so on your deathbed, when your consciousness is flickering on the verge of unawareness, I will just say to you, "It's your choice, it's your freewill, choose to be more conscious!" I'm sure that will help a lot.

That's a totally different subject, I'm talking about life not the process of dying. What one does at death is up to the individual. Accept the process or cling to past self, who is to be so sure that we won't have this choice. But IME it is important to realize this choice and make it a habit of being aware of it. Many have lost this choice, the ability to move into awareness out of past conditioning. So many people nowadays do not have this choice and are completely run by their ego. They don't run their ego. Having the awareness necessary to tame the ego is what gives manifestation to this choice, and the more the choice is realized the more in control of our own processes we can become. Before I started meditating, roughly 5 years ago, it would be so difficult to escape my attachment to emotion and conditioning. Having cultivated awareness, I must conclude that it has been free-will I have been cultivating as well.

maybe so, but this thread is a debate over whether free-will exists, and so I interpreted your post within that context, and as an argument in favor of free-will, which I maintain is an illusion. IME, whatever experience of free-will we think have during decision-making processes will, upon closer inspection, reveal that there are always myriad reasons underlying each of our decisions and that all of our decisions are determined by these reasons. And that further, the experience of free-will is nothing but the experience of our ignorance of underlying causes of our decisions coupled with the incorrect attribution of our decision-making to some mysterious faculty called "free-will".

Have you read the book by J. Krishnamurti " The First and Last Freedom" ?

no. Can you elaborate?

You know, as offtopic as it is, whenever I see the title I can't stop thinking of this movie:
http://www.orcanetwork.org/captivity/image..._free-willy.jpg

On a more serious note, where's the logic in a predetermined consciousness that keeps repeatedly asking itself whether it's free or not...?

That's no different from someone writing a computer program that keeps outputting the value "Am I free?" on the screen.

Or creating a browser that keeps making logs with phrases like "Did I output the value because I wanted to, or because some higher power called User inputed it within me?"

I think the fact alone that we can ask such a question proves that we have free will.

Some decisions can come from higher awareness and some come from ignorance. Yes free-will could be considered illusion as it is a projection. But free-will for me is at times an experience, not all a projection. If I had been meditating for 2 hours, I am experiencing more free-will than before. This is my interpretation of free-will. We each have our own definitions based on our own experiences and it is wrong to impose yours onto mine and say that free-will is ultimately an illusion. Sometimes I am more engulfed by my ego than other times. When this is true, the decisions I make are ego-based and have an ego-based outcome. When I am aware, the decisions I make can lead to more awareness transcendental of ego consciousness. This ability to perceive the ego from a more in-tuned and expanded perspective gives rise to experiences of which I would call a manifestation of free-will. When the mind is tamed the possibilities are endless. When the possibilities are endless freedom is experienced. Awareness of the possibilities of the choices we can make and the potential outcomes is free-will to me.

Free will" is awareness of alternatives, which is a form of awareness of ignorance about ourself.

call me a cynic (though I prefer the term optimistic idealist), but these endless possibilities are also an illusion. The mental associations you make are extremely limited, and the experience of endless possibilities only arises when we exhibit no bias towards a particular direction. If your experience of endless possibilities is real then why are so few of the possibilities ever realized, much less brought to distinct awareness? It's like change blindless, which proves conclusively that we are not aware of much of what we think we are aware of. Take for example, your visual perception; it's an illusion because you're not even aware of most of your visual percept. The phenomenon of change blindness proves this is the case. So too with your experience of "endless possibilities". It's a simple illusion, and the proof resides in the failure to realize or even become aware of most of those possibilities. This is not just semantics. Change blindness has been extensively studied and is a real phenomenon. It would be foolish to think that change blindness is limited to visual perception; instead, it's implications are almost certainly universally applicable to all or most aspects of consciousness, including your experience of "endless possibilities".

Thinking about it these possibilities are an illusion. But the moment has no end. There are infinite possibilities of forms/manifestations of energy. Maybe we are on different pages.

very insightful questions lucid.

What is Will ? And what makes It free or unfree ?

The question of determinism or non-determinism is irrelevant to the question of free will. Free will merely means that it "could have been otherwise." In the case of an elderly person near the end of his life, it is possible for him to extend his own life by willing it (or end it by giving up), just as one can rise to heroism by willing it. This is, of course, related to the placebo effect. One merely wills himself to feel less pain, have more energy, live longer, etc. There are physical limits, of course, but within our own boxes of possibility we are free.

Not nessecarily ;D If you were to change the chemical structure of the cells, causing them to regenerate continuously, one would live forever. Cell Biologists are working on this already, they just haven't solved it yet.

If the placebo effect can cause so many other things to happen to ones body and since you are capable of communicating with single cells, its theoretically possible.

For ancient Egyptians, Heru = Will = Freedom

PERT EM HERU

Hey Ra

THE 1ST DISTORTION = FREE WILL

QUESTION: The 1st distortion of intelligent infinity is free will. Can you give a definition of this distortion?

RA: In this distortion of the Law of One it is recognized that the Creator will know Itself (or experience Itself). (B2, 7) The primal distortion is free will. (B2, 8)

QUESTION: The Creator then grants total freedom of choice in the ways of knowing. Is this correct? (B2, 7)

RA: This is quite correct. (B2, 7)

QUESTION: Then all other distortions spring from this first distortion, is this correct?

RA: It is both correct and incorrect.

In your illusion of physical existence all experience springs from the Law of Free will or the Way of Confusion.

Spirit of Ra Channeled


In my opinion, cultivation of higher self is cultivation of what I consider to be free will, based on my own experience with it. We all have different experiences and interpretations/definitions of free will based on our programming and conditioning. Some have cultivated higher awareness to see the inner workings of this conditioning and others have not. Those who have not done this have a hard time accepting the possibility of free will and what it could potentially mean. Free will to me cannot be contained within a conceptual framework as it is experience based and totally subjective. Just a couple pennies.

Good point, Rick. And when you say: "There are physical limits, of course, but within our own boxes of possibility we are free", this reminds me that some human beings, are more free than others, depending on whether or not they are, or allow themselve to be, trapped in their mental scripts. Unlike animals and insects, which live instinct-driven lives, have a wider range of choices. We are affected by instinctual drives, but we can choose not to be dominated by them. Most animals, uless brought to live in zoos and provided for by humans, are only free to live in their natural habitat. I can't imagine a woodpecker saying, "I think I will migrate to the treeless desert."

False. If determinism is universal, then free will is an illusion since it "could not have been otherwise".

Some things are pre-determined, some we have controll of. Let us not get caught on rhetoric. Example: there was just a pretty big earthquake here which I obviously had no controll over, yet I was able to find a safe place to marvel at how awesome it was

this is not rhetoric, this is reason and logic. Simply put, if determinism is universal, then free will is not free from determinism, and hence is not free. Period. You can always redefine "free will" to make it compatible with determinism, but it will never be free from the iron grip of necessity. Even the ancient greeks recognized this obvious fact and made their gods non-exempt from determinism.

That is a conditional statement. IF determinism is universal, then free will is not free from determinism. There is always the possability that determinism is not universal. Even transcription of DNA is not always perfect. If chemicals can from time to time arrange in an aparently (at least to me) arbitrary manner, then it seems like the laws governing "determinism" do not always work, thus it is not determined at all, there is only a tendency.

Prove it. You can't. All you've got is wishful thinking, whereas I've got all of science, reason, and logic behind me.

Science is a game, what I am talking about is not. Would you agree with the quote, "the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing"?

You do not have reason behind you, nor science, and without reason you cannot have logic. Your reasoning is conditional as I have stated. Science has yet to prove determinism.

philosophers have already proved it. Read Hume and Kant. Everything has a cause. Anything else is wishful and irrational thinking.

I have read Hume and Kant; however, I was never clear as to how exactly these individuals answered the greatest questions of our time with nothing but words (a concept created by man).

science operates by inference. The Law of Causality has been upheld everywhere where we can test it. Thus, by inference, the Law of Causality applies to everything.

It seems to me that Newton and Einstein both saw some force "gravity" and infered two very different things. This method of reasoning is how Saint Thomas Aquainas "proved" the existance of God.

all that means is that science is progressive. It works using the scientific method, so clearly our conceptions of how things operate will change over time as new observations are made, which is what differentiates Einstein's view from Newtons.

Who was right Einstein or Newton? Who is to say that Kant's reasoning was right? Who is to say that reason is more correct than insight?

Neither Newton nor Einstein are completely right. That's how science works, by progressively constructing or discovering better theories with more explanatory power.

why take refuge in ignorance by assuming beforehand that certain things don't have causes? Science tells us everything has causes.

I have always had a problem with hyperbolic statements like: "the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
Sure there is a lot that I would like to know; but I would never say, I know nothing.
.

You just admited that science tells you nothing, thus logically you can only assume that there are multiple possabilities, eaither everything is causal, some things are causal, or nothing is causal, and you only percieve causes. You can not prove any of these hypotheses correct.

Science and reason have shown you that you know that you know nothing--a logical contradiction. Why do you think I asked if you believe that quote to be insightful?

One cannot KNOW that they KNOW nothing logically, but somehow I have the intuition (I know) that I know nothing with absolute certainty.

No, I didn't. Show me exactly where I said this.


like I said, science uses inference. Everything science explains has causes. Thus by inference everything has causes, until proven otherwise. You've presented no proof to the contrary. Only wishful thinking.


they've shown me no such thing. Quite the contrary. You've heard of a priori knowledge? You've heard of cogito ergo sum? All of this involves knowing things with certainty.

"That's how science works, by progressively constructing or discovering better theories with more explanatory power."

Relative right is not right, just as relative determinism is not determinism.

What about those things which science cannot explain? Are you going to infer that they have causes? Science cannot explain how the Universe was created. What was the cause of the Universe?

there is no reason to prematurely place limits on the explanatory power of science. There are many scientific ideas about how the universe was created, assuming it was created (and no, the Big Bang Theory does not undermine the idea of a universe that was never created). Given that, for practical reasons, we cannot currently test hypotheses on the origin of the universe, assuming it had an origin, it doesn't rule out that someday we will. Are you a defeatist or just lack faith in reason?

I say that reason is an important tool, but not the only tool. Insight in my opinion is equally important. Reason cannot function without insight, but most scientists fail to acknowledge insight. Science tests hypotheses, insight gives us hypotheses to test.

I disagree. Where do you think scientists get hypotheses from? It may be insight but it doesn't convey much info to just attribute it to insight, so often they tell the reasoning behind the hypothesis they are testing, with it being understood that some insight must have gone into its formulation or else it wouldn't make for much of a hypothesis as something that was obvious and not in need of testing.

Exactly, both reason and insight are vital to progressive thinking.

but this doesn't change the fact that insight has a purely rational and causal basis, even though we are often unaware of the causes underlying our insights.

There may be a cause behind a murder, but does that make it right? It is easy to explain the causes after the fact, it is very difficult to predict them.

Mm.. yes and no.

Somethings are easy to predict, like if you hit your head on something - you will feel pain. Or if you mix two chemicals together, of the same amount, in the same conditions, you can be assured it will produce the same reaction and the same molecule every time.

Other things, can be more difficult, such as predicting human behaviour. This has a lot to do with the fact that there is a lot less unrestricted information available to the public about human behaviour and how it is determined.

This is due to the fact that political scientists use their knowledge of human behavior to manipulate the masses. If the masses of people suddenly knew about such tactics and became aware of them.. there would be quite an uprising.

When you mix two chemicals, you do not always get the same reaction. Look at DNA replication, translation, and transcription.

it helps to make a distinction between motives and causes. When I say "causes", I mean actual physical causes, not motives. When we attribute motives to someone's actions, we are rationalizing their actions, and we are ignorant of all of the physical causes underlying their actions. A motive involves a conglomeration of physical causes. A motive might be better called a meta-cause. This means that you may attribute likely motives to a murderer but, with current methods, will not be able to divine all of the physical causes underlying their actions.

Well if you believe in determinism, then you cannot hold an individual accountable for his/her actions. What ever "meta-causes" caused an act could not be altered be the individual. In a causal system, everything is predestined, thus there is no good act nor bad act, simply acts. Only intuition governs the forces of good and bad.

I like your way of thinking.

There is no good or evil, but thinking makes it so.
-William Shakespeare

determinism is not incompatible with accountability. Holding an individual accountable is subject too to determinism.


this is incorrect reasoning as good and bad are human judgments that are determined by causes. I have yet to see a valid criticism against universal causality.

Determinism (and, hence, causality) is independent from free will, as Daniel Dennett explains.

From Daniel Dennett on free will at

http://meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=...&topic=freewill

From the interview:

"... Natural selection is an explosion of evitability. We've had huge increases in the degrees of freedom, the powers that the products of evolution have the accrued powers, this is one of the most obvious facts in the physical world, this growth of evitability. If you look at evitability in that way then you see that the traditional philosophers' notion of inevitability just isn't in the same picture."

"... What I claim is that all the varieties of free will that are worth wanting we can have in a deterministic world. I can define varieties of free will that are incompatible with determinism but they're pointless. They don't give you anything that matters. They aren't needed for moral responsibility. They aren't needed to give your life meaning. They are completely gratuitous, sort of bizarre metaphysical conceits that don't pull their weight, you don't need them, who cares."

If you believe in absolute determinism, then you must also believe that you do not have free will. If you do not have free will, you cannot be accountable for your actions. Good and bad are not determined by causes IMO they are determined by intuition.

To whom is this post addressed?