Möther!
Thanks! And adding that community to the sidebar.
Also yes to the tumblr post! ❤️
A bit besides the point of what I had in mind. That's just... casual conversation. I'm focusing on positivity.
That's my point. Willpower (independent of biology+environment) isn't a thing to begin with.
Now if we only stopped thinking that willpower is some magical fairy dust we were all granted when we turned 18 and not using it "correctly" indicates moral failure.
For real, this just boggles my mind. All this neuroscience, psychology, biology and so many still somehow believe in some vague magical essence that is totally independent of any biological or environmental factors.
Oh but there certainly are people who wield every one of those insults against another with the intent to describe the core of their being. The difference between calling someone stupid, and calling someone's action stupid is a vast one. I am glad you see it, but many do not.
Glad to hear you're doing better. And near death experience as a teen sounds like a lot, especially if you didn't get appropriate support after. But philosophizing isn't the worst thing you could've done, in fact please keep doing that. Crash Course to Philosophy is a nice and engaging starting point if you're interested.
If it is within your means, no reason to not go see a psychiatrist now if you feel there's something unresolved there. I realize that's a slightly privileged invitation these days though.
Since you mention lonely, depressing nights, I'll drop the act.
I actively worked to understand the things I wrote because that finally let me forgive myself for not being perfect. I'm the perfectly natural consequence of everything that ever happened, so I had no reason to beat myself up anymore. But of course, the requirement for that realization was to allow others the same grace.
You are exactly right that it made me appreciate the complexity much more. It was much easier to think there was some objective "good" (that I always failed to be), and it definitely was easier to think people I didn't like were "evil", instead of coming to the very sad understanding that I could be them if not for luck. But having that understanding doesn't lead me to depression, it leads me to write bizarre pompous manifestos on Lemmy for fun. And working in health and wellness industry, because I realized also that I'll never know what could happen, before it has happened (as there's a difference between determinism and fatalism).
I hope you don't have too many lonely and depressing nights. Probably my sentiment won't land but I mean it.
Please feel free to get familiar with semantics.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/semantics
Now if you have an actual argument for why free will exists, please do argue that. Else, I have said as much as needed.
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Ohh yay, thank you for prompting me! The thing is, even as things are now, there is no logically coherent argument for free will (that doesn't require re-defining absolute free will to accommodate people who just really like the idea of free will). Digging deeper into biology, consciousness, neurology etc. consistently fails to find a mechanism for uncaused agency.
You literally don't choose the next thought you have. You'll have already thought it by the time you know what it was. This includes non-verbal thoughts, vibes, your feelings about matters. By the time you cognize any of them, they'll have already happened. You can deliberate but you don't choose if you do, you'll only know after the fact if you did. This is just... plain as day once you are willing to face it.
Belief in free will is just a stubborn thing we have because A: we really just LIKE to think that we have it, and B: Christianity(/Abrahamic religions), in which western thought is rooted, specifically demands the existence of free will. Anyone's belief in free will is just the result of not having one; they've been exposed to a lot of reinforcement of the belief so they take that as a fact.
Further, not having free will carries two implications that people really, really don't like:
If people don't have free will, they aren't at "fault" for their "bad" behavior. People much prefer to be able to simply judge, rather than consider nuance. On this topic, it's easier to say "fat people are just lazy gluttons", instead of accounting for various mental health situations and environmental factors (upbringing, culture etc.). People who grew up with unhealthy habits often struggle to change them if that's all they learned, and the body really likes to hang on to fat once it gets some. This often makes losing weight significantly harder than maintaining a healthy weight. That's just some of the nuance for the topic, and there's way more. Thinking about all that takes a measure of cognitive bandwidth which not everyone has so it's simply more efficient to jump to a judgment (but as I see it, if they don't have the bandwidth, it would be more intellectually honest if they didn't weigh in on the matter at all). Plus getting to judge someone inherently puts one in a superior position in one's own mind, which gets to the next point:
If people don't have free will, any personal achievement anyone is proud of is just the result of "randomness"(except there's no reason to think there's true randomness in reality, any more than there is in computer RNG, it's just complicated to the point that the concept of "random" remains useful in everyday language). They lose the superior position. This is often more significant to people than the much more positive implication that there is nothing inherently wrong with anyone (so people beating themselves up for all their perceived shortcomings are off the hook - however much they think they suck, the fact is that they are the perfectly natural, normal and expectable result of everything that ever was).
It's a direct challenge to our moral intuitions and again, because people like to go for simplicity, they confuse trying to understand causes as excusing behavior. Which it isn't. You don't have to have free will to have consequences for undesirable behavior. But you can impose the consequences from an informed place that actually aims to reduce the undesired behavior. But we tend to prefer "eye for an eye" thinking, again because it's simple and it caters to our base desires.
Add to this that people frequently confuse lack of free will (determinism) with fatalism ( https://breakingthefreewillillusion.com/wp-content/uploads/DETERMINISM-VS-FATALISM-infographic.png ), which leads to people arguing for free will because they think that the lack of it makes "trying to change things" pointless. Which is not an argument for free will, that's just a problem in one's understanding of the topic ( also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences ).