Do you think we have control of our lives?

Sn1p3r187

Sn1p3r187

Carolinian Shaolin Monk
Tied into a discussion me and my friend had about realism and interaction in RPGs and Open world action adventure games. When I think about it. I recently started "The inheritance" mod for New Vegas and the old man spoke of this. And it made me think if we have any form of control of our lives. I feel we can get something started but we can't control what's going to happen next, afterward, or let alone how anything will play out in the end. It's a question I've always wondered about really. Do you think we have control over our lives?
 
I'd say yes, we have. But that's a simple answer that really doesn't cut it. A grown, fully mentally developed person could be argued to have a lot more 'control' than, say, an infant. An infant can't even control its own body properly, not to mention 'life' outside of itself. It all comes down to cause and effect - we do something that will result in something else. However, another million-billion people are doing the same thing - something that leads to something else. So yeah, bearing this in mind, I'd say that I, as a grown, fully developed person, have control of my life, or at least the choices I make. The result of said choices aren't fully in my grasp, as it is influenced by other people's choices.
Besides, if I think that other peoples choices keeps impacting the control I percieve to have over my own life in a negative manner, I can just go into crazy-wood-hermit mode and eat grubs the rest of my life.
 
God gave us free will and free reign over what we do with our time on Earth. I'd say absolutely we control our own fate.
 
"There are times when you gotta agree to something, even when you think it's wrong."

"That's a load of horse piss."

"What?"

"You can make all the excuses you want. But you're the one who decided how to live your life."
 
I don't really think so to be honest. How you react to a situation greatly depends on how you were born, and how you were brought up. For example: maybe someone happened to be born in to a family of devout Christians, and therefore they in later life may base their moral decisions on what the bible says, whereas someone else might be raised as an Atheist and instead have a more flexible moral approach, then when new issues arise, these people are going to have very different outlooks.

Not to mention how much chance is involved. Think of someone who changed your life majorly, and imagine if you happened to be somewhere else when you would have met them, and how much that would change your future, or if one night out you saw something that changed your outlook on life forever, when really your original intention was to stay at home and watch TV.

I think that the vast majority of how your life will turn out is based on chance.
 
I want to believe that life is entirely based on personal decisions, but that would lead to everyone being totally good and never bad which given reality isn't the case. The problem is at least half of life is everyone else's decisions that should only apply to them, but apply to others and forcing them to act the same.
 
I think Fantastic sums it up well: "I know exactly what I'm doing. I just don't know what effect it will have." In all seriousness though, yeah, I think we definitely have a decent amount of influence over our lives. I believe the remaining chunk comes out to chance. Where we start out in life isn't our choice, but where we go with it and what we do with it is up to our choices. On the same coin though, like I said before, a bit of it can be all up to chance. Like, for example, being born with some kind of terminal disease. You don't have control over things like that. In addition, as previous posters have stated, even your choices affecting your life doesn't necessarily mean you have "control" over it. TBH, I'm not 100% sure where I stand on this. I'm not sure if we truly have "control" over our lives. I think the best I can say with certainty is we have influence over our lives.
 
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Free will is an illusion. Physics above the quantum level is deterministic, so every neuron firing is a result of every earlier neuron firing and a result of all sorts of things right back to the initial state of the universe, more or less.
 
I'd like to think we don't have any control over our own lives because that would excuse me from taking any responsibility for the shitty state it is in right now. I feel like that's just an excuse, though.

Not big on quantum physics, so just watching some of the related videos you posted.



This guy so far hasn't excused me from any of my failings.

Gonna check me out some more videos on the matter that also talk about quantum physics.
 
Free will sucks because consequences, but it most certainly does exists. I know there's this hanging belief that we're all living under the illusion of free will, but awareness of the theoretical illusion alone is already a demonstration of free will.

Have I confused you yet? I know I've already confused myself.
 
What if awarness of the theoretical illusion of free will is a simple consequence of human evolution and natural selection, and by consequence determinism?
 
“Everywhere man blames nature and fate yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passion, his mistakes and his weaknesses.” - Democritus
 
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