Question about Kastrup's perspective on Freewill

[ItayNagar]

That raises a whole question whether we should chose our beliefs or metaphysical views based on their philosophical validity or truthfulness, or based on their social or psychological effects and benefits (or may be some compromise between both)?

That is an interesting question. I tend to lean heavily towards 'truthfulness', though I grant that we could come up with scenarios where 'Truth' might be so detrimental to general well-being, that we might as well opt for 'psychological effects and benefits'. I think at least some philosophers hold a view that sounds something like, "there is no freewill - just don't tell anybody".

[AshvinP]

I'm also agnostic to the "metaphysical" question of free will and I agree with Astra that in practical terms it is irrelevant. However, what does matter is how much our choices are conditioned by circumstances. From that perspective our choices are realistically never (or at least very rarely) completely free, since they are almost always conditioned to some degree by external and internal circumstances. Yet, we can still speak of their relative unconditionality depending on how much and to what degree they are conditioned by those circumstances. BK's definition is that our choices are free if they are not conditioned by "external" circumstances. However, in such case, the degree of their freedom (un-conditionality) is very limited if they are still strongly conditioned by our internal circumstances (desires, biases etc that we habitually identify with our "selves"). Higher degree of non-conditionality can be still achieved if the decisions being made by our consciousness become less conditioned by desires and biases and more determined by reasonings coming from high-level cognition.

That last part is spot on. The key for spiritual freedom is that we are acting out of our own instincts (desires), feelings and reasoning when they are all aligned with each other. Such an alignment will only come through our 'higher order' cognition i.e. the essence of our human Thinking activity. BK's expression in the article was correct but not complete, as it left out the critical role of that Thinking activity (as Schopenhauer generally does). Idealist monism is absolutely critical for grasping the basis of individual freedom apart from merely academic metaphysical questions. Steiner elaborates in The Philosophy of Freedom:

Metaphysical as well as naïve realism, consistently followed out, must deny freedom for one and the same reason: they both see man as doing no more than putting into effect, or carrying out, principles forced upon him by necessity. Naive realism destroys freedom by subjecting man to the authority of a perceptible being or of one conceived on the analogy of a perceptible being, or eventually to the authority of the abstract inner voice which it interprets as “conscience”; the metaphysician, who merely infers the extra-human reality, cannot acknowledge freedom because he sees man as being determined, mechanically or morally, by a “Being-in-itself”.
...
Monism, then, in the sphere of true moral action, is a freedom philosophy. Since it is a philosophy of reality, it rejects the metaphysical, unreal restrictions of the free spirit as completely as it accepts the physical and historical (naïvely real) restrictions of the naïve man. Since it does not consider man as a finished product, disclosing his full nature in every moment of his life, it regards the dispute as to whether man as such is free or not, to be of no consequence. It sees in man a developing being, and asks whether, in the course of this development, the stage of the free spirit can be reached.

Monism knows that Nature does not send man forth from her arms ready made as a free spirit, but that she leads him up to a certain stage from which he continues to develop still as an unfree being until he comes to the point where he finds his own self.

Monism is quite clear that a being acting under physical or moral compulsion cannot be a truly moral being. It regards the phases of automatic behavior (following natural urges and instincts) and of obedient behavior (following moral standards) as necessary preparatory stages of morality, but it also sees that both these transitory stages can be overcome by the free spirit. Monism frees the truly moral world conception both from the mundane fetters of naïve moral maxims and from the transcendental moral maxims of the speculative metaphysician. Monism can no more eliminate the former from the world than it can eliminate percepts; it rejects the latter because it seeks all the principles for the elucidation of the world phenomena within that world, and none outside it.

Just as monism refuses even to think of principles of knowledge other than those that apply to men (see Chapter 7), so it emphatically rejects even the thought of moral maxims other than those that apply to men. Human morality, like human knowledge, is conditioned by human nature. And just as beings of a different order will understand knowledge to mean something very different from what it means to us, so will other beings have a different morality from ours. Morality is for the monist a specifically human quality, and spiritual freedom the human way of being moral.

[Martin_]

I think a better question than "do we have free will" is "to which extent do we have free will?".

Am I, as an example, free to direct my attention where I please?

[Cleric K]

I think a better question than "do we have free will" is "to which extent do we have free will?".

Am I, as an example, free to direct my attention where I please?

That's exactly what Ashvin's post above is about. This question is just as undecidable as the first, unless we understand man as something in the process of development.

For example, if I'm angry at someone am I free to direct my attention where I please? Few people would be able to perceive anything else but the anger - it's their master, they are unfree, they can't point attention to anything else even if they try. But with work on our character we find the inner strength to overcome such states. We do that in a practical way not when we simply resist anger but when our spiritual life opens such wide horizons that we simply don't have the time and the nerves to be angry - we have thousandfold more interesting and important things to direct our energies to. Clearly this latter situation is more free. Now we are free to point attention to anger if we want but we may also point it somewhere else.

So the question should be "Am I free to work in such a direction that I can overcome my conditioning and thus become more and more free?". This everyone answers for themselves. If they answer negatively they simply find excuses to justify their conditioning. If they answer positively they open the road for development.

[Martin_]

That's exactly what Ashvin's post above is about

Ok. Cool. We're on the same page. Now let's dig in.

"Am I free to work in such a direction that I can overcome my conditioning and thus become more and more free?".

Let's say your answer is Yes.
Then, specifically, which part of your mental-ish capacity is it that's free?

Now, personally, I think free attention would suffice again. (As the only thing that is free) The thoughts spurring from your attentiveness can be deterministic, as well as the feelings that arise.

In the beginning, your oppurtunity to divert your attention are few and far in-between, and even when you 'succeed' to 'observe otherwere' the effect on your 'soul' and general thought patterns may be negligble. But, you're moving in the right direction,. It's just a matter of time.

Any other candidates?

[findingblanks]

I wish Bernardo could put it as well as Astra052.

But Bernardo's need to, at the end, speak in terms of contrasting a free choice from unfree action shows that he is as allured as most of the others in wanting to make such a core distinction.

[Cleric K]

Let's say your answer is Yes.
Then, specifically, which part of your mental-ish capacity is it that's free?

Now, personally, I think free attention would suffice again. (As the only thing that is free) The thoughts spurring from your attentiveness can be deterministic, as well as the feelings that arise.

In the beginning, your oppurtunity to divert your attention are few and far in-between, and even when you 'succeed' to 'observe otherwere' the effect on your 'soul' and general thought patterns may be negligble. But, you're moving in the right direction,. It's just a matter of time.

Any other candidates?

Ultimately we have forms of spiritual activity. Attention can be said to be a form of spiritual activity that contains within itself the rudimentary thought. When we steer our attention through perceptions (sensory or otherwise) we experience the fusion of perception and idea, even if the idea is not verbalized. When we point attention to objects around us we have some nonconceptualized understanding/idea of what we're experiencing.

As you say, our world of perceptions gives us the ability to more or less freely point attention to anything within the palette of possibilities. Yet we are not very free with the contents of the palette itself. For example, if I never move from my chair my palette of visual perceptions is fairly restricted. As long as we view thinking only as thought-perceptions that spur spontaneously we have all reasons to consider it unfree.

When we are focused on paying attention to perceptions (and memory) it can be said that we are always looking at the fixed past. But through our spiritual activity we can also turn towards the future by exercising actively willed thinking or willed becoming. This has different character because we don't feel the palette of possibilities to point our attention to. Instead we need to be active in order to make contact with something that can be attended. As an analogy we can imagine being blindfolded and only touching our way around. We don't have a palette spread around but we must be active with our hands in order to make contact with objects and only then we become aware of them. It is something similar with active thinking, except that we are touching ideas and their relationships. After a while we begin to orient ourselves in the invisible landscape and it practically begins to become spiritually visible for us (not necessarily in visual sense but primarily in the sense when some question becomes clear to us and we say "I see").

In this way, we owe to our actively willed spiritual activity the expansion of the palette. If a simple minded man looks at a tree he sees a blob of brown and green - this is the palette of things that attention can be pointed at. If we have explored the world of ideas, even though we may have the same sensory perception of the tree, we can experience palette of potential of much more things that we can point attention to. Beginning from the most varied botanical characteristics of the plant, to a whole world of related ideas such as photosynthesis, carbon cycle, ecology, industry, etc. It is similar with reading. The sensory perception of written text is the same for those who can and can't ready yet the former can point attention to ideas that simply don't exist within the palette of the latter.

The whole point is that we need both the active thinking and passive attention. The former increases the density and richness of the world of perceptions and thus we have more and more things to attend to. And here we shouldn't imagine that we're talking only about ideas about the sensory world. This holds true even in a more significant sense in relation to our inner world. Unless we probe inner space through active meditation, the most we can achieve is a flattened out nebulous feeling of something. It is through proper cognition that this vague feeling receives its depth and structure. That's how we recognize the complicated rhythmic patterns of thinking, feeling, willing, our relations to other beings and so on. As long as we simply flow passively with the nebulous stream of consciousness we can't speak of freedom - we are simply content with whatever happens. When the nebulousness has been elucidated through the proper ideas, the spirit gains its foothold within the soul and can guide inner and outer life much more wisely and lovingly.

[Simon Adams]

There are many ways at many different levels in which my choices are not free, many of which I’m clearly not even aware of. Then there are the higher level ones that Bernardo brings into the discussion, is it the ‘right’ choice for me etc. But in my simple understanding, to paraphrase the infamous Descartes, I choose therefore I’m free. What that “I” is, is a much more complicated question, and you can argue about levels of reality and all kinds of other things. But even someone who has transcended their ego does not go onto autopilot. In fact you could argue that less enlightened people are more on autopilot, and make less conscious choices. Nonetheless, they have the ability to genuinely chose at some level.

The idea that we don’t have a will directed agency (behind all the influences), is based on a misunderstanding of our nature as far as I can tell. Even the Stoics had an untenable position, saying that everything is determined by natural law, but then having a compatibilist view of free will. It’s even more untenable for a physicalist to have any belief in any kind of free will. The most they can possibly accept is that we make choices based on our knowledge and experiences, which is not free will - any computer program can do that.

I have a fairly extreme view on this, in that I think all living creatures have some degree of free will. It’s like the most base and immediate aspect of telos, call it intra-telos maybe, and because most of the world has denied telos as something real, it no longer makes sense. For a simple creature which is cold, its ‘intra-telos’ becomes “find warmth”. For a climbing plant, it’s “find something to grip”. For us humans, we metacognise our telos, which makes the question of will more complicated. The intra-telos could be “look out the window”, or “lift my hand”, or “be rich”, “experience pleasure”, “be liked” etc. In some ways I think this is what the fall is, where we have the ability to dynamically rewrite our telos at every level. Our naked state was like the wild animals, with a free will but always guided towards a natural telos. Once we were able to clothe ourselves in any telos, we were separated from the natural tree of life.