A lot of this comes down to people’s free will. If you could perfectly analyze the reasons for every decision a person makes then those decisions would hardly be free.
A lot of this comes down to people’s free will. If you could perfectly analyze the reasons for every decision a person makes then those decisions would hardly be free.
SenK@lemmy.ca 22 hours ago
You’d have to now prove that free will is real.
ageedizzle@piefed.ca 21 hours ago
I can’t prove that to you. And you can’t prove it’s not real, either. This debate has been at a standstill since the Ancient Greeks started discussing it. I just took it for granted in my previous comment because the vast majority of people, including professional philosophers, see here) believe it to be real.
SenK@lemmy.ca 21 hours ago
That’s not how burden of proof works. Just because a lot of people (particularly those with culturally Christian backgrounds…) “believe” it’s real, doesn’t make it so.
ageedizzle@piefed.ca 21 hours ago
Like I said in my previous comment, I can’t prove anything to you. And if it wasn’t obvious, I’m not trying to prove anything to you. I’m certainly not saying that free will is real because people believe in it. I’m not saying you have the burden of proof. I’m not trying to persuade you and I’m not looking for a debate.
All I was saying that, in casual conversation, it’s probably fine to speak as if it’s real because very few people will actually take objection to that.
And that has nothing to do with Christianity either. You’ll notice from that survey that the majority of professional philosophers are actually atheists too. In fact, one of the philosophers who is responsible for popularizing atheism in revent decades, Daniel Dennett, someone who is literally one of the founders of the new atheism movement, is a big proponent of free will and has written entire books on it.