The Batlord

But you're never going to act differently when either crossing or not crossing the bridge. The world is governed by mathematical laws, and unless there is magic that can introduce randomness (where one plus one can sometimes equal three) then your actions are predetermined, just like everything else. Free will is an illusion.

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Chula Vista

Passion plays a huge role. Even if it's insane passion. Hence the marine shootings this past week.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

The Batlord

Emotions are en evolutionary development meant to stimulate certain responses in an organism. Not magic. Just because emotions are complex doesn't make them necessarily mathematically unpredictable, anymore than the complexity of the universe proves the existence of God.

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Chula Vista

Expound please.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

The Batlord

If you want me to give you equations that govern emotions, then even if they existed I don't know about them. But our models of the universe so far have shown that it is governed by mathematical laws, and not magic (magic being any force which governs the universe while contradicting natural laws which are fact rather than just descriptions of our current understanding of natural laws) -- Naturalism -- which means that anything is potentially predictable, assuming we had the right equations.

For this to not be true of emotions, then there would have to be a separate, non-mathematical, non-naturalistic mechanism which governed them (i.e. magic). So unless you believe that emotions are governed by some form of magic -- be it God, faeries, or Merlin -- then the only logical conclusion is that they are most likely governed by mathematical principles, making them predictable and unchangeable. And if the entire universe is also ruled by mathematical principles which would necessarily be governing every movement of every form of anything that exists (or even doesn't exist for all I know) then the situations which you find yourself in will always be the same, as will your reaction to them.

Granted, this stance is not one that can be 100% proven, anymore than the non-existence of God can be 100% proven, but since every observation and model of the world and the universe to date has shown that it operates naturalistically, and that any evidence to the contrary has so far been inconclusive at best, then the assumption should be that the universe operates naturalistically, until compelling evidence suggesting otherwise is introduced. Which would logically also include human action.

I like to call it Secular Calvinism. Not because there isn't already a word for a predetermined universe, but because "Secular Calvinism" amuses me.


A good thing to study on the subject would be incompatibalism vs.compatibalism.

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Chula Vista

The human mind has evolved to a point beyond mathematical laws IMO. It's capable of passion that can drive a person to do things that are beyond any sense of comprehension or logic.

There was a story years back of a woman who roasted her young child to death in her oven because she was convinced he had the devil in him.

Sorry, but stuff like that is never going to be explained by an equation. It's not magic. It's the human brain gone haywire.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

The Batlord

How do you evolve beyond math? Evolution is governed by naturalistic laws. To claim that something can "evolve beyond mathematical laws", you have to not only accept the existence of magic (previously defined by me as any governing force that defies natural laws as they exist in reality regardless if those laws contradict our current models), but that it enters the process at some point.

And seemingly irrational acts based on emotion are not illogical. Say you hear a stick crack in the middle of woods which you know full well are free from large predators, and which are not known for harboring criminal activity. It would be logical to assume that it was just a deer, or a hiker, but ancient instinct, from a time before the existance of human-created "safe zones" where they did not have to worry about predators, kicks in and you may very well become startled.

There is almost certainly no danger, but if your ancestors hadn't developed instincts to treat every noise in the woods as a possible threat, then they would likely have been eaten by considerably more bears. Emotions and instincts are not necessarily logical in every specific situation, but their development was still based logic.

Sounds like an Argument from Incredulity, which is a logical fallacy basically meaning that since you can't imagine how something could be so, then it must not be so. Human emotions are complex to such an extent that the human mind is clearly incapable of fully understanding them, therefore, your own subjective analysis of them should be treated as suspect when attempting to do so.

People aren't clones. Genes are "randomized" to a certain extent in order to prevent genetic stagnation in a species. Since this process is not overseen by an infallible computer, undesirable deformities, both physical and mental, are bound to occur.

From what you describe, this woman was actually acting according to a parent's basic instinct to protect their child: she saw a threat (i.e. demonic possession) and acted to neutralize that threat. Her dysfunctional premise and response would probably still be mathematically predictable if your equation accounted for her mental aberration, and her mental illness (be it genetic and/or developmental) would also be predictable.

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Janszoon

You just added a bridge in your universe. There was no bridge in Trollheart's. Imagine the ripple effects that will have.

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A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

DwnWthVwls

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I don't got a god complex, you got a simple god...

The Batlord

Oops. I read that as "bridge" and not "road".

?

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