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Thread ID: 142713	2016-08-25 04:00:00	45 minutes on a single paragraph of Nietzsche's Beyond Good & Evil	zqwerty (97)	PC World Chat

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
1424974	2016-08-25 04:00:00	Some of you may have noticed and read my Signature. Here is more about the book this Sig comes from, very, very, very, worthwhile taking the time to listen and understand a little of it: www.youtube.com	zqwerty (97)
1424975	2016-08-25 22:55:00	Some of you may have noticed and read my Signature Yes and I can't understand it. What does the "it" refer to at the end - free will itself or a theory of free will? "Refuted" means "has been proved wrong". If a theory of free will has been proved wrong, some other theory might be correct. Whether free will itself is true is another question What is the guy trying to say?	BBCmicro (15761)
1424976	2016-08-26 01:03:00	If you watched the video you would have found that Nietzsche's writings are both dense and subtle and open to interpretation. I take my signature to be a Philosopher's joke. He is saying that all theories are interesting because they can be refuted by anyone but if you refute the theory, or even the idea of "free will" as generally understood, then you brand yourself as a fool because it is "free will" that allows you to choose to refute "free will", or not, but for some reason, ie stupidity or muddied thinking the person that denies "free will" shows himself up, so that is funny and a built in trap.	zqwerty (97)
1424977	2016-08-26 04:20:00	Ah! He was getting at people who deny free will It was a scientific fashion at one stage to deny that free will exists . Scientists assumed that everybody was forced to act according to the dictates of reality . Nowdays, scientists are not sure that a self-existent reality exists, in which case it can't force us to do anything As I understand it, the current scientific explanation of free will is that it is a fictitious force like the Coriolis force - something we invent to preserve an erroneous view the world . (The Coriolis force arises from people on a rotating platform assuming they are at rest . When they do that, they are forced to invent a "force" to explain various peculiarities in their world . ) What is the erroneous view of the world that causes the force of free will? That a self-existent reality exists when it does not . It works like this . Each person unconsciously assumes that an independent reality exists which they have accurate knowledge of . But in the absence of a self-existent reality, each person's reality is just a personal creation . Each person is fully compatible with what they create, and if there are 7 billion of us, it means 7 billion realities . But we insist that there shall be just one true Reality, and that it applies to everybody . When we do that, we are forced to explain why other people are not fully compatible with it . We invent the force of free will to explain that incompatibility . We assume that other people have a mysterious ability to wilfully disobey the dictates of Reality . Of course, each person is obeying their personal reality . But we don't like people having personal realities . We want a single reality because then we can have knowledge of it and be superior to anybody who doesn't have my knowledge	BBCmicro (15761)
1424978	2016-08-26 04:57:00	Ah yes BBCmicro, but I thought that Post-Modernism, the age we live in now, is based on the fact that there is no one 'true' reality just a whole multiplicity of individual 'realities' and that none of the individual 'realities' is any more valid than any other, hence the current chaos. The definition joke of 'free will' above, also just below, shows its limits, and what a tiny thing it really is, that is why Nietzsche made the joke.	zqwerty (97)
1424979	2016-08-26 21:01:00	It all reminds me of the musings of that guy on the smoke and drive TV ad....meh.	pctek (84)
1424980	2016-08-26 22:32:00	Philosophy is interesting but I prefer science. You can take or leave a philosophical stance like post-modernism. But you had better accept science Free will is certainly a problem of science. In atomic theory for instance. As I understand it, all the forces of Nature (such as electricity) are in the pseudo category. Gravity only appears to us as a force because we have an unnatural way of viewing it - from the surface of a planet. The natural way to view gravity is "unbiased" ie, free-falling. In that case there is no force. It shows that what we call the force of gravity is just our invention to preserve the notion that the surface of our planet should be the basis for explanations. Free will causes objects to be moved around - the assembly of this computer for instance. It therefore has the character of a force. Therefore it should be explained along with the Coriolis and other forces, by science	BBCmicro (15761)
1424981	2016-08-27 06:39:00	Here is the difference between philosophy and science - Philosophy (post-modernism): Everybody believes in their own personal reality. It results in 7 biilion realities. We add them together and get chaos. Wrong result. Science: Everybody believes in their own personal reality. It results in 7 biilion realities. We add them together and get... a single coherent reality. Correct result. The scientific result is correct because it corresponds with what we observe. So how does science get a different result from post-modernism? Like this We add the 7 billion personal realities in a way which gets a single answer (not a jumble of 7 billion different answers). The way to do this is by using vectors. Each person believes a particular reality to exist. We represent the person's belief by a vector whose magnitude represents how strongly their belief is. The direction of the vector is towards whatever reality the person believes to be true. Then we use the addition property of vectors to see the result of 7 billion people believing things. (The addition of vectors: remember the parallelogram rule from high school?) The result of adding these 7 billion vectors is one resultant vector. It points at the one real world believed to exist We arrive at the satisfying result that the world is not different from what it is believed to be. (You are free to dispute this. Please provide proof.)	BBCmicro (15761)
1424982	2016-08-27 20:22:00	Each person believes a particular reality to exist. We represent the person's belief by a vector whose magnitude represents how strongly their belief is. Then we use the addition property of vectors to see the result of 7 billion people believing things. (The addition of vectors: remember the parallelogram rule from high school?) The result of adding these 7 billion vectors is one resultant vector. It points at the one real world believed to exist So all the religious nutters are right then. Creationism rules and the planet is 6000 years old.	pctek (84)
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