Free will and opinions : DISCUSSION

Free will and opinions … What does it mean to us ? And when does an opinion stop being one and ends up being a statement or a threat ? And when is it right for us to be punished for the things we have done ??

My brain has been nagging on about this and school certainly didn’t help with them bringing the subject up but clearly there is a line between opinions and other things? And when is it right for us to be punished for things we have done ??

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I…i… I AM QUESTIONING THE MEANING OF MY LIFE!!!

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I have been doing that too for the past few days :sweat_smile:

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That’s actually a very difficult question indeed. Have you heard of the Libet experiments? They basically showed that our subconsciousness knows what we will do before we even decided it. They also found out that our brain works that way that we not do what we want, but believe we always wanted what we did… According to this, there is no free will at all. But how can we judge people then? It’s already a vivid discussion regarding things like pedophilia, are they fully responsible or victims of their genes themselves? So you see that it’s very hard to find proper answers here.

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People’s views will help my battle I’m having with my brain so Thankyou for posting yours and yes i know the Libet experiments, they made us watch a video about it

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I’ve thought about this a lot. One thing that happens a lot here in America is that people always try to defend themselves and there decisions with free speech; it really REALLY bothers me. It bothers me because it shows the misconception of what free speech is. It’s not the right to say anything you want, anywhere you want. It was created to allow people to disagree with government without getting punished for it, because when the country was forming and European countries were still under absolute monarchies, disagreeing with the king could get you killed.

Where I’m going with this is that people excuse horrible actions and disgusting dialogue like racial slurs and ignorant statements with free speech because “it’s a right granted by the Constitution.”

Free will is such a complex concept with many different answers that aren’t necessarily right or wrong. The line can be blurry between opinions and other things, and people tend to use that to their advantage and to try and undermine others. It’s a shame but yet really fascinating.

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I was not stating my personal opinion on this subject, but only wanted to provide some arguments that might help you with finding your own answers. In fact, sometimes I am not sure what theory might be right and what wrong when there are logical and valid aspects on both sides. :exploding_head:

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What do you mean by this? When does our opinion start becoming something like “hate speech”?

Is that what you’re getting at?

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I don’t understand what you mean. Free will should be accepted because every person is obligated to express themselves any way they can.

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Oh gaWd , I have confused myself again…

Okay , okay let me say … This :

If a person is making an opinion on something … I don’t know … If cats are better than dogs or vice versa , they would say what they believe and why . But if they were to tell others to commit suicide because they had a different view on it , that isn’t much of an opinion …

MY EXAMPLE !!

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That’s a question that today’s society has to answer.

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Shoot . I need to rephrase the whole thing facepalm

What I’m trying to get at is what age , what time , when is it “right” to punish you for your mistakes . For instance , you can’t do much if a baby has killed someone (some how) . But what if they knew what they were doing ? And perhaps even people who are over their 40s still don’t know what their choices are in a situation and are punished for it .

Oh okay. Yeah, when it gets to “you should kill yourself because this is your opinion…”

That…I guess is technically someone’s opinion, and it is wrong af to say it, but they have the right to say it, so long as they aren’t calling violence to you.

“You should just kill yourself.” Is a messed up af thing to say and I don’t get why people say it unironically…>.> But if you go like, “Hey, you people, let’s band together and hurt this person for their ideas.” That is something you can’t do. That’s calling violence to someone, and despite how you feel about the person or the ideology, that’s wrong.

As for the right age to punish someone for when they’ve done something wrong, that is dependent on not only the age of the person, but also the wrong thing that’s been done. So to use your example of murder, I think that we should definitely punish people like we do now. When teens commit murder, they’re put in a juvie or whatever it is until they’re 18 and then go to jail. I don’t have kids and I don’t remember what age I was, lol…when I knew for sure that murder was something I understood and knew 100% that it was wrong and stuff…it just depends ^^’

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@NelidaU

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Whheeeee!!!

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You do have a point with the example that you used… Well everybody makes mistakes; that’s a generalized statement. A person should get punished for their mistakes when they knew what they were doing when they were making the mistake. I am terrible at explaining how I feel about this because people have different opinions about this.

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I think the terms you might want to use here are tolerance and aceptance. We are all different in some way. If you say: “I do not agree with a person’s point of view, but I respect this person’s right to have it.”, then you are tolerant. Aceptance is more than this, like trying to see things from other people’s perspective and get a deeper insight, taking pride in diversity instead of being uneasy about everything that’s different from what you know or expected. Sadly, nowadays people confuse tolerance with ignorance. You are NOT tolerant if you say: “I just don’t care as long as noone bothers me with it.”

As for the other subject you were adressing, age is a very poor scale for maturity and mental development in my opinion. Age only matters in two points. First, science found out that the part of our brain that’s responsible for morale and ethics needs the longest time to fully develope. That’s why kids can be cruel, they might understand what to do and what not to avoid punishment, but a deeper insight only comes with puberty. And second, you need time for certain things. Age shows how much time you had, but not if you really used it to learn. This said, I would introduce something like an “adult’s license” to test the state of mind of a person. Starting maybe at the age of 11, you can try to pass it once a year, and when you do, you are fully grown up. Because some never really are, no matter how old they become.

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I think that your opinion becomes a threat/statement when both parties who are *listening said statement, both know it is a threat/statement.

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