A Sense of Free Will: the consciousness quagmire (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, November 17, 2015, 17:48 (3081 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Again you are debating with me by pointing to religious precepts. I arrived at my concept of a universal consciousness as the only viable solution to the issue of SOURCE, recognizing that religions had established an anthropomorphic, human friendly God in the West and a divine level of Reality in the East, which I do not accept. Is God friendly? Adler said 50/50, yet he eventually converted to Catholicism.-dhw: There is a misunderstanding here. Your approach to the subject of free will entails dualism, which I have avoided because of its inevitable religious ramifications (such as predestination).-DAVID: Here again you are looking at your concept of religion. I've never considered predestination in any way as valid to any of my thinking. This is the first time I've been forced to comment on it. It is a void for me.-The misunderstanding continues. I have been trying to explain to Romansh that there are different approaches to the subject of free will. You brought up dualism - a very important aspect of your own belief in free will - but I wrote that I wanted to avoid it because it will inevitably lead to God and religion, with all the attendant convolutions. Not YOUR religious ideas, but those that have had theologians tying themselves in knots over the centuries, trying to prove that even though their God knows in advance what they are going to do, they still have free will. And now I'm talking about the very subject I particularly wanted to avoid in this context! (Happy to discuss it under “Difference in degree or kind”.)