No Objective Space or Time = No Free Will or Events

[Cleric K]

Freedom to create entails freedom to destroy, as one can't be apart from the other.

Undoubtedly. That's what freedom is all about.

(warning! poetry ahead )

We can image a much more harmonic Cosmic scenario, where we go through existence as a child through amusement park - everything is safe, everything is harmonious - we flow in a blissful state.

But what if the beings of the Cosmos decide to "crank it up a notch"? Why walk only within the railings? Why put on the safety belts? And... accidents begin to happen. Pain and death - never before known - appear in the theme park. After much experiences, we learn the difference between having a safety belt and not, walking where it's safe and not.

Now we are free. We do the good not because it is part of the blissful program of the park but because we have experienced reality in much, much greater resolution than it would otherwise be possible. We have experienced a Cosmic perspective of unprecedented depth. It is like pulling apart the living Cosmos to the verge of falling apart in oblivion.

I'm free not when I do whatever I want. In that case I'm not free because I don't know why I want the things that I want. I'm only free when I have knowledge of myself and the Cosmos - only in this way I can now the alternative paths. If I know only the world and its demise - I'm not free, I'm simply falling with it. If I only know God's will as something external, as commandments - I'm not free. I'm free when I'm standing within the world and have knowledge of the consequences of the path I take. No one forces me to go one way or the other. I go to the one that I Love - Love in the sense of the most intimate expression of creatively-causative activity. I become what I Love.

So there I am. A world falling apart or a world that is being healed and resurrected?

Everyone is free to choose. That's what freedom is all about.

If I want proof, if I want something - God, science - to tell me which is the right path - I don't understand freedom, I'm acting because the scriptures or the sensory world have forced me to.
I understand freedom when I choose what I would Love to become. But before I choose I must know. I cannot choose what I don't know exists. Man can only know what the alternatives are if he knows what he is and how he embeds into the Cosmos. I'm free if I know the deeds of the Gods and out Love choose to work with them.

(end of poetry)

[SanteriSatama]

I understand freedom when I choose what I would Love to become. But before I choose I must know. I cannot choose what I don't know exists. Man can only know what the alternatives are if he knows what he is and how he embeds into the Cosmos. I'm free if I know the deeds of the Gods and out Love choose to work with them.

We can wish for happy surprises in the general indefinite direction of our heart's desire, we can choose not to be limited by our limits of imagination, and delegate the details to what ever. We can be more cunning than to confuse choice with control. It was the choice of the cunning Odysseus to keep on returning to home, all his adventures and forgettings of nostalgia unfolded from that choice of poetry:

[David_Sundaram]

Sure David,
It hasn't been my point to quibble.[/quote
Izzatso?

I take it in Hegelian sense - to every thesis we can find an antithesis and their synthesis leads to higher unity. Which itself would have to find its antithesis and so on. That's how we agitated our soul bodies and moved up the thread further, rather than stopping at your post In this way everyone learns something. If nothing else ... at least what happens if you toss a brick into a washing machine

[SanteriSatama]

Aufhebung/Sublation = seeing that T-shirt from outside and feeling it from inside.

[Brad Walker]

Sam Harris: Final Thoughts on Free Will

Unfortunately the full version is currently available only to subscribers.
What lawyer wouldn't defend the legal status quo?

[Starbuck]

Sam Harris: Final Thoughts on Free Will

Unfortunately the full version is currently available only to subscribers.
What lawyer wouldn't defend the legal status quo?

Sam Harris fundamentally draws the same conclusion as Bernardo when any interviewer asks him the free will question.

If there is ultimately no unchanging personal identity surviving through the thing we call time, then to say ‘it’ wills anything freely is completely preposterous.

[findingblanks]

Yeah, it is one of the many areas that Bernardo and Sam fully agree on.

When Dana said:

"Carry on if you must, but If there is choice, I'm not sure why one would."

It made me think of those incredible stories of animals going to such great lengths to save a child or even an animal from another species. Even though I'm inclined not to say they were enacting freedom in their behaviors, I do see determination, intelligence and even deep care. I like Dana's use of 'carry on if you must...' and how that can apply to those animals (ants included!) and even the best of us humans who find ourselves inspired by impulses and ideas (ever changing, never finished or even all that correct) to help and creatively connect. Seems that we must carry on. And, now and then, we might even live up to the care and intelligence of the dog risking its life to save a squirrel.

[AshvinP]

Yeah, it is one of the many areas that Bernardo and Sam fully agree on.

When Dana said:

"Carry on if you must, but If there is choice, I'm not sure why one would."

It made me think of those incredible stories of animals going to such great lengths to save a child or even an animal from another species. Even though I'm inclined not to say they were enacting freedom in their behaviors, I do see determination, intelligence and even deep care. I like Dana's use of 'carry on if you must...' and how that can apply to those animals (ants included!) and even the best of us humans who find ourselves inspired by impulses and ideas (ever changing, never finished or even all that correct) to help and creatively connect. Seems that we must carry on. And, now and then, we might even live up to the care and intelligence of the dog risking its life to save a squirrel.

My post on the other thread also addresses the original post here, and why Harris/BK position on "free will" is born once again of incomplete reasoning...

BK says "it is our cognitive limitation which needs to impose causality on the world" (paraphrase), which is generally accurate. But, as always, incompleteness is the enemy of harmonized facts. He could reason further to say, "and it is my own cognitive limitation which also fails to perceive the deeper meaning the symbol of physical causality is pointing to". That is the natural conclusion if we continue reasoning from there. But when our critique is suddenly pointed back at our own preferred conclusions, through nothing but the natural unfolding of its inner logic, we then decide to stop reasoning further. Is that a coincidence? Regardless, the natural consequence of that incompleteness is that he must conclude causality as something completely arbitrary imposed on the 'external' mental reality by our 'internal' cognition. It is a conclusion born of assuming it into the argument from the outset. That's also why he then concludes "individuals don't actually exist" (why would they if 'individual cognition' takes us further away from MAL?) and there is a discernible lawful structure to 'external' Nature but not to 'internal' "meta-cognitive" Mind. All of these conclusions flow naturally from thinking constrained by the initial flawed assumption born of unexamined sympathies and antipathies related to how we want Reality to be. It funnels thinking in one direction towards abstract perceptual contents of the 'personal mind container' and away from concrete meaning of the unified, transpersonal domain.

[findingblanks]

Many of of the things that you refer to as BK's 'conclusions' strike me has hypotheses that he holds with various degrees of strength. For instance, whenever I hear him speak about what an 'individual' is, I hear him make various distinctions that let him acknowledge that the concept can point to a very specific phenmomena without having to make an ontological commitment that ignores his suspicion that the so-called 'individual' is reducible to the reduction base of his primitive. He typically does a good job of showing which aspects of his model are strong conclusions that would wreck his theory if shown to be false versus speculations and hunches he holds. For instance, his model can easily accommodate various levels of spiritual beings even though it does not insist upon it nor presuppose it.

[findingblanks]

Steiner believed that the 'individual' was reducible to a reduction base as well. Even though he had a different understanding of what he called the Godhead. He speaks of the nature of reality from which individuals emerged and he speaks of a time in which they will unite into one being. I'm not saying he shared BK's view, obviously. I'm simply pointing out that even Steiner's view held a pre and post individual.