Philosophical Speculations

Yes, that's another "reason" that I was thinking of adding but the post was getting way too long. For historical reasons PoF had to take the form it took. It was to be expressed in a language of the philosophers of its time. Ironically it was exactly these philosophers that absolutely did...

The only interesting things about free will are how it's so widely misunderstood, why it's so precious to some, and the concept's undeadness. The questions of agency, responsibility, and punishment still have relevance when free will is admitted impossible/incoherent, but have different solutions. ...

After finishing the first chapter of PoF, I was really interested to see what if any explicit Steiner-Jung connection existed, since they lived at the same time and from the same area, traveled to the same places and no doubt both wrote in German. I came across a Jung related google group where this...

No you’re stuck in a materialist mindset. Our choices matter. If you study the history of terrible events where people who would be normal people in normal times do terrible things, it’s where they just go along with things, where they don’t want to stand up and be counted, to chose something diffe...

Sam Harris does live like free will is illusory. Why can't anyone? Society could be less predatory if people got over the illusion of free will. But people, even physicalists who should know better, or spiritualists that should be less prideful, cling onto it. Really? So, if someone murdered Annaka...

It should be noted that this totality is normally not experienced as something crisp, as if we have perfect awareness of everything. An analog could the if we focus our gaze, such that our gaze encompasses the whole screen, this doesn't mean that we experience the meaning of every written word at t...

Ashvin, Scott already alluded to this. The most down-to-the-core consideration of the matter (to my knowledge) has been expressed in Rudolf Steiner's Philisophy of Freedom (PoF). Because of the sensitive nature of the word freedom , it has been translated with different titles like Philosophy of Sp...

But even if we assume everyone was thrown into an existence of suffering without any choice, that does not negate the freedom which is inherent in eternal purpose. The alternative would be no existence at all, in which case there is no possibility of freedom. Right, it does not negate freedom, but ...

Bottom line seems to be character types. Some of us get energised by being popular and accepted, some get energised by being a contrarian and outlier. If you removed the emotional aspect and it just came down to sober rationality, I suspect some form of idealism would prevail. Jung generally agreed...

But this says nothing about whether we have free will. It just says that we have a purpose, and we will only really be the full embodiment of our true nature when we are aligned with that purpose. We could restate it this way - if there is no goal you are acting towards, then your actions become me...