The Real Lowdown On All That "free Will" Stuff.....

The problem with defining yourself as a Phenomenalist in this way is that it is impossible to tell where your head is for anything to be occurring in it. There are a couple of reasons for this that I can think of. The first is that the way you perceive your brain processing and what the actual processing mechanisms look like don't necessarily have to look alike. It is just an assumption that the "chemicals" interacting in our "brains" are combining to show us an accurate picture of what our reality looks like, including the brain itself. We could be an abstraction of the interaction of light and gravity. But ultimately there is no way to tell. The second is that we don't know the Earth's location in interstellar space, much less our so-called heads' location.

Even if the cosmos were revealed to be a hologram on some level, there is nothing about the nature of a hologram that you could correlate with the nature of life and say, "Now we've got it all figured out. Life is like a hologram." Because "hologram" suggests no feeling of substance whatsoever. It, of course, is like a hologram on some level, for holograms do exist. But it is also like a box of chocolates, Forest, you never know what you're going to get. The essence of a hologram still lies in question as well, as would the question of the essence of strings. Explaining the shape and form of something isn't a full explanation of what it is at all and never will be.

So my question remains as always...do we have a goal? It seems people want to find this solution that will put the cosmos in the palm of their hand. Is the universe made of wiggly strings? That would be kind of cute. Just lots of adorable little worms wigglin'.

It is foolishness to fool with the quantum realm. We are what we are. We are mostly here to love one another. Not pick apart everything in desperation to prove there is something.

I still say there is fundamentally no difference between mind and matter. Matter is just how mind seems in this context. Dreams take solid form, coalesce, and dissolve. It's all energy, all the planets flying around the sun, none of the energy ever in the same place from one moment to the next, spinning and twirling, dancing in a starry galactic void of interstellar space. The backdrop of the dream, and we are the dreamer. We may dream that the dream seems like a hologram, or a string, but our minds will warp and wander to ever greater heights.

 

Sure one does. I never argued differently....so I think both, too. Sometimes, we did not choose something that came our way....so we either have to reject it, accept it, or walk away.....@ Mountain Valley.

 

Let me start with this:

I agree, especially when you say that, “Matter is just how mind seems in this context.” You hit the nail on the head. So why do I go through all the hoops that I do to reach this conclusion? Because we are living in a world without meaning, truth, value, and authenticity, and we are on a path of self-destruction. This is the Post-Modern Crisis; the Age of Nihilism. Obsessed as we are with physicality, everything and everyone is objectified into an object. On the other hand, the nonphysical (and mind is by definition, nonphysical) has long been denied, and marginalized. Therefore my argument goes through a process of Derridean Deconstruction. Deconstructing the physical into the nonphysical (which becomes the dominant side of the duality, then there is the inversion or reversal, and finally they become two sides of the same coin.

Actually the answer is quite simple---it doesn’t really matter where your head is, or where the universe is, because subjectively, you are always at the center---what I call, your Subjective Center. Whatever is experienced, is experienced subjectively by you within your center. What does the brain really look like? Do the chemicals in our brain truly show us what reality is like? It doesn’t really matter----because what we experience is the phenomena of that. Kant, in his Phenomenalism stated that we cannot perceive the world as it actually is---or what he called the noumenal world. We can only see the world as it appears to us from how our minds construct it to be. But we can never see the ‘Ding-an-sich’ (thing-in-itself). Today we have the math of Quantum Mechanics that is highly predictive and therefore to the best of our knowledge, demonstrates how this noumenal world may be. In fact my own philosophy—Archephenomenalism—has its own suggestion of how this noumenal world may be, based on Einstein’s theories, Quantum Mechanics, philosophy, and so forth. But whether my assertion is wrong or right, we still have the same existential experience of our reality, as perceived from each of our own subjective centers. What we want though, is to be able to demonstrate truth, meaning, and intrinsic value to life from what we can gather to be the nature of reality---and that is more of a philosophical issue than one of science.

Yes you are correct, in that we do not want to assume that we’ve got it all figured out. That is the reductionist problem of many scientists today. However, Postmodern theorists say that the problem with the Postmodern times is that we do not have a Unifying Myth, or what I call a Unifying Truth, because it is the truth of that culture for that time—the truth that gives a culture and its people a meaning to be. Beginning with the dawn of civilization, this Unifying Truth was always a religion, and in the West, it was, of course, the Church. But the Modern Age was all about science, and it was thought that science would solve all of our problems and be the new Unifying Truth. Instead, it gave us two world wars, the atom bomb, and has destroyed any chance of a deeper meaning to life as long as we continue with the current mindsets. (Yes, science will bring meaning to some, religion to others, but as a culture we have no meaning.) I argue that our culture has a pseudo-unifying truth: consumerism. Consumerism gives us shallow superficial meanings that are temporary, and it keeps the culture in motion, but it offers nothing towards true meaning.

When I set out a decade or two ago to formulate what was to become Archephenomenalism, I was trying to simply find an example of how we could resolve the Postmodern crisis. It was never a question of solving the meaning of life. Though, it worked out far better than I ever expected.

When I speak about the modern mindset (or zeitgeist), I am referring to the mindsets that we have carried with us since the dawn of civilization---dualism, group ethic, and a focus on objectivism. Our indigenous ancestors were, apparently, universally the opposite---multiplistic, individualistic, and with a greater focus on subjectivism. (In fact, as you see indigenous people become planter-based, and switching to a stage of development much like our early planter villages that led into the city states of civilization, you see the same shift in the zeitgeist at work). But this civilized zeitgeist is structured towards reductionism. There can only be one answer, because life is based on duality---you are either right or wrong. Relativism has been breaking this dualism down (an example of how science (the Theories of Relativity) can shape the philosophy of our culture in ways we might not even expect).

Modern culture is a Western cultural phenomenon, but it is a global culture. This is one reason why the church could never again be the source of our Unifying Truth. The other reason is that we now see reality through Post-enlightenment eyes. Therefore, to bring truth and meaning back into our culture, this truth and meaning has to be grounded in rationalist and objectivistic thought. But it also has to be multiplistic---it cannot be reductionist in nature. The next thing is that it needs to re-enchant the universe. The Modern Age has progressed on the idea that we have all the answers---or that having all the answers is just around the corner. This is all thanks to Kant who separated the church and metaphysics from the physical sciences. This enabled science to move forward, and the benefit is the technology of today. But the cost was the disenchantment of the universe (…oh yeah, and World Wars, the atom bomb, etc.).

But that separation has served its purpose. It is time to bring it all back together again. Not to put science back under the control of the church, but rather to re-enchant the universe. AND to reintroduce Modern Man to the nonphysical, no matter how, on an individual basis, he interprets that nonphysicality.

Ideally you are exactly right. We are here to love one another. But in this overly objectivistic world, where any intrinsic value has been removed or destroyed and replaced with constructed values of exploitation where is that love for one another? There are individuals who have meaning in their lives---they can love one another. But our culture is meaningless, and it is hard for most people to love one another. Instead we break families apart to deport Mexicans. After decades of targeting primarily people of color in a War on drugs, pharmaceutical companies create an epidemic of opiate addiction (with countless lives lost) just to make money, and when it comes to life-saving drugs, the greed will push prices sky high because the purpose of a life-saving drug is not to save lives, but to make money. Meanwhile companies everywhere exploit humans in a form of slavery (as slavery is really defined by the objectification of a human being into a tool), empowered by an institutional framework that keeps wages low, taxes disproportionately higher on labor, than on the upper classes and corporations, as well as keeping other costs institutionally low, yet unfairly high on labor (such as healthcare).

Quantum Mechanics is truly a bridge back to the ‘science’ of metaphysics. Yes, there is some goal to prove that there is something---enough to return meaning, truth, and value back to the Modern world. But it is just as much about returning us back to the great mystery. Scientists, dogmatically attached to the physical, ignore the metaphysical implications of Quantum Mechanics. A good example is the reality of the Wave. What the science is telling us is too strange for scientists to begin to approach—therefore they stick to the math, you could say, they hide behind the math---keeping it abstract enough to not have to deal with on an ontological basis.
I define the physical as that which has a specific position in space-time—in other words, the particle. The wave (or wave-field) is superpositioned, and makes far more sense to be a ‘thing’ of the 4th dimension. Therefore I define that as nonphysical. People have a hard time with this—but the fact is, we never measure, observe, or experience the wave as a wave—it is always only after there has been a collapse into a particle. A wave meter, for example, requires electrons to actually move the needle.

But Quantum Mechanics also presents a multiplistic reality that is incredibly subjective. Each quantum wave collapse becomes an intentional object of quantum information. In other words, every point of physicality manifests for a reason. But this does not equate to a predetermination. There are trends in place---the flow of the Tao---but it only presents us with potentiality.

Existentialism tried to empower the individual with existential freedom. But it failed because it had no metaphysical basis. Quantum Mechanics provides that metaphysical basis, but it is essentialist in nature.

 

We experience free will or lack of free will as we experience it. Our fundamental experience of life wouldn't change be there proof either way. If I feel free, then it really doesn't matter.

 

There are many roads to truth.

Truth is the default of what is real. Anything that takes us away from the default is experienced as tension. Any free-will that deviates away from truth causes tension in us, as if we were going against the flow of reality and life. The tensions are actually trying to pull us back to reality. Some call this God/Truth.

Free-will is making a decision as to which road to take now. As soon as we take that path the universe is perceived differently. If we take a deviated path, from the truth, we will perceive difficulties of sorts. These are sometimes lessons needed to be learnt to reach the truth _ the default. However, most don't see it that way, and some actually think the world is against them.

I find that the best way to exercise free-will is to freely accept everything. By doing so, truth of the matter reveals itself very quickly. And the truth takes all my tensions away (freedom). Some say that this is God's (Truth's) will.

 

The freewill/determinism question is something of a philosophical tautology. We can only enact one thing at a time, and in retrospect we see that given those circumstances we couldn't have done anything else. But the illusion of freewill is so strong that we take it as real self-volition. If it were scientifically proven that we have freewill it really wouldn't change the quality of our experience, except in an intellectual sense of knowing that we have freewill. We would still only be able to do or think one thing at a time. It really doesn't matter. If there is no freewill I still feel free. If there is freewill then I feel the same as if there were no freewill. Our felt experience of the World remains one of taking in information, formulating decisions and acting upon them. The question does raise ethical questions because it engenders the consideration of personal culpability when we break the law or when we enact cardinal sins. But when the individual realizes what I have outlined here he or she views such things from the perspective of knowledge of the contingencies of life and is able to avoid enacting crimes or cardinal sins. They have reached a stage. Even though we are trapped in serial action, knowledge can still grow and build a better informed person. We are more inclined to see cause and effect play out - from the past, present and into the future. If we want to minimize our effect on the World and those around us we can decide to withdraw from creating large waves that disturb people and things and create small ripples instead. We can still get to the point where we start to take responsibility for our actions even if this state is the result of a preconditioned set of circumstances. This is the wisdom found in Buddhism. And it is bound up in ego. Sort out your ego and you won't be bothered by false division of free and unfree.

 

you are as free as you permit yourself to imagine. when someone robs your imagination, tells you to throw it away, or prevents your creative thinking by demanding your attention, they are robbing your freedom same as if robbing your tv or your car. when someone tells you what to pretend, they are doing this. and the odd thing, that we've mostly been brainwashed to forget or not even consider, is that nothing that exists, owes anything, to what anyone tells anyone else to pretend about it.

you might not always be free to DO anything about what you can conceptualize in your mind, but only someone robbing your attention, can prevent you from imagining it.

(this is also why the dominance of aggressiveness is what tyranny is)