[ExI] Social implications of widespread extropian/positivist ideals

jameschoate at austin.rr.com jameschoate at austin.rr.com
Fri Mar 5 21:37:12 UTC 2010


Actually you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink, you can only drown the nag. What you want to do is get people to question themselves. Even if you get people to admin they were wrong they'll hold you responsible for it. Whatever you were trying to accomplish dies right there.

You answer your own question. People don't have free will because they're not willing to question and risk. They're afraid of the unknown. People, all people, are caught in a weird little self-actualizing fantasy. They look around the work with a tinted view, then make decisions based on that view that are self-actualizing, and then look at the consequences and holler about how that's the way the world is. The whole time the vast majority of what they take for a given is their own creation because they don't want to take responsibility for the choice. You can't have free will if you don't want to take responsibility for having the choice.

De Omnibus Dubitandum.

The funny, ironic aspect is that once you decide to question everything once you can never stop and you realize how little you know and how little you control. At that point you realize that in many things there is no 'free will'. If free will isn't universal then it isn't free.

---- JOSHUA JOB <nanite1018 at gmail.com> wrote: 

> On this question, I think the only real answer is to try to convince people they're wrong,

> I don't get why people say free will is a fiction, in any meaningful sense of the word. We deal with people as macroscopic entities, with thoughts, beliefs, ideas, etc., and it is literally impossible for us to deal with them, or ourselves, in any other manner.

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