Peterkin

Been done already. Better. And the dismissive language and facile generalizations don't make this a very strong exposition.

Why? If the first, you already experience yourself that way, so the only thing left to learn is the mechanism of you function. If the second, you can never understand anything anyway, so it doesn't matter.

How do you know? https://blog.oup.com/2017/08/electrons-consciousness-philosophy/ There is the operative phrase. You don't know. The particle doesn't know.

Obviously. But you don't have access to all that preceding information, so you can't know what-all is going into the current decision. You experience it as a process over which you have a degree of control (depending on external circumstances and available options), so it feels more free than it really is. You're still going through the process, just as if the outcome were not pre-determined. I could, for example, have sworn I cited this link before, but it was not reproduced in the external world the way I pictured it in my prefrontal cortex. https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofmanagementopenstax/chapter/how-the-brain-processes-information-to-make-decisions-reflective-and-reactive-systems/

All angles must be represented. I came late and got stuck with 178 degrees. Any more obtuse, I'd be a straight line.

Yeah. I can live with that.

You are aware that it's in the religion forum? You are aware that religious FAITH is not based on EVIDENCE? Nevertheless, the structure, intent and content of a dogma, or mythology, world-view or belief system can be discussed within its own frames of reference. Submitting it to the strictures of an alien discipline is entirely unproductive. Why do people insist on saying that? Most religions are scary as Hell and demanding and uncomfortable.

As a wise man recently said: Like mathematics, it exists and is absolute, whether we know about it or not. In this case, the outcome of the decision is pre-determined in the sense of having been determined by all the events pre-ceding the decision, before the decision is known by the decider.

It probably isn't true: everything that went before determines everything that comes after. But we don't know more than 0.00001% of all that; it doesn't figure in our decision-making process. We experience life as if we had free will. We make our assessments and judgments, pick our fights, partners and lottery numbers as if we had free will. We walk around thinking and acting as if we had free will. So, for all practical purposes, we do have free will. (Pay no attention to the predetermined physics behind the curtain!)

So the numbers are a deciding factor? That's all I asked. Why did you drag him into this, if you didn't mean to use him? In my example, you were torturing (bloodlessly - yes, there are more imaginative methods than hitting on the nose) a nineteen-year-old terrorist suspect, whom you had, seventeen years earlier, saved from a kidnapper by torturing the kidnapper's accomplice. How he shrunk down to 7, I don't know. Unless you torture a lot more frequently than you previously let on, or else you failed to rescue him and the terrorists brought him up to serve their own nefarious ends, so it took a lot less time to go from innocent toddler to weapon of mass destruction, or else you did save him, returned him to the hulkingly brutish father who tehn became a mad bomber, using his own child as a weapon.

Then mine would be very different.

If he was only seven, you would still torture him to find out where the bomb was? Would you not find that repugnant - even a little? ??? I find your stance and philosophy as simply stone walling, and strawmen building by the score.. It's not a "stance". it's a very simple question. It was you who put one child* and thousands of people** in the same sentence. (* who you assume is worth saving at any cost, though you can't know what he or she will grow into; ** whom you assume to be uniformly innocent, but you don't actually know how many are guilty of what, or what they will do after you saved them) So I asked: Do the numbers involved influence your decision?

Nobody should do any of those things. And nobody should assume they know which procedure will bring about the best outcome in every situation. Approximately how long it takes to grow a toddler into a terrorist. Give or take 2 years. Just be funny if you had caused the thing you're now preventing. Funny 'ol worl' all around.

Which is it? One child? Or a thousand assorted people? Shouldn't that make a difference to the balance of rightness? Wouldn't it be funny if the mad bomber you're torturing today were the same little tot you saved seventeen years ago by torturing a kidnapper? (Once every seventeen years is still quite a rare occurrence, even in the career of a federal agent who feels unconstrained by the law when he can't think of any way yo get the information he needs.)

I don't see air rising and falling as a factor inside a freezer stuffed with food - there is little or no air circulation. The temperature inside the freezer should be between -15 and -20 C; everything inside should be frozen solid. This is your best insurance against a relatively short power outage. Make sure the door seal is tight, and don't open it unnecessarily. Oh, I guess it's an upright freezer. They're convenient but far less efficient than chest freezers. Even so: the more full it is, the longer it takes anything inside to melt. If you don't have enough food to fill it, insert containers of water - you don't need ice cubes; the water can freeze in place - not just at the top, but packed tightly in among the packages of food. The more ice is in there, the more like an old-fashioned ice-box it behaves. With an upright freezer, the door seal is even more critical. If it doesn't seal tightly enough, put a bungee around the freezer. Because sometimes it's summer outside.

Those can't be the only possible alternatives. Again, not the only available alternatives. When you set up false dichotomies, you get nonsensical results.

At night, I'm reading Pilgrim, a novel by Timothy Findley. In the afternoon, I'm reading Places of the Soul by Christopher Day. It's about architecture.

Ahhh!

I've also noticed a change in the attitude of my own cohort. When I was in my teens, there was a surge of interest in the paranormal, supernatural, unexplained and spiritual phenomena. Ouija boards, automatic writing, pendulum, Tarot, I Ching, astrology - dream interpretation, which morphed in young adulthood into hypnotism, various fringe psychotherapies, Eastern mysticism, holistic medicine... and then a gradual hardening of sciences, which leads rejection of the exotic and fanciful and finally, overt scorn of whatever isn't "objective" enough. At 15-25, I as far more open to things that do not yield to a facile physical explanation; at 60, I was closed and shuttered. Now, I'm not as sure of what I know and what I can know as I was 15 years ago. Maybe, but I understand that an encounter with a haunt or poltergeist is not a bit comforting for the people who have that experience.

I've seen some odd things on highways at night - most of them explained by light, shadow and perspective, all of which change and interact as a vehicle speeds along. But there are different classes of experience, of which optical delusion is only one. I knew a very practical, sober-minded nurse who announced the deaths of three of her relatives (within the five or six years of our acquaintance) weeks before a letter from the old country informed her of those deaths. She said, quite matter-of-factly: "They visit me, just to say goodbye. So do some of my patients." I don't know whether she found that comforting or not. I thought it was spooky. When I told my mother about it, she said she'd dreamed of the deaths both her parents - 40 years apart, in distant places, without warning) and an older sister on the night of their deaths. (Everyone in her family seemed to die at night - she did, too.)

Interesting perspective. Thanks.

For some people, the supernatural becomes a way of relating to the world all the time. If they're talking to saints or the Virgin Mary, they're considered pious. That's the safe alternative. If they're talking to an invisible friend, they're considered mentally ill; if they're talking to a spirit guide, they're considered charlatans. Those are the alternatives that people worry about and why they might be reluctant to mention their peculiar experiences. We can't tell how normal and prevalent such experiences are, because people who have them don't report them, and lots of people who do report are lying.

What happened to ?

I think we just used to be students.

Maybe not everybody has them, but most of the people I've known did. At one time, sometimes or many times, we have a moment .... we hear something, see something, feel something, remember something.... otherworldly. A dead relative whispers a warning. A phantom pet hops up on the bed and curls up behind your knees. The grass calls your name. The stars threaten to suck you up into the sky. You wake up in the middle of the night and know that someone has died. You have an unaccountable urge to get in touch with with someone, because they need your help. When something weird like that happens, do you formulate a rational explanation? Do you ignore it? Do you look up research on such occurrences? Do you talk to somebody about it? Do you accept it as paranormal?