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feos wrote:
No, you are trying to disprove my statement by inventing nonexistent situations.
Sorry, if I misunderstand, but the situations are very real. How is "me accidentally hurting myself against my free will" a nonexistent situation? Have you ever hit your toe on furniture or otherwise accidentally hurt yourself? Was it your free will that it happened?
I'm sorry. The problem with this discussion is that there is no clear definition of "free will" for us to use in a meaningful way. We use those words vaguely. Everyone is probably thinking about a different idea. The result is a bunch of pseudophilosophical assertions (also known as theology). The discussion is entertaining, but it might be more fruitful if we agreed on what "free will" means. Maybe this helps a little: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_willfeos wrote:
Citation needed.
Genesis 1:27-28 --> God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
Is this not a correct assessment of the "free will" involved:
1. God creates something.
2. God doesn't ask the creation what the creation wants to be. Just like we don't ask the sims. The sims have about as much free will as Adam. (I for one would love to have more hands, brains and eyes! Would you not? Would Adam? Nobody even asks his opinion!)
3. After creation, God commands what the creation must do.
4. Therefore, God violates the free will of the creation.
Oh, wait...
nfq wrote:
The standard Christian answer to that Adam and Eve chose to eat the forbidden fruit
If so, then is this not correct:
1. Being deceived can't be anyone's free will.
2. The creation was deceived by the snake.
3. Therefore, the creation had no free will on the issue.
How about this:
1. Satan knows God directly, perhaps better than anyone else.
2. Despite the direct knowledge of God, Satan uses free will to be against God.
3. Therefore, Satan's free will was not violated by the direct knowledge of God.
4. Therefore, God would not violate our free will by letting himself be known to us directly (rather than through faith shenanigans).
The above is supposedly an argument against the assertion that "God will not reveal himself to us directly, because that would violate our free will."
Is the reasoning solid? ars? Bisqwit? feos? Nach? Pokota? Anyone?
nfq wrote:
That's a bit paradoxical. How would you be able to choose whether to be born or not? You have to exist in order to be able to choose.
I totally agree with you, nfq. But this is a religious debate thread, so logic doesn't matter much, as Bisqwit so eloquently put it.
Bisqwit wrote:
In Biblical terms, God's ways are so much higher and more complex than man's ways that a man has no hope of comprehending God's plans.
Paradoxically, the statement itself comprehends something about Gods plans, namely the fact that the plans can't be comprehended. Is it not a logical paradox? Can the assertion be saved with something more than special pleading?
I wonder why the people who bring up the mysterious nature of God initially pretend that rational arguments are fair game. Some believers seem to toss the logic out immediatelyafter their own favorite belief is threatened by rational and open discourse. Even Bisqwit uses brilliant rational arguments in every other context except when it comes to God. Nothing bad about that per se. Just a curious observation. Might be special pleading, though.
I agree with Bisqwit that the Dunning-Kruger effect is a bitch. It greatly pleases me to know that Bisqwit the bus driver is well aware of the effect. (Is the phenomenon maybe even mentioned in the bus driving course?)
But it came to pass that I am probably overestimating my understanding about many things (like someone's favorite holy text, as there are so many even in this single thread). That is exactly the reason why I (we?) read and write about everything, here and elsewhere, isn't it? For me, one of the greatest forms of experience (even though not initially the most pleasant one) is to learn that I was wrong about something. Growing up hurts much less, when we leave our egos on the backseat. I'm neither Buddhist nor stoner, but ego death is a useful concept to keep in mind from time to time, especially when discussing over the Internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death
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Archanfel wrote:
Yourself since you decided to take a risk to walk outside. It was act of a free will.
No. I wanted to do something without getting hurt. I got hurt. Thus, my free will was violated.
What the religious people might find more interesting is this: In the Abrahamic mythology God creates something without letting the creation decide whether to be created or not. Thus, God violates everyone's free will.
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feos wrote:
And the only thing that can violate a free will is (ironically) someone's free will to violate others' free will.
The only thing? Really? How about when I get randomly injured by a rock, when I walk outside. I did not want that to happen. Thus, my free will was violated. Who violated my free will?
Another situation: I want to use my free will to magically summon a fusion reactor. It doesn't happen. My free will was violated again. Who violated my free will?
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Hi Pokota, I like your attitude. You seem like a really open-minded person. Actually, I think the same is true for many people in this thread. Always interesting to read your comments, everyone.
Pokota wrote:
God uses evolution as a tool
Isn't that an ad hoc hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hoc_hypothesis
It seems that you add something to the idea of God, in hindsight, just to save the idea from being useless.
You see, the process of evolution does not have and cannot have any user, because it is not a thing per se. It is a relation. The verb "use" cannot be meaningfully applied to this:
A population of self-replicating entities with variation and heredity in a complex environment with limited resources will adapt and bifurcate.
All this happens without any user, so why postulate the useless user? What does the user do exactly? (Nothing.)
We all agree that it is meaningless to say that God uses lightning. That is because we know that lightning works whether there is God or not. In the same manner, natural selection would exist as an abstract relation whether God existed or not.
I can't think of any context where the "user God" would not be redundant. Can you?
Pokota wrote:
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Yes. Woman screaming at a snake makes sense, because if a pregnant one gets bitten, then the genes of more than three individuals (mother/father/fetus + the fraction from possible twins) are endangered. It doesn't even need to be deadly venom to ruin a pregnancy. If a man gets bitten, then only the male's genes are endangered even if it is the deadliest possible situation. Letting the male always handle the snake wins 2/3 of the time. There would indeed seem to be a strong pressure to select for genes that cause such behavior. I wonder if this behavior has been observed in other animals?
Generally, women also produce more noise during copulation. I don't think anyone taught them to do that, so the explanation must be of ancient origins. This book has more to say about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_at_Dawn (I haven't read it, though.)
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Nice.
maTO had a complete TAS of this game on his page, but it is no longer available. His run might have given some insight into route planning.
If you TAS much of this game I am almost certain to agree that it looks great, sooner or later.
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Disclaimer: The F-words in this post are added purely for comedic value.
I want to contribute to the research. Surely we should know the type of the giants we are looking for, so I analyzed the possibility of jungle giants, city giants, desert giants, forest giants, ice giants, plain giants and pygmy giants.
JUNGLE GIANTS. There can't be jungle giants, because we have evidence for people who live in the jungles and they are FUCKING SMALL! If you want to survive in the jungle, you had better not be too big. If there ever were jungle giants, they obviously evolved into pygmy giants: Here's a photo of jungle giants that have evolved into pygmy giants.Here's another photo of the pygmy giants. There are plenty of these photos, because the pygmy giants are real.CITY GIANTS. There can't be city giants, because then their existence would be FUCKING OBVIOUS!
DESERT GIANTS. There can't be desert giants, because they would dehydrate and starve. Maybe they have humps like camels? Any real life that struggles in desert environments is in the form of tiny creatures. The further into the desert you go, the tinier the creatures get.
ICE GIANTS. There can't be ice giants, because THOR FUCKING KILLED THEM! Also, Inuits, the real ice people are -- once again -- FUCKING SMALL!
An ice giant walks on ice. *CRACK* *SPLASH* The ice giant is dead.This is the main reason why there are no other ice giants than Inuits.PLAIN GIANTS. These giants starved to death, because the prey saw and heard them from afar. They tried to use berries and mushrooms as food, but there just wasn't enough to sustain the large body size. A sad story, really. Smaller body size was once again an advantage that the giants failed to realize.
FOREST GIANTS. See: Jungle giants.
PYGMY GIANTS. These actually exist. It is not a coincidence that they are small. The bigger folk did not survive in the jungle as well as their smaller siblings. The slightly smaller man struggling in the jungle was able to fuck more and spread his smallnessness in the form of his offspring. He did it slightly more efficiently than his slightly larger brother until after many generations the genes that make the people small are prevalent in the gene-pool of the population.
Plot twist: The "normal-sized" man is the giant!PYGMY ICE GIANTS. These actually exist. They are called Inuits. Just like the pygmy giants in the jungle, over many generations, natural selection has made these giants small. It is not a coincidence that there are pygmy ice giants instead of giant ice giants. I recommend watching the astonishing documentary film about the Inuits. You can see how the life-style in the environment and the small body size fit together and you understand how a large humanoid would be less efficient at surviving (and thus less efficient at fucking) in the harsh cold environment: Nanook of the North (1922)
Judging from how the various human tribes in jungles, ice plains and other environments have evolved to be small, it seems that being small is an advantage and the genes for smallness would naturally preserve better than the genes for largeness in any population.
Conclusion: We are the giants. The reason why we are large is that due to modern life-style (beginning from the introduction of agriculture) there is less selection pressure for small body size. The opposite is true for hunter-gatherers. When you have fields and domesticated animals, natural selection no longer cares whether you are small or not, you are still able to survive and fuck efficiently under the city lights. You also fail to see that you are a giant, because your own size is the norm that you are used to.
Feel free to use these findings as your material, ars.
Feel free to use these findings as your material, ars.
