Poof, Pennywise is suddenly a billionaire profiting off the suffering of others! OoOoOo scaaaaarryy!
82tbf, a billionaire right in front of you isnt that scary even if thats what you're afraid of, its the abstracted effects of their power and actions. A billionaire right in front of you in the flesh is something you can physically harm with your own two fists alone, a widespread system is not.
53Yea honestly that’s a fucking gift right there.
“I’m Donald Trump now”
“…wait except I won’t get in any trouble for caving your face in? Oh HELL yea!”
“Wait no no NO NO NO”
6Well in this comic it seems like he clearly gets bummed and has empathy unlike a billionaire
2
Maybe if the kids stayed in the town and "IT" was in the town factory destroying the town water, air, and making indentured servitude.
4
Fucking Instagram. I'm not going to sign up just to browse this user's posts.
Aha! I finally found the original on https://bananatwinky.tumblr.com/
61I was expecting the clown to tell him that they are the same person but from the future.
The cost of living is so high that you're required to work multiple shifts across multiple timelines just to afford a -420 sqft⁴ apartment.
29We'll be living in quadratic dimensions.
6Imaginary space
1
Blaze it?
3
This is actually the plot of the book IIRC. Pennywise can't become the fears of adults because they're too abstract, so he preys on children. Which is what leads to him being defeated by a child orgy
28Woah, woah, woah! The child orgy helps them find their way out after defeating ol' pennyboy the first time and getting lost. The power of friendship (and some help from Gan) is what does the trick. Let's get our fictional facts straight here.
12Is it really an orgy, though? More like running a train, right?
I don't know why I felt I should start a discussion about the semantics here, so don't ask me about that.
3
He didn't lie, he turned into existential dread.
19I mean, it's pretty obvious free will is an illusion if you stop and think about how the universe functions. If everything is governed by physics, then why would we be special? In order for "true" free will to exist, it is necessary to exist outside the realm of physics in order to make decisions without said decisions being affected by the chemical and electrical signals in your brain. You have to be able to make choices that won't be influenced by the physical world, which, afaik, there is no evidence for.
However, even from a philosophical standpoint: if we rewound time to the last major choice you made, so that you could make it all over again, would you do anything different?
Keep in mind that we rewound time and you don't have any new knowledge that you acquired after originally making the choice.
Personally, I can't see a reason why I'd make any other choice. As such, that seems like a much larger existential crisis in the same vein that you should be concerned with.
14Free will isn't worth worrying about in the face of the fact that you can't reasonably prove that anything at all exists outside of your own thoughts.
You can't prove that your existence is anything more than the hallucination of an isolated brain - which doesn't imply that your brain bears any resemblance to your concept of what a brain is.
You can't even prove that you've existed for any longer than the length of your current thought. All of your context is memory, which could equally be hallucination.
15I don't agree with this version of the free will argument. I prefer to ask the question, is anything outside the local system affecting my decisions. Think of a toaster. It has buttons and levers, but once you press them, it can do whatever it wants. It's a contained system. It was preprogrammed or designed to respond a certain way, but if it short-circuits or something inside changes, it does that independent of your will or input.
In your case, you are made of chemical and electrical signals, so your argument is like saying, do I have free will if my brain is making the decisions? The real question is, is there anything outside your brain that is affecting your decisions. Otherwise, congratulations! You have free will!
6The real question is, is there anything outside your brain that is affecting your decisions. Otherwise, congratulations! You have free will!
Well, yes. We are a collection of inputs and outputs. We cease to be in a vacuum. I can't find the study, but I'm almost certain I remember reading about an experiment where scientists removed a rat brain and studied what happened when they gave it everything it needed except external stimuli. They found the brain atrophied and eventually just stopped. That doesn't mean the same would happen to humans, but it suggests that external stimuli are necessary for consciousness.
Our lives appear to be a chain of cause and effect impacted by our surroundings. Any prediction or anticipation we do is in response to external stimuli priming us to expect some form of action or inaction to occur.
To try and put it another way, your response was predetermined, as is mine. The text on the screen released photons in a pattern my brain could recognize, which were then focused by my cornea and projected onto my retina. Those photons were translated into a mix of chemical and electrical impulses that traveled up my optic nerves and into my brain. From there, they were filtered through a highly complex series of algorithms that used things like prior experience and personality to decide whether or not I should respond, and if so, how I should do it. At no point in this did I actually get to choose, everything was cause and effect with my choice being an illusion.
This isn't some grand conspiracy theory about lizard men hijacking your brainwaves; it's just simple cause and effect. You responded the way you did because deep inside your brain, you decided that what you wrote was the best way to respond based on prior experience, and so you did. The same is true for me.
3Almost everything your brain decides is affected by things outside of it.
We are a mixture of chemical desires and social + cultural outputs. Free will is an illusion. Its been done. Philosophers did to to free will what they did to God and capitalism.
2I suppose the real question is, is my brain part of me or am I inside of it somewhere/how? If it's part of me I'd argue it's the part I use for free willin', just like my butt is the part of me I use for poopin'. If I'm inside of it...well... I don't know? I think it's more the first, anyway, so I guess I don't have to know lol.
1
Ok but that's different than free will as in, the premise of a society in which a person is able to choose their path in life
2Which we also don't have, since our choices are greatly restricted by the economic class that we're born into!
2
How "meta" - by sharing our insecurities, we can give our insecurities... insecurity! :-P Take that my personal demon!:-P
14We are in fact part of a system rigged against us and free will is a commodified illusion, pseudoscientifically speaking.
Too little time to experience what we want and what we want is a choice within our means of what is available.
8"I'm you from the future. I didn't invent a time machine or anything, but I did promise to try to scare you into doing more with your life. Clown school is SO MUCH fun though!" pulls out a syringe, shoots up right there, overdoses, dies
Now its an existential crisis. Please the people that are so petty they'll send him back in time to traumatize themselves, or go enjoy Clown School? Crippling New Fear of making decisions: unlocked.
8Eat shit Pennywise, you wanna know what's scary?
Being crushed under a lifetime of debt you know, no matter what you do, no matter how much shit you get right, you're still permanently fucked, but you can't stop or you will die. You continue because you have no choice and you know you will die a wage slave. There is no escape.
Fucking werewolves...
Get outta here with that bullshit.
7My son's worst nightmare is a mannequin. Not like a moveable mannequin, but like a clothing store mannequin.
It would give him plenty of time to run, that's for sure
5Has he watched Doctor Who, the first Christopher Eccleston episode, by any chance?
4Is that the one where he rescues Rose from those clothing store dummies turned alive? No.
We don't watch any Doctor Who, every single episode would make him cry lol
5
I could relate
2
and we'll all float on okay...
4Fam just needs to take them to the Halls of Illusion.
3Free Will Denial is so cringe
2what if I'm part of the 1% and I don't know it.
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