I’m a 26 year old furry. my fursona is a fox. I’m agender; any pronouns are fine with me.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Tl;Dr, yes*

    I find this discussion to be an exercise in frustration. There’s a lot of philosophical jargon that gets glazed over and nuances that often get ignored. I also think it’s an incredibly complex and complicated topic that we simply do not have enough information available to us to determine in a scientific manner.

    For instance: what kind of “free will” are we talking about? Often it’s “Libertarian Free Will,” that is, absolute agency uninfluenced by any external factors. This much is disproven scientifically, as our brains run countless “subconscious” calculations in response to our environment to hasten decision making and is absolutely influenced by a myriad of factors, regardless of if you’re conciously aware of it or not.

    However, I think that the above only “disproves” all notions of free will if you divorce your “subconscious” from the rest of your being. Which is where the complication and nuance comes in. What is the “self?” What part of you can you point to as being the “real you?”

    From a Christian perspective, you might say the “self” is your soul, which is not yet proven by science, and thus the above has no bearing on, as it cannot take the soul into account. But from the opposite side of the spectrum, from a Buddhist perspective, there is no eternal, unchanging, independently existing “self.” And as such, the mind in its entirety, concious awarness or not, is just another part of your aggregates, and from that perspective it can be argued that a decision is no less your own just because it was not made in your conscious awareness.

    With my ramblings aside, I am a Buddhist and so my opinion is that we do have free will, we’re just not always consciously aware of every decision we make. And while we cannot always directly control every decision we make, we can influence and “train” our autopilot reactions to make better decisions.







  • Zen Buddhist. I grew up Christian, realized I was believing out of obligation rather than genuine conviction, but also I’m pan and Christians have made it very clear that’s not okay with them.

    I was areligious for awhile. Which I use because I am still an atheist; I don’t see much evidence for gods, but that isn’t important to Buddhism.

    I appreciate the Buddha’s teachings and find them incredibly helpful. I’m calmer, more focused, and over all, happier for my practice. It gives me a spiritual outlet that doesn’t make me feel “dirty” the way Christianity did.

    There are aspects to Buddhism that I have to take on faith even though I am otherwise a skeptical individual. But ultimately, those things don’t change how I would have had to live my life. And I believe that a true practitioner needs a balance of logic anf faith: too much logic, and you kill your faith. Too much faith and you wind up in a cult. You need enough logic to stay grounded, and enough faith to believe. But you have to acknowledge that you can rarely prove the things you take on faith and because of that, there will always be non-belivers, and that has to be okay.