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I don't believe in karma, it's pretty obvious that the universe does not reward good behaviour/punish bad behaviour through some supernatural force. If this was the case then why do corrupt billionaires get to live out a long life of luxury, while the devout buddhist monk who never harmed anyone in his life gets killed in a freak Tibetan snowstorm...
I believe in causality in a similar way to you - If you are nice, people will be nice back and you'll generally have a better time. Also, I believe that if you you do good things, you will generally feel better about yourself which will in turn enrich your life. (Is there such a thing as a selfless act? lol I don't know, another thread for that I think...)
Similarly, I find the idea of a god that has influence on reality in realtime very hard to understand. I am an atheist, but even so I understand the concept of a god that created everything and now sits back and watches the outcome
What I don't get is when people who, for example, win an Oscar and then thank god in their speech. Who the fuck are they to be so arrogant as to think that god "chose" them over, say, a devout priest who gave his life to the church, gave all his money to charity and then got falsely accused of raping a choirboy, and subsequently was hung, drawn and quartered (no source for this but I'm pretty sure it's happened a few times). I just don't get it.
Aaaanyway, to your question about free will. I've thought about this a lot, and firstly I don't believe that beings of higher intelligence can neccessarily influence the will of beings of lower intelligence - I think it's an all or nothing situation - either every self-aware being has free will, or they don't.
I tend to think of the human brain as a computer (albeit a ridiculously complicated one). After all, it does just consist of electrical impulses travelling through specific paths. I've contemplated the idea that theoretically, you could artificially map every single neural pathway in a human brain and predict all behaviour and actions that said human would do, in effect meaning that there is no such thing as free will.
I found this concept quite troubling (what is the point of making any decision if it's already been decided in advance by your physiology?), but recently I've been thinking that maybe it would be impossible to predict such things, mainly due to chaos theory and unpredictable quantum phenomena. Regarding chaos theory - perhaps there are so many variables that there is not enough energy in the universe to predict a humans behaviour past a certain point. Regarding quantum phenomena - perhaps there is an innate quantum randomness that again, would make a humans behaviour impossible to predict. Although I don't believe in any of this fully, It's a reasonable assumption as far as I'm concerned. And it makes life more fun than just thinking "It doesn't matter what I do, I was going to do it anyway so I may as well just jump off a cliff..."
I believe in causality in a similar way to you - If you are nice, people will be nice back and you'll generally have a better time. Also, I believe that if you you do good things, you will generally feel better about yourself which will in turn enrich your life. (Is there such a thing as a selfless act? lol I don't know, another thread for that I think...)
Similarly, I find the idea of a god that has influence on reality in realtime very hard to understand. I am an atheist, but even so I understand the concept of a god that created everything and now sits back and watches the outcome
What I don't get is when people who, for example, win an Oscar and then thank god in their speech. Who the fuck are they to be so arrogant as to think that god "chose" them over, say, a devout priest who gave his life to the church, gave all his money to charity and then got falsely accused of raping a choirboy, and subsequently was hung, drawn and quartered (no source for this but I'm pretty sure it's happened a few times). I just don't get it.
Aaaanyway, to your question about free will. I've thought about this a lot, and firstly I don't believe that beings of higher intelligence can neccessarily influence the will of beings of lower intelligence - I think it's an all or nothing situation - either every self-aware being has free will, or they don't.
I tend to think of the human brain as a computer (albeit a ridiculously complicated one). After all, it does just consist of electrical impulses travelling through specific paths. I've contemplated the idea that theoretically, you could artificially map every single neural pathway in a human brain and predict all behaviour and actions that said human would do, in effect meaning that there is no such thing as free will.
I found this concept quite troubling (what is the point of making any decision if it's already been decided in advance by your physiology?), but recently I've been thinking that maybe it would be impossible to predict such things, mainly due to chaos theory and unpredictable quantum phenomena. Regarding chaos theory - perhaps there are so many variables that there is not enough energy in the universe to predict a humans behaviour past a certain point. Regarding quantum phenomena - perhaps there is an innate quantum randomness that again, would make a humans behaviour impossible to predict. Although I don't believe in any of this fully, It's a reasonable assumption as far as I'm concerned. And it makes life more fun than just thinking "It doesn't matter what I do, I was going to do it anyway so I may as well just jump off a cliff..."
You've made some interesting points.
I'm inclined to believe, the same as you, that perhaps there really is no such thing as a selfless act.
I don't believe the oscar winner is thanking god for actually choosing them to win. Instead, they are thanking god for; their talents; support from friends, family, and gatekeepers; and life experience in general leading up to the award. The monk in this case is simply an unfortunate victim of circumstance.
It's been studied and proven that many animals are in fact self-aware. If a self-aware being's only choice is to obey or suffer a beating until it does what you command, even though it can choose to suffer a beating instead of obeying, wouldn't you say it's free will has been diminished? Being given a choice of only two available options, A or B, overlooks any possibility of there being an option C,D or E. This is a flase dilemma, one that is indeed being presented to us every day by politicians and corporations, to make us believe we have no choices other than the ones offered by them.
Observing and understanding predictable behaviour is very different from actually programming behaviour. MKULTRA experiments were designed and studied for the express purpose of controlling human behavior, often without the participants consent or even knowledge of said experiments taking place.
Obviously it's just paranoid to be afraid of taking any step because it was somehow predetermined you would take one, but what if a path was laid before you that led to a cliff? The path being, tragedies and circumstances designed to break your spirit and the cliff being suggested as the answer.
