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Comment by donaldknuth123 | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately the vast majority of Academic Philosophers disagree with you. Thoughts obviously exist but the idea that you are in control of what you think about is patently false. Take a look at modern stances on Free Will if you doubt that.

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If I'm not in control of what I think, then I am not in control of what I do... In which case, we're all just robots.

Yes.

But complex and interesting ones.

in a very simplistic view, yes we are

Free will in this interpretation is making binary choices to manifest thought forms or not, and consciousness would be having the machinery to interpret thought and exercise free will.

Not sure I agree with this. I think most people imagine that they have a landscape of possible choices or thoughts in front of them and they have some agency to maneuver through that landscape and modern research and even simple meditation will reveal that this is simply an illusion. I don't really want to chime in on the nature of Consciousness though.

My thought is that the binary “do not manifest” decision could request delivery of a new set of similar thought forms which could then be manifest. There could be several types of thought forms that let us have the illusion that we are willing in related thoughts. Like an old iPod, perhaps. Consciousness is the most fun topic to speculate about, says the Buddha!

Indeed, that's certainly one way to interpret the lack of free will. You might be inclined to join the Compatibilist camp, which I find intellectually lacking but many people are more comfortable with than raw determinism. Whichever stance you take its virtually certain that Libertarian Free Will, the kind of free will 99% of people imagine when they think about the idea, does not exist.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

Or ants. Perhaps the human species is a big robot, made up of replaceable parts, individually blessed with belief in free will.

There is something divine about this.

A gaggle of Academic Philosophers all nodding in agreement that they have no control over their thoughts or publications.

I agree, just don't make the mistake of thinking that Reason and Logic are meaningless if free will doesn't exist. They are still critical.

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