Doug and Chris

[nelison]

[Venom]

[Corey]

[doug]

[Venom]

[Narbus]

[doug]

Venom:

taxation is still rampant. The government continues to grow in size, therefore, they will continue to require more of your money in order to fuel that growth. You justify new and ridiculous laws by saying "new problems arise."

Yes, they do. But we don't need the government to solve them.

If you know a person who says "if there were no concequences i would have killed him" that person is dangerous and i suggest you stop knowing him, ASAP. A rational individual would not arrive at such a conclusion.

What does "fine" mean, if not ethical? Look, venom, one of us two has to be wrong. You say government is ethical, i say it isn't. My logic is being debated at this very moment and it's holding up to scrutiny. You can't prove that anarchy is unethical by saying it would result in a chaotic society, so you must now admit that at the very least, you can't prove me wrong.

My first link did say that people may choose leaders. That's fine. But those leaders cannot use force to take the property, lives or time of others. That's what you do in demockracy.

So, narbus, you are saying that we do not have free will because our brains use chemical reactions to function. You are right, chemicals do not have a choice about how they react to one another.

But what iniates that reaction?

Just now i took a drink of my diet coke. I lifted my arm, grabbed the cup and brought the straw to my lips, where i then sucked the liquid out of the cup and into my mouth. Then i swallowed.

you are saying that i took that drink because some chemicals were released by a gland in my body telling my brain that i was thirsty. That's true, they did. But i made the choice to drink. Other days, I have made the choice not to drink.

There is no way you could ever acurately predict whether i would drink or not. It is impossible to know until i have made the choice.

In fact, as i was writing this, i had to go to the bathroom. I made a choice to put off going to the bathroom until after i had finished responding to venom.

The brain is bound by physics. When we are thirsty, for intstance, chemicals are released and they react together to send signals to our bodies letting us know we are thirsty.

But there is no way you can predict how a human being will choose to respond to the chemical reactions going on in his body. Under most circumstances, when a person is thirsty, they drink. But sometimes, they don't.

Why not? Because we have free will. We can disobey our bodies. We can put off sustaning them if we feel we need to or it serves our purposes to do so. Neither I nor Halbrooks are arguing that we can put off our bodily functions forever. Our bodies do need maitenance. However, people have willingly starved themselves (anorexics), people have willing killed themselves, people have willingly endured pain.

choice is what gives us free will. Since we are concious and aware, we have the power to make choices. Whether animals can or not is up for debate, but even if they can, that does not prove that we can't.

if you are arguing that our choices themselves are the result of further chemical reactions, i would like to see proof. That's an interesting theory, but it's one i disagree with.

Children are the same. All humans are built with this capability. You say a child could not, under any circumstances, leave his finger on the needle even if it hurt?

even if i told him "hey kid, prick yourself for 1 minute and i'll give you $100"?

if he could under the above circumstances, he could under any circumstances.

babies, and toddlers, do not display a faculty of reason. but a fully developed human mind does. kids can't walk when they're young, either, does that mean that humans can't walk? as the child develops and grows, so does his faculty of reason.

[Narbus]

Absolutely nothing you just said addressed my central issue: Where do these choices come from? I want a purely logical, sound reply.
"Choice gives us free will." No, choice is free will. You just said "free will gives us free will," which is a rather nasty bit of begging the question.
The brain is a physical system, based on the same (predictable) laws as anything else. That the brain is a really BIG system doesn't matter. If a butterfly flaps it's wings in Tokyo, the weather doesn't choose to produce a tornado in Kansas.
On the same note, weather prediction is abstract at best because of those damn butterflys. It wasn't just your body telling you that you were thirsty. It was a nigh-impossible-to-list combination of chemicals that each had some affect on you. Just as leaving that butterfly out of the equation changes the weather some time down the road, leaving any chemical, temperature, firing neuron, or sensory input out of the "what will you do next" equation invalidates the results.

I'm not saying that it's easy to predict what people would do. We'd need every bit of pertinent information to a ridiculous amount of precision. As the weather clearly shows, that a finite mind cannot solve the equation doesn't mean it doesn't exist, nor does it mean it's not predictable.

The bit about the child: That's actually the point I was making. Infants are not able to think rationally. It's physically impossible. As a child grows and matures, so does the child's mind. But we all grow at different rates and in different ways. The point was that there are people who do not grow in the way and at the rate to become rational, and even those that do will retain some bit of irrationality. Ergo a community based upon all its members being rational would have to be very small (the USA is out), yet strong enough to deal with all the irrational people out there, of which there are many. You'd also need some way of proving that the people who want into the Gulch are rational, something elusive at best, as the alcohol example above shows. Age doesn't determine it, gender doesn't determine it (Rand was female, you are male), social class doesn't determine it (Enron, anyone?), background doesn't determine it (Bush was born into a very nice family, and Rand was born into an upper-middle class family), education doesn't determine it (Bush went to Yale)...what does? How can you judge?

While in theory, a current passing through a resistor will give a voltage equal to the product of current and resistance, the reality is that the voltage will be slightly less, a result of the inherent resistance of the wiring between the current source and the resistor, and the resitance of the device being used to measure the voltage.
Similarly, while in theory a society of purely rational people would be able to exist in a sort of utopia, the reality is the situtation is that people will always have that bit of irrationality in them, and unless they have that crucial time necessary to assert that mind (time that real life often doesn't provide), the irrationality will surface and undermine the society.

[Venom]

[Dr. Hobo]

[Venom]