Most people everywhere are very politically unaware. Here’s a decent site that demonstrates this. Basically, the knowledge we (by which I mean humans, not just Americans, of which I am not one) have leads us to make inaccurate assumptions about the other stuff.

No, now I’m old and don’t smoke anymore, but my mind still does this stuff to me anyway.

I mean, if I said to you, ‘Calculate 13x16’ (or some other sum you don’t know off the top of your head) you could either do it or not do it. That would be a willed choice, whether or not you knew the answer.

I think this is probably it. I think this argument is strongly related to the idea of consciousness as an emergent property of sensory experience. I find it simple to imagine the idea of a body with no will or no consciousness (i.e., a philosophical zombie). But I find it very difficult, almost impossible, in fact, to imagine a consciousness with no will, even if it’s only the will to think a given thought.

Thanks for the response! Would it change your answer at all if I had instead asked, ‘Why do we have the idea that we have free will?’

But my body also takes actions which I don’t control and of which I’m not conscious. E.g., normal cell death and replacement (granted, I would eventually notice if this stopped, but not in the short term). I don’t have the illusion of control over those actions, but I do have a sense (real or not) of control over others. My question is, why do I have that sense if it’s not real?

The premiss involves the idea that it would feel different, that my deliberate acts would feel (like cell replacement) like a thing that happens, rather than a thing I’m doing. Granted, if I were unconscious of all my acts, it wouldn’t feel like anything (like my experience of x-rays, which is a non-experience), but then I would be unconscious. So, if I’m interpreting you correctly, are you suggesting that the sense of will is a property of consciousness, and that consciousness is itself an emergent property of sensory experience?

Yes, that’s the question: if our acts are predetermined all the way back to the big bang, as you suggest, why do we feel that we determine them?

Perhaps I’m looking for less of a reason, more of an explanation?

dude

I always loved the Dark World theme from A Link to the Past. It has a triumphant feel, could work as an anthem!

There are many thing my body does which I’m aware of, but that I don’t will, and others that I have some control over, i.e., my will appears to play a role, but not the only role.

I don’t think it creates any kind of contradiction to suggest that, hypothetically, there could be more (or less) of either of those types of things, without my perceiving an invisible (external) force of some kind to be involved. After all, I don’t ascribe my heartbeat to an external force, but I am aware that I don’t will it.

Weird, now I know kung fu.

FIFA. Every man and boy in England loves FIFA, except me. I find it totally boring and pointless.

This is from the manifesto, published after both those articles. It’s the most up-to-date information we have on Labour’s plans.

They’re hoping to do that, too! A cash injection for the NHS and planning reform, so more houses can get built more quickly, are both in the plan for the first 100 days. I imagine the planning reform will be in the King’s Speech, but the NHS thing should be able to happen pretty quickly. If not, it will be in the first budget.

From the manifesto:

banning exploitative zero hours contracts; ending fire and rehire; and introducing basic rights from day one to parental leave, sick pay, and protection from unfair dismissal. We will strengthen the collective voice of workers, including through their trade unions, and create a Single Enforcement Body to ensure employment rights are upheld. These changes will improve the lives of working people across the entire UK.

Labour will also make sure the minimum wage is a genuine living wage. We will change the remit of the independent Low Pay Commission so for the first time it accounts for the cost of living. Labour will also remove the discriminatory age bands, so all adults are entitled to the same minimum wage, delivering a pay rise to hundreds of thousands of workers across the UK.

Labour’s two headline policies are:

1. Green investment through a new state-owned company
2. A big expansion of workers’ rights

The green investment will be the biggest in the country’s history and the workers’ rights expansion will be the biggest in decades. Now, for me, those are two necessary, excellent, leftwing policies.

I think people criticising them from the left are mainly criticising omissions: why no wealth taxes? Why not nationalise the water companies? And that’s fair enough. Labour could do more and I hope they will. But the platform is a leftwing one, and I’m happy with it, even if it could always be more leftwing.

Sort of tangential, but Democritus was right about atoms, but obviously he worked it out in a very different way to how modern scientists did — though we don’t know his exact reasoning.

Even more tangential: Aristotle (and others) were wrong about the four elements making all matter, but they do correspond to the four basic states of matter, which is kind of fun: earth=solid, water=liquid, air=gas, fire=plasma.

This is what He wanted.

It’s certainly possible that sayings of other people were later attributed to him, but to really make this case you’d need to have quotations that were attributed to multiple sources, including him, if you see what I mean. Absent that, it could be true, but there’s no particular reason to believe it.

There are enough specific biographical details about Jesus of Nazareth to make it likely that there’s a specific, real central figure. For example, the fact that he was from Nazareth was a problem for his early followers (it didn’t match the Messianic prophecies), which is why they invented the odd story of the census, so that they could claim he’d been born in Bethlehem, the hometown of King David, from whom Jesus was supposedly descended. That seems unlikely to have happened if there hadn’t been a real, central historical figure.

Also, none of the early non-Christian sources claim he wasn’t real or that he was a composite, which they surely would have done if there was any doubt on the matter.