another you in another universe, but different ?

that s like me, i m also another you but different, and i pretty much live in my own personal fantasy-world/universe as well. :o

no worriez though, although i m clearly superior i m not doing that much better then you, so you don't need to be jaleous :P

I don't think you understood the theory.....

Yup, philosophy talk, fun fun!

We can provide a metaphysical account of time that allows for backwards causation: A static view of time, where there is no objective 'coming into being', where future and past events exist as present events exist, and the present is only a matter of one's position is consistent with future events causing past events. In this case, as the events that will happen after a certain point in time, t, which is picked out by our experience of it, exist on a par with t, it is at least possible that events later than t can affect events at t. The provision of such an account shows us that cause preceding effect is not metaphysically necessary; it is a contingent feature of the world that could have been otherwise, and backwards causation is at least metaphysically possible. That being said, there is still the question of whether or not cause preceding effect is logically necessary. On this point, I would say that it is. It is built in to our conceptual understanding of causation that it act in the direction of time's arrow. Consider a temporal snapshot of a ball I have thrown in the air at the top of its trajectory; It is a requirement of its being where it is that I have thrown in in the air, yet we do not say that its being in the air causes my throwing it up. It seems like a contradiction in fact to say that a later event could cause a prior one. So I would say that the fact that effect always happens after cause is a fact that is down to us, that is true because of facts about us rather than facts about the world. If we perceived the flow of time in the opposite direction, we would perceive the direction of causality as opposite as well. We can't distinguish the notion of cause from the notion of effect without relying on a notion of temporal direction.

Topic 2 (forgot to update):
Does free will exist? If yes/no then what does it mean?

Yes it does Szeweningen

We're cursed to be free

We're all slaves to each other.

No because if we were truly free i will be able to run across the street while shouting Grehig am the terminator without being arrested or but in an asylum.

Just man up and do it. You'll be fine, I promise.

You are still free to do so if you want. Regardless of the fact that it has consequences doesn't mean that theoretically you couldn't do it.

You're confusing being free with the act of it being a positive state or not.
From a hedonistic approach you would be correct but from an extensive approach you're wrong/

An argument against free will:-

Assuming that every event has a physical cause, and that every event occurs in accordance with the laws of nature, ever event, including actions and decisions made by rational agents, is causally necessitated by preceding events. That is, whatever we do, think, feel etc., it was predetermined by the events that preceded it. Facts about the past necessitate the truth values of questions about the future. If it was predetermined at whatever point in the past that I would write this, then it is not through any free agency on my part that I do. I could not have acted differently, and in this sense I have no free will.

Thomas of Acquino.....stay modern here Victoria.

Dark ages philosophy is outdated

I'm not sure why you think that view should be attributed to Thomas Aquinas. He believed humans to have free will, as he thought that we are the cause of our actions, rather than God. Determinism has its roots in ancient Greece, in the Atomism of Democritus and Lucretius, so yeah, it's not a particularly modern idea. It's madness to say that it is outdated though. Philosophy doesn't become 'outdated,' there's no virtue in modernity in philosophy as there is in say, science or technology. An idea can't become outdated, it remains as interesting as it ever was.

I believe free will exists, but only to an extant. We are all slaves to DNA, and most of what we do is to help the strongest genes reproduce.

Oh dear... to everyone that thinks that philosophy can be outdated go and read Politeia or sth... more relevant that modern non-analytical crap.

Returning to the topic... Again assuming a person has decent understanding of modern science, it provides many interesting arguments in favour of existence of free will. First the purely deterministic approach was heavily dented by phycics, since now there is a place for something coming out of nothing (cause-effect violations, symmetry breaks etc.). On the other hand multiple universe theories may render our actions irrelevant since assuming that in other universes we do sth exactly opposite of what we do now, but that is an argument that has to be viewed on a separate plane, like solipsists' arguments.
Second there is another approoach to the lack of free will, which I'd call mechanism (not sure if that is the proper expression in english), which states that free will does not exist in the same way computer programs do noy have free will, so we can basically act only on our initial "software" which can be updated. That approach was very popular in 19th century and the beginning of 20th, but since Godel theorems actually have strong philosophical interpretations, since analytical philosophy became more and more popular mechanism was also somewhat refuted. Note that it is very hard to fight it without proper analytical background.
As for my personal standpoint free will exists, yet we are bound by our physicality. Although we do have "real" free will there are some specific boundaries. As a mathematician I view the world in terms of probability and human actions are quite nicely described by that. Regardless of free will we do have preferences that we uncover as we go through our life and more often than not we do not break our chains. We are weak creatures, that is our curse because we have free will. We have free will, but in real life not always there is willpower, thus for all practical men the discussion of latter is often more important (Nietzsche will come up some week, don't worry :) ).

What IF the past that remember is really the future but we perceive it to have already occurred?
Or we could be travelling through time backwards without being aware... or is that forwards?

Anyway, given that time is formless, like wind, we can only attempt to understand it through how we perceive it within our human limitations. We can only remember the past because through the definitions of time that we have instituted based on our commonly agreed on perception of time, only the past has already occurred for us to REmember. Had we defined it any differently, then theoretically we very well could remember the future. However our definitions are based on observations gained from within the confines of knowledge as we believe it to exist, even though we have no way of proving if up is down or if down is up. Therefore, all our knowledge is as we believe it to be and is the basis of all further knowledge and perceptions such as time, with no way of verifying if it is actually correct or not. This topic is now nullified.

In terms of free will, I theorize that there is a near(if not) infinite number of possible outcomes and combinations of outcomes that are in fact laid out before anything happens. Our free will lies in choosing what sort of path we decide to take, and therefore have the power to alter our destinies to a different path/outcome, perhaps one more preferable... and then change it again to our demise. :|
This is simply a theory of mine, however, and obviously there is no way to prove it. Yet I believe it to be the case, or at least kinda close.