Callie]

That's a good point. I haven't thought about it that way before.

[Alorael at Large]

It's not like nature turned off somehow. We're still natural. We're still living in nature. And cities are ecosystems, too, while we're at it. Appeal to nature is a fallacy unless you're using nature imprecisely when you mean something with actual practical, moral, or other benefit.

 

—Alorael, who is a hard compatibilist. You have free will only to the extent that the future is predetermined.

[VCH]

" You have free will only to the extent that the future is predetermined. "

 

What does that mean? Can you reword this?

[Callie]

I think Alorael was being facetious with that comment.

 

It's not like nature turned off somehow. We're still natural. We're still living in nature. And cities are ecosystems, too, while we're at it. Appeal to nature is a fallacy unless you're using nature imprecisely when you mean something with actual practical, moral, or other benefit.

Oh I definitely agree, and I was making a statement to that effect in one of my previous posts. I've been waxing philosophical lately, but I still have a lot of inconsistencies in my logic; Nalyd pointed that out. I also made a typo in one of my earlier posts: I said hard incompatibilism when I should have said hard determinism.

 

Also, I think "Post hoc ergo you're wrong" might be my favorite of Alorael's PDNs. It made me laugh out loud (or lol, as the common internet lingo would have it).

[Alorael at Large]

I was being a little bit facetious, but it really is part of compatibilism, or at least one kind.

 

Consider a situation in which you face a decision, be it momentous or completely mundane. You enter the situation with your past, everything that led you to that moment. You have all the knowledge you've gained up to that time, minus everything you've forgotten. You have your preferences and your beliefs. You make a choice, and that choice is an expression of everything that you are and have been through in arriving at that moment.

 

Free will is often taken to mean that you really could make either of two (or more) choices freely. But what does it mean that you, with the sum of who you are, could make a different choice? What would it be based on? The only real way to have two real options is for the options to be random. And that requires physical randomness in your decision-making brain. It's no longer really a choice; it's an expression of physical randomness.

 

—Alorael, who thus believes that free will, with emphasis on will, is nonrandom. Randomness gets you choices, so it's free, but there's no will there.

[Sudanna]

That is how it happens, but that is a worthless, neutered redefinition of what free will means. Your will is not free: it is determined by things that are not you. Will is an inseparable part of a self, and a self with different will is a different self, and what your self is is determined by things that are not you. The idea of free will is indeed based on various intuitive fictions and cognitive deceptions, but the response should not be to redefine the words to mean something else entirely. It should be to discard the broken, ill-defined idea "free will" has always been.

[Lilith]

hey thanks for the pep talk artie schopenhauer

[Kelandon]

You know what I was thinking just before I clicked on this thread? "Gosh, I really need a pep talk from Artie Schopenhauer." And here it was! What are the odds?

[Alorael at Large]

WIll is determined by self. Self is determined by things other than self. But what would be the meaning of will not determined by any external causes? That's not meaningful; it's not even really conceivable.

 

—Alorael, who notes that metaphysical free will is an ill-defined, nebulous, meaningless concept as commonly used. Definitions tend to be either unworkably vague or compatibilist. You can claim that compatibilist will isn't really free in a fit of pique, but at least it's a definition that seems fairly congruent with the intuitive nebulous meaning. Claiming something can't be defined well, so it doesn't exist, which means definitions are deceptive and wrong isn't a helpful practice.

[Sudanna]

It's a definition that is entirely divorced from the intuitive nebulous meaning and shouldn't use the same words. The intuitive nebulous meaning is all about someone being able to make choices. In a deterministic universe, there are no choices to make. They have been determined by other things already. It is an accurate conception of will, but it is not at all free will. Free will doesn't exist.

[Alorael at Large]

In a deterministic universe there are still choices, and you still make them. They come from who you are and what you want. You're responsible for them. Your choices are determined by you. You are determined by outside forces, but that's not unique to determinism. Nobody reasonably suggests that people and their decisions aren't molded by culture, by upbringing, by mood, by how hungry they are at the moment, and so on. Decisions are always affected by extrinsic factors. People are affected by extrinsic factors.

 

Saying that we are entirely the products of extrinsic factors is a difference in degree, but it doesn't really take away free will. You have a personality and preferences. You make a choice.

 

—Alorael, who again asks the same question. In a non-deterministic universe in which one has free will and can make choices, what is the difference? How do you connect will to choices that are not the product of anything that is the product of anything else?

[Randomizer]

How do you tell if you are in a deterministic or non-deterministic universe? After all in a deterministic universe with the illusion of free will, part of the illusion could be thinking about the predetermined decision.

[Sudanna]

If outside forces determine what you are and what you are determines what choices you make, then outside forces determine what choices you make. It's not the influence of outside forces on decisions that are otherwise yours, because outside forces are the only influence happening at all. Outside forces are the only input into this system. You, however you want to define what "you" is, have no input, make no choices. The universe is fundamentally masturbatory.

 

A personality and preferences exist in my brain, but these are not mine - they were chosen by things other than me. They cannot ever be mine, because for me to make any decisions, I have to already exist, and if I exist then I have to have come from something, and then that thing created every decision I might make. It made all of those decisions, not me.

 

In a non-deterministic universe with free will and choices, I have no idea what happens because that concept makes no sense. Free will requires something to come from nothing. I don't think that happens in this universe and I don't have any conception of how it's supposed to work. But that's what any meaningful definition of free will requires. What's the difference between a universe with no free will and one where "free will only to the extent that the future is predetermined" is the case?

[Slawbug]

In a non-deterministic universe with free will and choices, I have no idea what happens because that concept makes no sense. Free will requires something to come from nothing.

So? While it may be a crazy idea that the world sprang into being from nothing, it's also a pretty crazy idea that it didn't. Either way you leave the territory of actual knowledge and enter the realm of total speculation, of Unmoved Movers and First Causes.

 

Personally I'm less interested in whether or not free will is an illusion -- since we can't seem to tell the difference -- and more in the fact that, free or not, we are conscious of our experiences and our thoughts. Talk about pulling a rabbit out of a hat. The existence of consciousness is totally inexplicable, just like the fact that anything exists at all.

[Balladeer]

A personality and preferences exist in my brain, but these are not mine - they were chosen by things other than me. They cannot ever be mine, because for me to make any decisions, I have to already exist, and if I exist then I have to have come from something, and then that thing created every decision I might make. It made all of those decisions, not me.

 

 

This can only be true if whatever you came from has the ability to control the thoughts in your head. So either you are arguing that the 'being' that made you 'can' control your thoughts, or that the sum of all external forces and circumstances and influences on your life ultimately puts all your thoughts in your head. The former I can shrug and say possible at, but the latter I do not believe. Life and circumstances may influence your thoughts and decisions, but I do not see how these experiences can force you to think and do one way or another. There is always a choice, despite circumstances, despite upbringing, despite experiences good or bad, there is always a choice and something sentient has to make it, be it you or a being that controls you.

[Sudanna]

There's a difference between musing on the origins of the universe and saying that something new comes from nothing every time a human makes a decision.

 

I would not be so amazed with consciousness, if I were you? It doesn't work very well and every day that goes by makes it look like most of our conscious experience is just the rest of our brain lying to the conscious part. Probably just a lucky evolutionary mistake.

 

This can only be true if whatever you came from has the ability to control the thoughts in your head. So either you are arguing that the 'being' that made you 'can' control your thoughts, or that the sum of all external forces and circumstances and influences on your life ultimately puts all your thoughts in your head. The former I can shrug and say possible at, but the latter I do not believe. Life and circumstances may influence your thoughts and decisions, but I do not see how these experiences can force you to think and do one way or another. There is always a choice, despite circumstances, despite upbringing, despite experiences good or bad, there is always a choice and something sentient has to make it, be it you or a being that controls you.

 

Where else can the thoughts in my head possibly come from if not from their basic biological functions and sensory input. It's not that I am forced to think a certain way - it's that the idea I ever could have thought any other way is an illusion. Light hits my eyes. Neurons fire. What space is there for anything original? Everything is the product of what has come before, be it culture or evolution. My thoughts, as physical things that exist in my brain, are no different.

[Alorael at Large]

I guess we have the same idea, but I see it as free will and you see it as the antithesis of free will. See, to me having decisions enter the system from nowhere seems like unfree will. I am not some entity outside of reality, I'm a real being running on the laws of physics. My decisions are predetermined, yes, but they're predetermined by who I am and what I want. (Sure, those are predetermined too.) To make other decisions I would have to be someone other than me.

 

If there is outside input, it's not from me. My will is less free because something else, even if it's something somehow freer, is pulling the strings. The only reasonable version of this I can conceive of is a quantum mechanical randomness. Maybe enough ions move, maybe they don't. Maybe that lets an action potential trigger in the neuron, maybe it doesn't. In aggregate, maybe my brain settles on yes, and maybe on no. But then it's not me making any choices, it's the dice of the universe.

 

—Alorael, who finds consciousness to be an inexplicable emergent property. But he's really not sure it's any more inexplicable than a lot of very basic parts of the physical world.