Free Will 2 (Evolution)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, July 09, 2012, 22:31 (4518 days ago) @ romansh

Hi Matt
> > Don't know. What I do know, is that I can say no to an impulse. 
> Yep I agree - but is the act of saying "no" a result of another (albeit perhaps a different kind of) impulse?
> -Here we might be playing games with ourselves: What's the definition of an impulse? Is something that can last 8+ hours an impulse? -> > I don't think it turns a blind eye at all. I'm living proof of that. Remember what I said earlier--just because I can *at times* sit still and ignore impulses, doesn't mean that the majority of the time I'm fully "in control" either. The "goal" again, of meditation, is to get beyond the point where our minds are constantly firing off flak, and reach that state of "here and now." That's the first step. 
> 
> I don't see how we are not avoiding the concept of dependent origination here.
> -We're not. It's part of it. Remember: No absolutes in Zen. "All teachings are but a raft." -> 
> > Suppose someone were thus to see through the boorish simplicity of this celebrated concept of "free will" and put it out of his head altogther, I beg of him to carry his "enlightenment" a step further, and also put out of his head the contrary of this monstrous conception of "free will": I mean "unfree will," which amounts to a misuse of cause and effect. One should not wrongly reify "cause" and "effect," as the natural scientists do ... according to the prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it "effects" its end; one should use "cause" and "effect" only as pure concepts, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication--not for explanation. In the "in-itself" there is nothing of "causal connections" of "necessity" or of "psychological non-freedom"; there the effect does not follow the cause, there is no rule of "law." 
> 
> I don't thnk reifying cause and effect is a problem in that its opposite does not allow for freedom either. It is the very word free (intrinsically independent) that is the problem. In a scientific sense we should be careful of this word. 
> -I think you pegged his point exactly: Nietzsche was a student of Schopenhauer, who (as YOU probably know) was famous for positing determinism in free will, because we can only ever will one thing at a time. But, as I just argued recently to a humanist group I belong to--Nietzsche's position is that the question of "free will" isn't correct at all. It's we humans getting lost into a game of words: Since the only thing that matters is "the strongest will," than that means whether or not we have control over our will, the consequences are irrelevant: If we're completely free, it is clearly the conscious agent that has the strongest will, and if we're completely deterministic, again, we're dominated by the strongest will. -It's a zero-sum question. This is where N diverted from his mentor.-> If we are using the free in the vernacular, then who cares? My will is not intrinsically free, in shape or form. It is shaped by the universe and it shapes the universe. The two are one - so to speak.
> -A "process theology" of the mind? (sans theology, of course.)

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"