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What would you do?

  • Continue existing in this world as you are.

    Votes: 7 31.8%
  • Live in your dream forever except you have no free will (incapable to alter most of the dream)

    Votes: 15 68.2%

  • Total voters
    22
UnnervedCompany

UnnervedCompany

Student
Jun 21, 2024
118
The character Sunday in Hsr wanted to allow people a permanent utopia an infinite Sundays as he called it in exchange of their free will. Because its a dumb gacha game the heroes won everything was good yada yada but I wonder how many people would've wanted to live in that dream. This community has a lot of people who have very little reason to continue existing so I wonder their choice, and the choices of everyone else if they were presented this opportunity. Give your free will and dream forever or just continue existing in this life?
 
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MidnightDream

MidnightDream

Warlock
Sep 5, 2022
736
No thx. I fully believe that happiness isn't a tangible thing, it's a perspective. I also believe that you can't achieve true perspective without free will, so therefore you would never be able to achieve actual happiness in this scenario. Would you know that? Probs not. But I would never actually make that choice.
 
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Leiot

Leiot

Coming back as a cat
Oct 2, 2024
343
Absolutely not.
 
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Ashu

Ashu

novelist, sanskritist, Canadian living in India
Nov 13, 2021
732
Free will is an illusion.
 
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Praying 4 a Miracle

Praying 4 a Miracle

Experienced
Sep 22, 2024
247
Based on the decisions I've made recently, I would definitely make that trade.
 
BoulderSoWhat

BoulderSoWhat

Student
Aug 29, 2024
161
So, assuming we have free will now [insert definition here], what would it "feel" like to no longer have free will?

Like if I had a magic button in front of me that ends my free will, how would my conscious experience change?

Would it feel like my identity has been blunted, in a way in which I feel worse? Would I live with regret for removing my free will? Or would I still be myself, more or less?

Given every passing moment now, my brain is very quickly processing information, making decisions, and sending signals to my nervous system. With every point of decision, I'm not consciously stopping and considering a nearly infinite divergent decision tree to weigh pros and cons of what I'm doing on a moment-to-moment basis. That would literally be mentally paralyzing.

Free will needs a bit more definition for us to know what it's worth. Even just very simply saying that the absence of free will is the inability to make one's own decisions for oneself, okay, but that is still a bit nebulous. In a little bit when I drive myself to work, how would my drive to work feel different from a conscious experience standpoint if I did not have free will?

If my brain is still processing the information the same way, then I presume I'll still be stopping at red lights, slowing down at sharp turns, listening to music, and drinking my coffee. Would I really be able to tell any difference? If there is a difference, what is it?
 
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Reflection

Reflection

One last hurrah
Sep 12, 2024
265
I personally don't believe that free will exists, everything is already determined by causes outside of it.
 
UnnervedCompany

UnnervedCompany

Student
Jun 21, 2024
118
So, assuming we have free will now [insert definition here], what would it "feel" like to no longer have free will?

Like if I had a magic button in front of me that ends my free will, how would my conscious experience change?

Would it feel like my identity has been blunted, in a way in which I feel worse? Would I live with regret for removing my free will? Or would I still be myself, more or less?

Given every passing moment now, my brain is very quickly processing information, making decisions, and sending signals to my nervous system. With every point of decision, I'm not consciously stopping and considering a nearly infinite divergent decision tree to weigh pros and cons of what I'm doing on a moment-to-moment basis. That would literally be mentally paralyzing.

Free will needs a bit more definition for us to know what it's worth. Even just very simply saying that the absence of free will is the inability to make one's own decisions for oneself, okay, but that is still a bit nebulous. In a little bit when I drive myself to work, how would my drive to work feel different from a conscious experience standpoint if I did not have free will?

If my brain is still processing the information the same way, then I presume I'll still be stopping at red lights, slowing down at sharp turns, listening to music, and drinking my coffee. Would I really be able to tell any difference? If there is a difference, what is it?
At this point I don't know. I think the only difference is that you cannot experience most of your emotions in a perfect dream. I believe the only difference between free will and what Sunday wanted is just the removal of being able to tell what is right from wrong and the removal of pain. In that fantasy there is only good which causes the feeling of being happy to be dulled out. You cannot make wrong or dumb decisions essentially.
 
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killorbekilled

killorbekilled

manhwa reader, mentally unwell
Oct 3, 2024
65
What may be my happiness today could be my sadness tomorrow. I wouldn't be happy in that dream for that long. Unless my consciousness was erased in the dream, of course. I would like to choose my end and when the lights go out to some extent.
I also just don't want to continue living, even in a dream.
 
F

Forever Sleep

Earned it we have...
May 4, 2022
10,085
It's like @BoulderSoWhat said, would we still remember this life and having some capacity to choose our actions? In which case, how can we be sure we wouldn't miss that? Would we in fact be all that happy with no challenges in life? (Presumably.) No possibility of making a wrong choice because, everything we did worked out just fine. Our worth system would surely go a bit haywire. Or, are we being born fresh in to either world, with no knowledge of the other way to live?

I don't really know to be honest. I don't particularly trust the sound of this other world. Unless there's some Matrix type stuff going on and it's a simulation, I don't see how you could have a world where everyone gets to do what they want all the time. Would anyone bother working, producing food, providing sanitation and housing? That's hard work! I imagine the majority of people would opt for leisure activities. Listening to music, watching films, playing games, playing sport. Maybe a few artists will do that stuff for fun and a sense of purpose but again- all those jobs need a whole infrastructure of other jobs- which people may not be so keen to do. I just don't see how this world could exist.

Surely, it would mean we were either slaves or guests to some superior being that was providing all that stuff. Who's to say you can trust that superior being? Plus, we're such a stupid race. No doubt, some of us would still choose to fight and have wars. What about the humans that like guns and violence, that enjoy being greedy and having power- do they get their dream too? I suspect our masters/ hosts would quickly work out how high maintenance we are.
 
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finallydone

finallydone

Member
Aug 18, 2024
95
There is no free will buddy, it will be the 2nd option every time (although this will sound contradictory as making choices is considered free will by some people including OP ig, but the question itself is a paradox by that definition)
 
Emeralds

Emeralds

Student
Aug 29, 2024
151
No. I don't see how someone can be happy if they don't have free will. Without the freedom to make your own choices you would just be a slave. A part of being happy and feeling fulfilled in life is getting to chose your own path in life and making your own choices. It wouldn't mean anything if you were forced. to do things or if everything was always handed to you on a silver platter.
 
P

pyx

Wizard
Jun 5, 2024
618
assuming that we're going off of your example and not some unconstituted abstraction, i would prefer free will, only if the lack thereof entails your reality being engineered by external forces, as in the case of Nozick's experience machine
 
Mirrory Me

Mirrory Me

"More then your eyes can see..."
Mar 23, 2023
1,149
Interesting way to view free will, as having the option to choose something else.
 
BoulderSoWhat

BoulderSoWhat

Student
Aug 29, 2024
161
At this point I don't know. I think the only difference is that you cannot experience most of your emotions in a perfect dream. I believe the only difference between free will and what Sunday wanted is just the removal of being able to tell what is right from wrong and the removal of pain. In that fantasy there is only good which causes the feeling of being happy to be dulled out. You cannot make wrong or dumb decisions essentially.
Ah I think I'm following, sorry I don't know much about HSR hahaha, I just saw the discussion topic and decided to jump in lol. There's actually a lot to unpack here though! I'll take a stab at the idea of fantasy worlds/perfect dreams causing happiness to become dull if there's only "good" that can be experienced.

Can you think of a time in your life when you had at minimum an "okay" day, maybe even a "good" day? Maybe it was a trip somewhere, maybe it was just a good stay home day, or anything else of the wide variety of days humans experience haha? Even though the day was okay or good, was happiness blunted? Maybe happiness would become blunted if that day were copied and pasted across a timeline of weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, and no less than precisely 17 eternities. But that's more a symptom of our human biology. We have brains that get bored from repetitive stimulation, but also maybe not for some individuals given our collective neurodiversity. Can we change that with genetic engineering, where we could just do a small number of things that make us happy, and never become bored but never experience dullness? Maybe, who knows?

Let's imagine this chart spans a high of 100 and a low of -100. Would it be such a bad thing to create a world in which we progressively eliminate experiences that dip people below -90,-70,-50,-25, etc., while expanding the range of experiences to exceed highs beyond +110,+150,+250,+500, etc.? And aren't we already trying to do this with all of our advances in medicine, technology, entertainment, etc.? I think dullness in a dream world comes from the idea that a perfect world must remain at a constant happiness value, with no variance. And if that's incompatible with our biology or however we change our biology, then sure that's going to create a dilemma where we question if we really want that kind of world, like in the original post for this thread.

1728310389635

So I think the answer is a third option. We don't need to settle for what we are currently experiencing. But I don't think we need to think the only alternative is dulled out happiness. If perfect worlds don't sound so perfect to us, then we don't have to settle for what other people try to sell us. We can reject flawed ideas, we can reject what people call perfection, and I think humans can create something better. We can have a varied experience of increasing and decreasing stimulation, time for activity, time for rest, it can all be good, and badness/wrongness can be discarded at no cost.

But I'm also an Antinatalist and if the way I think is what all humans thought, we would abruptly die out within a generation or two or whatever :) But if I suddenly exist again after dying (just like existing now is evidence that people can suddenly exist after not existing, thanks to fucking universe physics), and I decide I want to play around with whatever that existence is, well maybe one day I'll see a perfect world. Who knows, not me lol.

Best regards :)
 
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