[Mind's Eye] Re: My fellow zombies

As an aside, very few can direct their dreams in the dream state. This
alone is about 1/3 of our life.

On Aug 2, 12:53 pm, RP Singh <123...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Of the various choices before you , you choose to do that which your
> nature decides upon at any given moment. You may let go an opportunity
> now to fiercely grasp at a later moment. The choice, of course , is
> yours but you are under the control of various motivating forces
> which, taking control of your very free will, make you do that which
> the strongest force within you at a given moment wants to be done.
> That which you do today you will not do tomorrow and all with a
> seemingly free will. You can con yourself by opening and closing your
> grip that you are the master , but you are not. It is only your
> reasoning processes which are at play , which take control over you at
> times just as your basic desires. When you think it appears that you
> are thinking freely but actually it is some part of your personality
> which is carrying you along.  If you take psycho-tropic drugs you will
> think and act in a bizarre manner but with what to you is free will.
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> On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 12:14 AM, Jo <jojocasame...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I don't understand how some can say we don't have free will. You can
> > choose to do anything you want at any given time. How is that not free
> > will?
>
> > On Aug 2, 12:51 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> "We have access to a technology that would have looked like sorcery in
> >> Descartes's day: the ability to peer inside someone's head and read
> >> their thoughts. Unfortunately, that doesn't take us any nearer to
> >> knowing whether they are sentient. "Even if you measure brainwaves,
> >> you can never know exactly what experience they represent," says
> >> psychologist Bruce Hood at the University of Bristol, UK.  If
> >> anything, brain scanning has undermined Descartes's maxim. You, too,
> >> might be a zombie. "I happen to be one myself," says Stanford
> >> University philosopher Paul Skokowski. "And so, even if you don't
> >> realise it, are you." Skokowski's assertion is based on the belief,
> >> particularly common among neuroscientists who study brain scans, that
> >> we do not have free will. There is no ghost in the machine; our
> >> actions are driven by brain states that lie entirely beyond our
> >> control. "I think, therefore I am" might be an illusion.
> >> So, it may well be that you live in a computer simulation in which you
> >> are the only self-aware creature. I could well be a zombie and so
> >> could you. Have an interesting day." (from a recent New Scientist)
>
> >> We range over debates in free will and what it is to be human. So far
> >> we haven't established free will or even that we are not merely
> >> avatars in 'something else's game'.
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> >> I wonder whether there are advantages in considering ourselves as
> >> creatures limited by programming and also capable of it?