Saturday 14 April 2018

That does not mean everything is useless.

Everything we know is wrong, has always been, and will always be.

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My experience is that I cannot really control my emotions, but neither do they control me. At least not in any direct manner. I rationally choose how I act even if I can't choose how I feel. Feelings appear to be a consequence of the circumstances. For example, external demands can cause stress if they are correlated with my interests and anti-interests in appropriate manner. State of my body can also have some impact on my feelings and their spectrum, but generally speaking such also doesn't dictate how I act. I may not be able to suppress the tremors my body makes when I'm nervous, but that doesn't prevent me from doing what I'm motivated to do (unless it's brain surgery).

All motivation seems to more or less stem from emotions so without emotions and motivation there would be nothing for the rational mind to do. Rational mind seems to be there only to solve an optimization problem of how to best maximize the expectation value of emotional gratification.

All in all, I'm not sure anyone really controls their emotions, but some may find themselves on paths that lead to apparent feeling of control which will of course correlate with higher feeling of happiness. Some may call such crossroads a choice.

So I guess one could say that I have tough time believing in free will. I don't think I've ever heard a coherent definition of what such a thing could be. Where does it come from? How does it work? How could it exist?

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Not everyone is biased, some people are just plain wrong.

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What philosophy is, is a study of "what can be". It’s a study that must precede all other studies of science and engineering, for what science studies is "what is", and what engineering does is answers "how do we make it". Unfortunately, philosophy has never really deemed that anything could ever be or not to be. Never the less, "what is?" and "how do we make it?" have been extremely useful questions.

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