It's rare that I agree with every single point in a long post like that, but here we are. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Consciousness truly is the thing there that matters the most. The fact that it feels like something to be. Sam Harris says that consciousness is the only thing in the entire universe that cannot be an illusion. Even if we're in a simulation and everything you've ever experienced has been fake, the sense of experience itself is still real.
Well not really. We've lived without free will just fine untill now so becoming aware of it's absence doesn't really change much.
What it does change for me however is that the flipside of it is no self, meaning there's no free will because there's no one making choices. I don't believe in the imagined "me" that's located behind my eyes and looking out into the world and authoring my actions. This pretty much pulls the rug out of blame. Who am I blaming exactly? The universe?
What about Turkey and Russia? Starlink doesn't work in Russia.
You think the white supermacists would vote Kamala / Hillary / Biden rather than Kanye?
Another one of Trump's core demographics is the religious christians too, despite Trump not having a religious bone in his body.
Agreed. The need for all kinds of mens-groups is probably higher than it has ever been. I'd love something where I could join a group of men and build / fix something together.
Free will, the sense, that you could have done otherwise, is an illusion.
We make choices based on either what we have to do, or what we want to do. There's no freedom in having to do something, but you're also not free to choose your wants. If you felt like having tea this morning instead of coffee, then having tea is the only thing you could have done. You wanted tea, not coffee. Now, if we rewind the clock back in time to the moment before you decided, you'd pick tea again, and again, and again. Everything else being the same, your desire for tea will override the desire for coffee every time. And you didn't choose that desire.
Did anyone stop to ask themselves if we even would want to watch AI videos?
Of course not.
Shitty AI videos? No. Good ones? Sure.
the quantity of launches and satellites is doing nothing good for anyone
Except for the millions of people accessing internet via Starlink to whom the alternative is either no internet, slow internet or extremely expensive internet.
Never miss a chance to milk some of those anti-Elon upvotes
It's involuntary action. Not something you choose to do.
The title is essentially an argument against free will. The illusion that you could have done otherwise. Waking up early out of habit is no indication of free will to me.
To have a strong feeling to have (something); wish (to possess or do something); desire greatly: synonym: desire.
Pick any dictionary definition for it.
Well I can't think of a voluntary action that people do for any other reason than either wanting to do it or having to do it. That's the point of the post. Every example I have been given so far is either of those two. It feels like we're free do to what ever, but in reality we're only free to do what we want and nobody picked their wants.
Nobody is forcing me to reply to this message. I do it because I want to. If I didn't want to I wouldn't but I also don't know why I enjoy having these debates. I didn't choose to enjoy it, I just do.
Just give me an example of something you do or could do that you don't have to but also don't want to. I don't think you can. You're not free to do that.
By have to I mean obligations. You've got a meeting at noon, you have to be there. You may not want to, but you have to.
By want I mean every other voluntary action. You're thirsty and you open the fridge. There's milk, water and orange juice. Say you grab the orange juice. You did that because you wanted it. To say that you could have chosen milk or water isn't true. You didn't want those, you wanted orange juice. If you rewind the clock and open the fridge again you'd still want the orange juice. In that moment you can't do other than what you want. You can't choose to not want it. It may be than in a few years you no longer like orange juice so in thay sense your wants may change but then and there in that moment you can't act against it.
Even if you decide against your preferences to prove a point you'd still be acting according to your wants; you want to prove me wrong and thus you grab the water. That's still doing what you wanted to do.
My motivation here is only to probe on what other people really think of when using that word, so that I know what they really mean by it
That makes sense. In my mind the definition never really evolved as I tend to take words literally and think of it more as a category, like "red heads" rather than as an ideological group. I guess that would technically make them a subgroup of incels.
I'm sure that's true in some cases, but I wouldn't generalize it as the explanation for most incel's situations that they simply had too unrealistic standards
Is it simply: involuntarily celibate, or does it come with a package?
To me, "incel" has always meant someone who’s simply just celibate against their will, but it feels like the term now also implies a specific worldview or even a subculture. Does identifying as an incel automatically come with those negative beliefs around gender and society, or should those two have separate terms? Has the definition changed?"
Your typical incel is that quiet guy in school with bad skin, plain clothes, and oily hair, whose only friends were the other outcasts. Like everyone else, they just wanted a normal relationship with a normal woman. It's the repeated failure to form those relationships that leads to the resentment and anger we now see. They weren’t always like that. The bitterness and hatred is a coping mechanism for their situation, not the cause of it.
There's no freedom in having to do something but you're also not free to choose your wants.
Maybe it's better to just live and let life happen instead of thinking about what could've been. What ever happened is the only thing that could've happened.
I can only imagine the difference it would make if instead of telling about your idea you could show it
Independent thinker valuing discussions grounded in reason, not emotions.
Open to reconsider my views in light of good-faith counter-arguments but also willing to defend what's right, even when it's unpopular. My goal is to engage in dialogue that seeks truth rather than scoring points.