ThanosWasRight posted:

I didn't realize Rorschach was based on a real comic book hero.

Zaphod42 posted:

You can choose things without free will.

zoux posted:

Oh for sure, I get why it's frustrating, and it's that very frustration that shows the distance between Dr. M. and mortals, and why he is so alien to us and alienated from us. If he were perceiving time linearly and just lying about it, I think that would be a much more disappointing and less interesting character.

rich thick and creamy posted:

Well you want to get really fancy pants about your funny papers: What if our Horny Blue Doctor is more than a metaphor for the comic medium. What if he picked up a set of pencils, pen, and paper and started writing his own Thrilling Tales of Atomic Science!!!! The comic book we pick up isn't written by this Alan Moore character but has a byline of Jon Osterman. We look up from the page and we are surrounded by several million Watchmen comics each one with a subtle variation from the last. We round a stack and find a Dr M composing yet another take on Earth 1959 and forward. Once he's done he takes it for a spin by hopping Gumby-like into it and experiencing his new story first-hand. He pops back out, makes some notes, and starts crafting the next.

I think Doc knows how the story ends because he wrote it. He also isn't interested in altering it because what would be the point? He can account for that in the next volume he pens. It's not like alternate universes are an alien concept in comic books.

zoux posted:

zoux posted:

Who amongst us didn't start dating an omniscient nigh-omnipotent 35 year old when they were HS juniors

precision posted:

A story you tell yourself.

quote:

Agency
In very general terms, an agent is a being with the capacity to act, and ‘agency’ denotes the exercise or manifestation of this capacity. The philosophy of action provides us with a standard conception and a standard theory of action. The former construes action in terms of intentionality, the latter explains the intentionality of action in terms of causation by the agent’s mental states and events. From this, we obtain a standard conception and a standard theory of agency. There are alternative conceptions of agency, and it has been argued that the standard theory fails to capture agency (or distinctively human agency). Further, it seems that genuine agency can be exhibited by beings that are not capable of intentional action, and it has been argued that agency can and should be explained without reference to causally efficacious mental states and events.

Debates about the nature of agency have flourished over the past few decades in philosophy and in other areas of research (including psychology, cognitive neuroscience, social science, and anthropology). In philosophy, the nature of agency is an important issue in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, the debates on free will and moral responsibility

TheCenturion posted:

I wonder if they made the Cyclops hand-signal, which seems to be 'middle finger pressed to thumb, index finger up,' stupid and obvious so it hopefully wouldn't be picked up and used by actual racist shitheads?

ThanosWasRight posted:

I didn't realize Rorschach was based on a real comic book hero.

Zaphod42 posted:

Agh this conversation is infuriating because you refuse to engage with the proper terms so everything you say is backwards and everything you read you interpret the wrong way, so I'm just going to have to ignore you.

quote:

In social science, agency is defined as the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. By contrast, structure is those factors of influence (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, ability, customs, etc.) that determine or limit an agent and their decisions.[1] The influences from structure and agency are debated—it is unclear to what extent a person's actions are constrained by social systems.

quote:

Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. The capacity to act does not at first imply a specific moral dimension to the ability to make the choice to act, and moral agency is therefore a distinct concept.

quote:

In very general terms, an agent is a being with the capacity to act, and ‘agency’ denotes the exercise or manifestation of this capacity.

quote:

agency noun
agen·​cy | \ ˈā-jən(t)-sē
2: the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power : OPERATION

quote:

Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.

quote:

As should be clear from this short discussion of the history of the idea of free will, free will has traditionally been conceived of as a kind of power to control one’s choices and actions.

quote:

freewill adjective
free·​will | \ ˈfrē-ˌwil \

1: voluntary choice or decision
2: freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention

Fragmented posted:

Is there any other literature that explores the "Man out of time" nature of our blue buddy's condition? Some sci-fi stuff in The Culture kinda goes there a bit. It just seems so horrible. Every worst pain you've had/most pleasurable moment/saddest moment/happiest moment all happening at the same time. It seems like either the dullest or most hellish experience i can imagine.

ThanosWasRight posted:

Fragmented posted:

Is there any other literature that explores the "Man out of time" nature of our blue buddy's condition? Some sci-fi stuff in The Culture kinda goes there a bit. It just seems so horrible. Every worst pain you've had/most pleasurable moment/saddest moment/happiest moment all happening at the same time. It seems like either the dullest or most hellish experience i can imagine.

precision posted:

Now you understand how the rest of us feel every time you post

Mandrel posted:

this is the correct explanation

Mandrel posted:

this is also correct

ThanosWasRight posted:

And if you ask me you can not have one without the other. It is completely impossible. If you are unable to control choice and actions, then you are not capable of making them. It is that simple.

ThanosWasRight posted:

Let's see if there is any sense to the difference between "Agency" and "Free Will."

I suspect not and the person here constant harping on here is participating in a form of masturbatory philosophical grammar naziism to make himself feel better about having ooh such a big brainnnn.

Zaphod42 posted:

Kiss my rear end, Precision.

precision posted:

It's okay, I know you had to post that.

Zaphod42 posted:

Read a book and educate yourself and your big brainnnn

Fragmented posted:

Is there any other literature that explores the "Man out of time" nature of our blue buddy's condition? Some sci-fi stuff in The Culture kinda goes there a bit. It just seems so horrible. Every worst pain you've had/most pleasurable moment/saddest moment/happiest moment all happening at the same time. It seems like either the dullest or most hellish experience i can imagine.

precision posted:

Do you really think this tone helps your argument?

precision posted:

Edit: Okay, sorry. It's just funny that we don't even disagree. The only difference between us is that you're certain of a belief, and I am way too narrow of a viewpoint to be certain of anything so big

AtraMorS posted:

It's also been a while since I read Flatland, but didn't it try to speculate about a 4th-dimensional perspective?

rich thick and creamy posted:

Well you want to get really fancy pants about your funny papers: What if our Horny Blue Doctor is more than a metaphor for the comic medium. What if he picked up a set of pencils, pen, and paper and started writing his own Thrilling Tales of Atomic Science!!!! The comic book we pick up isn't written by this Alan Moore character but has a byline of Jon Osterman. We look up from the page and we are surrounded by several million Watchmen comics each one with a subtle variation from the last. We round a stack and find a Dr M composing yet another take on Earth 1959 and forward. Once he's done he takes it for a spin by hopping Gumby-like into it and experiencing his new story first-hand. He pops back out, makes some notes, and starts crafting the next.

I think Doc knows how the story ends because he wrote it. He also isn't interested in altering it because what would be the point? He can account for that in the next volume he pens. It's not like alternate universes are an alien concept in comic books.

Zaphod42 posted:

Yeah we talked about flatland a lot a few pages ago, along with all the other works you just mentioned.

Wish people would read the thread so we didn't go in circles so much :/ for complex issues like this, just drive by posting doesn't work so well.

zoux posted:

Whether or not it exists we'll never know, but it doesn’t matter because it feels like we have it and that's good enough

precision posted:

Zaphod, dude, I'm just giving you poo poo. This has happened several times, and not just with me, you're way too insecure or worked up or something to just chill out and post. I can't speak for anyone else but I assure you that i am the last person in the world who would purposefully be mean over the internet. I'm a goddamn hippie!

But your misunderstandings of what other people say just pile up so fast that sometimes it's hard to make the choice to NOT rib you about it. You so easily and quickly default to "I understand you perfectly but YOU don't understand ME!" that it's hard to resist sometimes.

I believe I have a soul and have choices and I believe I'm choosing to be nice right now. You may believe this isn't a choice. That's okay; you don't have to live in my head, I do.

Colonel Whitey posted:

Just to address the question of why Manhattan doesn’t deal with the ray gun.

What is stopping him from noticing the ray gun guy is that’s the moment he falls in love with Angela. He’s looking at her with awe because she just risked her life for him despite him telling her she can’t. And he gets zapped because he’s distracted. Manhattan is essentially just a human being, walking through life making choices like anybody else. He just has a 10,000 ft view on events that we don’t have. So if we pretend he’s just a regular dude for a second, he made the “choice” in that moment not to look for more Kavalry guys and to look into Angela’s eyes instead. A very human moment.

AtraMorS posted:

I want to say Heinlen had a few stabs at this kind of fiction, too, but I haven't read much of his stuff since I was a teenager. Did Stranger in a Strange Land or Number of the Beast ever get into this kind of thing?

Nail Rat posted:

I don't know about agency vs. free will but learning how synapses work sometime back really has me of the opinion that free will may very well not exist. But just like weather, there might just be too many variables for us to figure out.

zoux posted:

Whether or not it exists we'll never know, but it doesn’t matter because it feels like we have it and that's good enough

Basebf555 posted:

That's not gonna satisfy the crowd that thinks he should've avoided it, because that's still a really dumb choice given all the information he is supposed to have access to. Why not make the choice to instead take the half second necessary to eliminate the ray gun and THEN you get to spend all the time you want looking into Angela's eyes?

It's just not something that we can ever fully wrap our heads around and it's meant to be that way. As others have mentioned, the characters themselves react the same way. The only one who truly can understand the "why" of Dr. Manhattan's actions are Manhattan himself.

Colonel Whitey posted:

Just to address the question of why Manhattan doesn’t deal with the ray gun.

What is stopping him from noticing the ray gun guy is that’s the moment he falls in love with Angela. He’s looking at her with awe because she just risked her life for him despite him telling her she can’t save him. And he gets zapped because he’s distracted. Manhattan is essentially just a human being, walking through life making choices like anybody else. He just has a 10,000 ft view on events that we don’t have. So if we pretend he’s just a regular dude for a second, he made the “choice” in that moment not to look for more Kavalry guys and to look into Angela’s eyes instead. A very human moment.