How deep does the rabbit hole go?

I thought that women drank tea and men drank coffee, because that was what my mum and dad did.

Whether or not George Mallory summitted Everest.

Mallory was a great climber. People who knew him think he had the ability. Another member of his expedition saw Mallory and his partner, Andrew Irvine, close to the summit, but not close enough to be certain whether or not they made it.

Neither man returned from the mountain. Mallory’s body was later found, many decades after he died. but Irvine was never seen again, dead or alive.

There are various other bits of circumstantial evidence, but the fact is we’ll simply never know for sure. I like to think they made it.

Try to learn Russian really quickly.

That may explain why they didn’t abolish slavery, but does not justify the fact that they themselves owned slaves.

Having strong morals is mutually exclusive with compromising your morals to enrich yourself, which we’ve established is something they did.

True, but one that conveniently allowed them to do what they were already doing anyway. As I say: not titans of moral probity.

Personal power, leadership abilities, integrity and morals were much stronger with these people, and in their times in general.

There’s just no reason at all to think this. Most obviously, people who signed their names to the idea ‘all men were created equal’ while themselves owning slaves quite obviously did not possess a high degree of moral integrity.

Kind of an obvious one, but Free Solo. Even knowing what happens, it’s one of the most tense things you’ll ever watch.

I agree with the people here that there aren’t any.

The closest to a ‘good reason’ is that some people want certain policy outcomes that Trump has promised, not all of which are in and of themselves morally wrong. What’s wrong is that they believe that the ends justify the means, which they quite famously do not.

We had a few evac chairs, but I think you needed training to use them and I never had the training!

I may have pretended to do this as a joke once or twice.

I used to work in a school with disabled kids, so I did a few fire drills.

As other people here have said, there are areas like stairwells where the kids with mobility issues waited (with adults, of course!) during fire alarms. Fire crews would’ve been told about us and come and got those kids first in the event of an actual emergency.

Most people everywhere are very politically unaware. Here’s a decent site that demonstrates this. Basically, the knowledge we (by which I mean humans, not just Americans, of which I am not one) have leads us to make inaccurate assumptions about the other stuff.

No, now I’m old and don’t smoke anymore, but my mind still does this stuff to me anyway.

I mean, if I said to you, ‘Calculate 13x16’ (or some other sum you don’t know off the top of your head) you could either do it or not do it. That would be a willed choice, whether or not you knew the answer.

I think this is probably it. I think this argument is strongly related to the idea of consciousness as an emergent property of sensory experience. I find it simple to imagine the idea of a body with no will or no consciousness (i.e., a philosophical zombie). But I find it very difficult, almost impossible, in fact, to imagine a consciousness with no will, even if it’s only the will to think a given thought.

Thanks for the response! Would it change your answer at all if I had instead asked, ‘Why do we have the idea that we have free will?’

But my body also takes actions which I don’t control and of which I’m not conscious. E.g., normal cell death and replacement (granted, I would eventually notice if this stopped, but not in the short term). I don’t have the illusion of control over those actions, but I do have a sense (real or not) of control over others. My question is, why do I have that sense if it’s not real?

The premiss involves the idea that it would feel different, that my deliberate acts would feel (like cell replacement) like a thing that happens, rather than a thing I’m doing. Granted, if I were unconscious of all my acts, it wouldn’t feel like anything (like my experience of x-rays, which is a non-experience), but then I would be unconscious. So, if I’m interpreting you correctly, are you suggesting that the sense of will is a property of consciousness, and that consciousness is itself an emergent property of sensory experience?

Yes, that’s the question: if our acts are predetermined all the way back to the big bang, as you suggest, why do we feel that we determine them?