Ok. I will rephrase. Assuming that the mind can be deconstructed, what remains to know that mind has been deconstructed?
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Free Will and Fate
- Thread starter atanu
- Start date
Ok. I will rephrase. Assuming that the mind can be deconstructed, what remains to know that mind has been deconstructed?
There are many threads and many posts wherein it is argued that every event and/or thought is determined causally. Such arguments are put forward as rational arguments. Assuming absolute determinism, how can in same breath one say that the argument for absolute causal determinism itself is free and rational?
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PolyHedral
Superabacus Mystic
Did anyone argue that it was free?
Rationality is an act of reason. Reason refers to the capacity human beings have to make sense of things, to establish and verify facts, and to change or justify practices, institutions and beliefs.
Reasoning itself indicates freedom of human intelligence to judge, decide, selct, change etc. etc.
PolyHedral
Superabacus Mystic
My reasoning doesn't. Why does yours?
Your reasoning doesnot reason? That is what you mean?
PolyHedral
Superabacus Mystic
No, my reasoning does not conclude that humans are "free," in an absolute sense.
I did, in another thread.
For clarification:
Yes. It is implied in the so called rational arguments of those who preach absolute causal determination, which however will mean that no thought can be free.
Some hold that we have free will, without specifying what means by 'we'. Experience does indicate that all effects have causes, in the domain of time. So, how can there be free will. A single act of free will will initiate a chain.
OTOH, some hold that happenings in mind are not only causally determined but fixed, being mere reflections of constraint free action happening at another level, which is not bound. Like Moon is not constrained by its images on poodles.
Everything is thus --so in saying that, we must find a further way in which free will and fate are 'thus' to distinguish them from anything else.
Free will is the individual who, in ignorance of his nature, exercises the ego to take possession of forward motion and change; free will is this state of exercise, possessed at no cost to the ego. One might argue that if the ego is delusion then so is the exericse; nevertheless, they exist, as much as forward motion and change exist, and it is in their existence that we describe them. The real question is whether, like anger that can be banished because it is delusion, free will can be banished. Poof. (Although I can do that with anger, I cannot yet imagine what that would look like with free will.)
Fate is, as you say, a resultant where the story of forward motion and change that we are writing with possession of each piece of the 'puzzle' takes possession of us. The story becomes the author of us. "It is written" that this would happen; "it is fated" that they would meet.
PolyHedral
Superabacus Mystic
You haven't addressed why determinism implies free will, or what happens if determinism is right and there is no, genuinely, no free choice.
An interesting question that however cannot be imagined except through metaphor. The ego-self can be sacrificed on the cross and a rebirth taken in spirit as spirit.
As long as the deterministic model includes a "me," someone taking possession of an action or a result as theirs, it hasn't abandoned free will.
PolyHedral
Superabacus Mystic
Why would it include a "me" as anything other than a label for a category of processes?
It is already answered. I will put the same understanding in another perspective.
I did not say that determinism implies free will. In fact it implies the opposite. Isn't it? And when one says "---- my conclusion of causal determinism is reached by pure rational thoughts", it is oxymoron -- something like 'virtual reality', which is an oxymoron that has taken a life of its own, but is an oxymoron, nevertheless.
It is also wrong because me as an independent free thinker is an illusion, as me is also causally determined.
As a label for a category of processes, does it serve the same function? Does it still take possession? Then the model hasn't abandoned "me."
If that is so, then the reality is something else, beyond the category identified as 'me' that has emerged due to processes. Quaetion arises as to who identifies the category as 'me'?
PolyHedral
Superabacus Mystic
Posession is an abstraction, as is almost everything. It doesn't make sense to talk about it at the most fundamental level, although the most fundamental level is not the only one worth considering.
...And? I thought that was a given.
What doesn't make sense about talking about possession or "me"? And doesn't the fact of something not making sense indicate a flaw in the model?