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Bushman
Social climber
In this form at present
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'Tooth and Nail'
Religion and its baggage seems,
To permeate our thoughts and dreams,
But I would just as easily,
Create my favorite fantasy,
Than live traditions that I see,
Are steeped in old mythology,
Society and laws of men,
Are based on predicating sin,
And all our base mentality,
Is less evolved than we might be,
If called upon to reason the,
The illusion from reality,
To find some truth in life so grim,
And not to act upon each whim,
And what to think and what to do,
Until our final day is through,
When all out tribulations will,
Be nothing to the bitter pill,
Of never knowing what will be,
In all our curiosity,
Or shall we struggle to the death,
To ward it off with dying breath,
Of what we think is coming next,
Simultaneously vexed,
Our ignorance beyond the pale,
Of what we fight with tooth and nail,
I've never met a single one,
Who's died by accident or gun,
Returning to the world to tell,
Of what lies there beyond the veil,
So 'till that day with knuckles white,
Going not quietly to the night,
I'll question and will rant and rail,
And fight the darkness tooth and nail.
-bushman
01/06/2015
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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On the Desire to Change the World...
"Books – however marvellous they may be – cannot, on their own, change very much, and the widespread belief that they can, strongly holds back progressive causes and the effectiveness of enlightened minds."
"the world as it currently stands isn’t held together simply by ideas: it is made up of laws, practices, institutions, financial arrangements, businesses and governments. In other words, its muscles are made up of institutions and therefore, the only way to bring about real change is to act through competing institutions. Revolutions in consciousness cannot be made lasting and effective until legions of people start to work together in concert for a common aim and, rather than relying on the intermittent pronouncements of mountain-top prophets, begin the unglamorous and deeply boring task of wrestling with issues of law, money, long-term mass communication, advocacy and administration."
http://www.thebookoflife.org/advice-for-those-who-want-to-change-the-world/
http://www.thebookoflife.org/
It's nice to see Alain de Botton (School of Life) reference Dawkins. Usually they're playing opposite positions on the offensive line.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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"Indian" references - East, West, or motorcycle, they all score a Ganeshload of spirit points.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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We're drifting now,looking for a hook or anchor to ground us. Such as it is with threads.
Waiting in another airport. A kind of a purgatory or netherland, a transition point between some places, while really a no place.
It's just like we are or seem to be in this life.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Waiting in another airport.
Kinda like the Twilight Episode. Everyone had someplace to go, but him.
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Bushman
Social climber
In this form at present
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It's more like another bar I used to frequent around here
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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My wife has been taken with recent TV epics that are the rage these days on cable. Very dramatic, current, and complicated. “They are such interesting and powerful dramas—and in every single episode!” she says
Don't knock it, Mike. These special series on HBO, Showtime, Starz, AMC, FX, etc. are complex, fascinating dramas, far beyond what TV was showing thirty or forty years ago. My wife enjoys watching reruns of Hart to Hart produced in the 1970s and 1980s, but I find them vapid, poorly plotted, poorly directed, and poorly acted, compared to the excellent productions today. I thought I might not like The Affair or The Leftovers but after a couple of episodes was hooked, to say nothing of the entertaining Black Sails and the brilliantly acted True Detective.
And yes, we are surrounded by people who believe they are their personalities . . . It's so sad they are not, but are biological mechanisms with can-do power but no free will, robots deluded by their sham "I"
;>(
;>)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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while really a no place
No mind. The captain will save us from the drift and re-direct us to no-thing.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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^^^^^
:-)
I think I can hear Mr. Scott in the background yelling, “I’m giving her all that I can, Captain! She can’t take much more than this!”
“ . . . a dream that became a reality and spread throughout the stars” (Kirk in “Whom Gods Destroy”)
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feralfae
Boulder climber
in the midst of a metaphysical mystery
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So, is there free will, including Free Will* of individual spirit, or are our paths all set by some greater cartographer?
To bring the question down to a basic concept: does the individual sentient have Free Will?
*Free Will: Free and independent choice. Voluntary decision. (Webster's Unabridged)
I seem to see both sides of this issue being discussed tangentially here. Perhaps more than two sides.
Do you have Free Will, and if so, how do you know that you do?
I have asked too many questions: I am muddying my own stream of thought. :)
One question:
How do you know you have or do not have Free Will?
feralfae
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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How do you know you have or do not have Free Will?
There seems to be evidence from the neuro sciences that most if not all our "decisions" are made at a deeper level of the mind/brain even though we feel we are employing "free will". And there is a compelling argument that processes obeying physical principles are at the root of such determinations. Which of course does not mean that the outcomes of those processes are predictable. The image below is generated by a mathematical process that I have explored that shows patterns emerging from an algorithm that would be very hard (if not impossible) to predict.
However, your question has not been entirely resolved, with proponents on several sides of the issue.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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far beyond what TV was showing thirty or forty years ago
I refuse to believe that assertion in a general way. I'll take a good solid episode of Leave it to Beaver any day over this over-written panoply of the current junk designed to compensate for the contemporary decline of an adequately dense field of face-to-face human contact and relationships.
The people in Hollywood these days have their collectives heads up their asses--- except for Clint Eastwood
Ooooh gotta go ...the Green Acres marathon has just come on.( I have a brother-in-law who steadfastly claims to have a genuine autograph of "Arnold" the pig)
As for the problem of "free will" I thought that Godel pretty much resolved that issue.
Hahaha
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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"And there is a compelling argument that processes obeying physical principles are at the root... Which of course does not mean that the outcomes of those processes are predictable." -jgill
Thank you, jgill!
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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"And there is a compelling argument that processes obeying physical principles are at the root... Which of course does not mean that the outcomes of those processes are predictable." -jgill
Well now. Which is a tidy way of saying " there is no current proof only reasonable arguments primarily because the outcome of these processes are not always predictable"
Or...until proof ,in the usual form of predictability ,is forthcoming , unfortunately we'll have to make do with compelling arguments.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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A couple weeks ago, upthread, a few posters cited a relatively recent series of neuroscience experiments in which brain scans indicated that test subjects were making decisions to push a button a full 7 seconds prior to their conscious brains being aware : (there has since been a series of further experiments along these lines that reached the same results)
The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes's outlook on life. In 2007, Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters1. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise.
Free will rests upon the understanding that thoughts, action, behavior constitute decisions made by the conscious mind. These experiments seemed to point to the possibility that at least some decisions are not processed de novo by the conscious brain:
The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided. http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110831/full/477023a.html
My question is: How can we know that our decisions are the product of our conscious minds?
And if they are not the product of our conscious mind does this mean that we do not in fact possess free will?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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"The debate is founded on our having too narrow a sense of what we are." -jstan
Yes. Yes, that's right... and in different terms: it's founded on inexperience. Inexperience in regard to what science and research tell us. Inexperience regarding the many definitions of "freewill."
The whole affair reminds me of Yos tourists expressing their opinions when they see climbers on El Cap.
.....
Claim: There is no supracausal freedom of the will
The claim is based on years and years and years of experience in chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology and neuroscience - all of which point to those "processes" strictly obeying underlying rules.
Ward, remind us, how many years in above activities have you under your belt? In what personal hands-on lab work experience did you see any "freewill part" floating free of physics or chemistry or cellular machinery? or any "process" disobeying (escaping and floating free of) an underlying rule?
The irony is that the "freedom" to believe in "freewill" has more to do with the likes of confusion, inexperience, science illiteracy and perhaps long-standing cultural and religious biases more than anything else.
Background experience in actual hands-on science constrains this freedom (to think and believe whatever you want).
But so what else is new. Right?
Speaking of which...
What continuously amazes me is how comfortable vast numbers of people are with their claims... when inside themselves they must know full well just how little experienced they are in the subject.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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HFCS:
You are jumping to all sorts of conclusions about how I am approaching this issue. This is no doubt emotionally conditioned by a constant need to engage in a tiresome polemic as regards science in relation to other forms of knowledge and inquiry.
Take it easy. Get a bottle of wine. Go backpacking.
It's not that interesting debating "one note Johnnies" on these subjects.
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