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A comment on You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it. Parent comment

Re:You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it by nikkwong on Thursday April 25, 2024 @02:03AM (#40153979)
Are you positing that you have free will but that those around you with less emotional control don’t? I don’t think your example is serving your argument; your brain is structured in such a way that you reason in a way that is unique to you, and others reason otherwise based on the structure of their brains. I don’t see how this grants you free will. You’re talking about feelings and reasoning as part of conscious experience and that’s, in my opinion, the end state of all of the neurological activity that pointed us to feel or think a certain way in the present moment.

The chain of causality that leads to thoughts and emotions in consciousness is completely determined by the structure and action potentials that propagate through our brain and nothing else, and this doesn’t leave room for some conscious agent in our brain also pulling levers and further modifying causality.

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Re:You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it by somenameforme on Thursday April 25, 2024 @02:23AM (#40154108)
No, I am stating that we can control and change how we behave, which is largely the definition of free will. This is why even identical twins growing up in a practically identical environment will not end up identical. To continue with claims of no free will you end up needing to start appealing to some sort of a butterfly effect of environment. And while that claim is not falsifiable and probably never will be, I think such diverge is vastly more easily explained by simply people having agency and, in identical circumstance and even near identical genetics, being free to make different decisions.
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Re:You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it by lynx23 on Thursday April 25, 2024 @04:42AM (#40155017)
You already said it. "practically identical" is not the same as identical, which alrady explains the (butterfly?) differences. Miniscule differences actually add up...
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Re:You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it by TFYS on Thursday April 25, 2024 @05:37AM (#40155348)
> To continue with claims of no free will you end up needing to start appealing to some sort of a butterfly effect of environment.

The differences between the lives of even identical twins in the same environment are a lot more than a flap of a butterfly's wings. They don't spend every second of their lives together, so their experiences will differ quite a bit.

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