Perhaps you could offer some evidence that all is cultural? I used to be a believer in nurture over nature but now I don’t see humans as infinitely malleable. Primal impulses may be diffused or mitigated by culture/nurture but they don’t cease to exist. As per my examples above, when in a real situation with sex, danger or aggression we all revert to our instincts. It takes a lot of work to override them, for example in military training.

So care to expand on your ideas?

cheers Ron

Are you Aussie or an Oswald? I am an Aussie but not an Oswald lol

Primal urges is pop psychology??? What the??? Go and pick a fight at the nearest pub and you can learn all about your primal urges lol Or anything to do with sex, love, aggression, or danger.

Or perhaps you meant something else?

cheers Ron

Thanks for that response.

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“When you are making plans for tomorrow or the next day or in a few years, wouldn’t you say those are conscious decisions even though at the deepest level they may not be? ”
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When we make plans, for the next hour or day or year or decade certain images arise. Yeah, I want to do this and that and in order to do or get them I need to do X Yand Z blah blah on it goes.
All’s good with this idea of freewill and decision making…….except that in the next hour or day or whatever there is an infinite number of possibilities………..yet they are somehow whittled down to a very limited number…..and it is those that we ‘choose’ from. So straight up our choices have already been chosen for us……and the only reason they are chosen for us is that they somehow conflict and it is the conflict that needs to be dissolved.

Normally life flows, do A then B then C……it’s only when there is a conflict that needs resolving that there is any need for choice. As a living being needs arise and are dealt with on an ongoing basis from breathing to eating to shitting……..it’s an organic thing.

So for this idea of decisions, the question is what choices are involved, where do they come from and what determines them.

Another question is do we ‘choose’ our wants? Does it even make sense to say that we choose our wants? And if we say that we do choose our wants then what is the we(or rather I) that does the wanting? I can’t want something till that thought or urge has emerged into my consciousness but by then it has already been decided deeper down that I do indeed want X, and all that is required is conscious acknowledgement and a move to satisfy that want.

Just try noticing the stream of consciousness and when thoughts and feelings and desires come and go,

All this discussion is based on the idea of individuals being a blank slate, a tabula rasa, and we can somehow create ourselves out of nothing.

What if, instead, we each have a unique identity(whether it resides in the DNA or soul or some other mechanism) in the same way as an oak seed is destined to be an oak tree and not a pine tree. And our duty is to find and fulfil our inner destiny and that involves being truly who we each are and living in accordance of that. Of course that means surrendering to our deeper selves.

I sometimes really envy those who have known exactly what they really needed to do from a young age. A little kid sees a plane fly overhead and says to himself “wow, I am going to do that” and he does, as that experience has resonated with him to the extent that all other possibilities are excluded, and all he needs to decide is will any activity take him closer or further away from his goal……but it’s no choice at all as all he wants is to be a pilot. So does he have any choiuce in the matter? I say no. others may say otherwise.

There was no choice involved in writing this response lol, as I started and it just flowed……..no need to choose among the 800000 words of the English language…….see what I mean?

cheers Ron

“Primal urges”? Nothing more than a pop theory/social control measure.

If that is the standard; there is no “consciousness” and our probability defying reality cannot exist.

Fortunately, empirics fails to understand cells (or atoms for that matter) so our reality is safe. Yay!

Don’t worry….be happy!

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“I agree that you can’t control or stop the thought or the emotion but you sure can control how you act on it. ”

“Example: if you have a thought to hit someone but don’t act on it, isn’t this an example of free will?”
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Maybe so…….or maybe more to do with social conditioning, habit, manners, delayed gratification, sublimation of primal urges etc, IOW, civilization. Most urges don’t even make it to the consciousness, so the whole process is unconscious anyhow. As an example, when was the last time you really had to restrain yourself from doing something extremely antisocial? For myself, I cannot even remember when I had to do that. So there were no choices involved.

As for the thought or urge to hit someone, if the urge or provocation is strong enough you hit them. If you don’t then all that means is that the initial urge has been diffused or mitigated subconsciously, so all that remains is anger or annoyance etc.

All I was getting at in my original post was that we all inhabit our subjective worlds and that is all there is. Yes, we do share a physical reality, but we each create a continuous experience that is ours and ours alone. We each create the meanings of that subjective reality and react to that as we must.

I do see this ‘freewill’ argument as merely ex post facto rationalization of what one would have inevitably done, a justification.

As another example…………we disagree on this topic. Each of us cannot see the other as being right………..which gets to what I am saying about the stream of consciousness we each are trapped in………we see what we see and experience what we experience……….and there’s no ‘choice’ involved whatsoever.

cheers Ron

Perhaps you don’t know how that would work but you do it probably every day. I agree that you can’t control or stop the thought or the emotion but you sure can control how you act on it. Example: if you have a thought to hit someone but don’t act on it, isn’t this an example of free will? Doesn’t that apply to any thought or desire you don’t or do act on?