Chefelf.com Night Life: Jordan - Viewing Profile

civilian_number_two, on 18 April 2017 - 11:38 AM, said:

Rogue One was a fun ride! I wasn't a fan of the Carrie Fisher animation, that felt wrong. I did appreciate how the script writers were able to make a film from one line found in A New Hope, the reference about many paying a price to obtain the death star plans. I suppose it was a prequel of the prequel? A Star Wars film without a "chosen one" in the story worked very well. The nerdism and fanboy pandering was kept to a minimum. Overall, good flick. Kudos to the the writers for including an Asian Shaolin warrior monk Jedi into the film, took long enough.

civilian_number_two, on 01 February 2017 - 09:02 PM, said:

Civ #2 it's been years! Good to see one of your posts again, even if it was short.

I haven't seen Rogue One and probably won't. I did watch the latest in the main saga and thought it was mediocre. I was sad to see the main villain was a literal example of Dracco in Leather Pants. It's the laziest of all the villain / tragic hero story lines. After watching Game of Thrones, I now think it's impossible for modern fantasy / sci-fi writers to create good villains. And, if they do (in the case of Prince Joffery) they murder them off half way through the story instead of exploring the character in a meaningful sense. Bad guy deaths rarely serve a purpose in modern fantasy realm, other than sate blood lust in the audience. "fuck yea, he deserved it".

You can't escape determinism, I'll post my full argument tomorrow during lunch, bit late now. But for now, I don't agree that it's boring, because from your point of view JM you're living your life as if you do have freedom to make choices, even though you don't. I understand what you meant by Chaos, Civ, but in theory there is no such thing as random events. Random just means incredibly complex, technically if you had the money and time you could figure out which balls would fall out of the lotto machine in order. It's just physics going on in there and it's following strict laws of nature. What do you mean you don't buy brain chemistry? You know the people you know based on the environment you live in, based on the parents you were born to, based on the genes they gave you, which boils down to your brain and physical ability or lack thereof to move about in the world.

You know whats really fucked up, we aren't even the author of our own thoughts. Thoughts just 'happen' with consiousness. We have an ability to select thoughts that already preexist in our brains but we can't really create new thoughts. How would you? It would require you to pre-think them before you think them. FUCKED UP.

Can Predestination and free will co-exist?

When you look at Scripture can't one make the observation that Your free will is what drives your predestination, and predestination drives your free will. They are two sides of the same coin?

Right, so if there is an omnipotent agent who knows the end, then we are all hopeless in terms of altering that end. I don't like this one bit. But even if there isn't an all knowing agent, then we are still victims of our DNA. So either way we live in a deterministic world. But since we don't know the future, and we don't know how we could alter it, in a sense we do have something like free will, but it seems to be an illusion rather than absolute freedom to make decisions.

I don't like the idea that our physical nature determines everything about us. We are only "good" if we have the proper brain structure and "evil" if we are wired slightly different. Our entire legal system is based on the fact that individuals have a choice. And it seems to work. Can't an arguement be made in the same context for God? Sigh.