jar2574 said:
Yes. It is an act of free will, as much as any other. Each individual is affected by their environment, but that does not eliminate their ability to make choices and to determine a course of action different from other people who lived or live in very similar circumstances.
And how exactly do you exact your free will / free choice if you do not
know the alternatives? This can be easily answered for people who lived in the past: They did not
know of today's possibilities, so they quite obviously didn't have that choice. However: Do we of today
know how it was / would be without all those achievements? Because only then the choice would be "free".
jar2574 said:
If you want to argue that we have absolutely no free will, that we are totally products of our environment, then that is a very long discussion in and of itself.
Ah, no, a discussion of free will or even determinism was not my intention. It's just that I think it's a bit too easy to point to some things we take as normal and have no CLUE of how it would be without them and say: "It's better today because we have those".
jar2574 said:
I believe you mean that to be free we must have choices, not make choices. But regardless, I would argue that we do have choices, and that we do make choices.
Certainly we do (That is, IF one doesn't accept determinism... but that would be a VERY different discussion). The question here is whether we have a valid scale to measure up the alternatives. That's what I doubt. And, to get a tiny bit back on topic: We tend to measure former civilisations by today's standards - AS IF we had a means to measure the amount of sheer happiness people had. I say: We don't. And therefore we shouldn't be as quick as we tend to be in judging cultures as superior or inferior.
jar2574 said:
As far as imagination goes: I can imagine not having a Dell computer. In fact I did not always have one. Not having a computer is not something that I have to imagine.
That's not quite the quality of imagination necessary here. You can only imagine how it is not to have a Dell computer in a world where Dell computers exist and maybe some of your friends have some, too. I honestly couldn't say I am happier with my 2 GHz PC today than I was with my 1MHz C64. Looking at the fun we had with some of those games, I sometimes think it may be the other way round... to take the next step, it would be questionable if I, 23 years ago, was happier with my C64 than my father had been in post-war Germany with his first pocket knife. And so on. This is just one example how technical advancement does not lead to an increase in FELT happiness.
jar2574 said:
There are other such "niceties of civilization" that I have not always had that I currently have. And there are some that I don't have that I want.
Yes. Because you know they are available. And because there are others who have them. There could be the most astonishing invention in the world, due in 2020, and yet you don't miss it any second - now. There is no real desire because you don't know what you're missing.
jar2574 said:
And there will be many developed in the future that I will want, and I wager you'll want some of them to.
Sure. We're both children of capitalism and it's our (manipulated) desires that make the stock markets pulsate.
jar2574 said:
We will make choices to seek out those "niceties of civilization" that we prefer and will choose not to work hard to get those that we don't care about.
Yes. And your point is...?
jar2574 said:
I agree. There is no objective measure of bliss. That does not mean that people are not better off today than they were in the Stone Ages.
No, it doesn't necessarily mean that. But, and that is my whole point, it doesn't necessarily mean the opposite, either. It is the mantra of the modern world that everything must get better, faster, bigger... This was not always so. Our ancestors lived in a cyclical world, were all things repeated themselves. And if you look closely, you can get glimpses of that feeling: In fairy tales. In fantasy novels. Why is The Shire (from LOTR) such a desirebale place for so many people? Because it does NOT change. Because there is NO "bigger, faster...". Because, deep inside, many people feel a desire to escape that endless running after the latest fashion, the fastest computer, the flashiest car.
jar2574 said:
Just because people are not any happier does not mean that they are not better off. It is impossible to be well off (in a wordly sense) when one is dead. In the Stone Ages people lived short lives.
For one, this is a matter of philosophy. It is my opinion that death might be a favourable choice when compared to certain ways of living. People who commit suicide quite impressively document this. So, no, from my point of view merely being alive is NOT automatically "being better off" than being dead. And then: Which criterion would YOU choose if not happiness?
jar2574 said:
Yes. People have problems. But more people in the world today "suffer" from being overweight than suffer from starvation. Hell of a nice problem to have, compared to the Stone Ages.
I guess you are not heavily overweight, otherwise you might have picked a diferent example. What you fail to notice is that people feeling miserable don't really care for absolutes. To use a picture: When someone tears off your right hand, you hurt not a bit less than if he had pulled of the arm. You misery stems from YOUR RELATIVE feelings.
jar2574 said:
If you assume that I have no free will and am solely a product of my environment, then yes, I "like" those things because I do not know otherwise. I think the notion that humans have no free will and are totally products of their environment is rubbish. But I know of people who agree with you.
So I'm a fool like others you know? Thank you very much
But, no, I do not think that we don't have a free will (and IF we didn't have any, it wouldn't matter anyway, so discussing determinism is the most redundant topic ever - for all practical effect, just assume there was something like a "free will"). It's just that we haven't got a free choice in many respects since we don't really know the alternatives. Add to that a surrounding that makes us believe every single day that we "need" the newest cell phone, that we "need" to spend our holidays on a très chicque carribbean island, that we "need" to buy a new car after 3 years... etc. (Or game companies that assure us we "need" an even faster computer in order to play a suboptimally programmed strategy game... or that we "need" T&L effects to display unit icons in it).
jar2574 said:
I don't know how you managed to tie free will into a conversation about barbarians, but somehow you managed it.
Nope. You did. My point was "free choice". As far as "free will" is concerned, well, at least there we seem to agree
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