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DavidA human residing in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Ancestral territory of the Erie, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Mississauga and Neutral First NationsVeteran
I think we do make choices, but those choices are largely dependent on our personality traits, personal history, circumstances, habits, moods, and so on.
@SpinyNorman said:
our personality traits, personal history, circumstances, habits, moods, and so on.
they are comprised of what we heard and read before (the knowledge we get from outside)
to turn the knowledge into wisdom one has to practice them instead of over-thinking
(since this is a buddhist forum, it is practicable to add 'practice the knowledge gain about Buddha's Teaching')
my intention was not to add more and more perception into the readers mind
but
that is what i had done
with good intention i would stop contributing to any thread here after
happy and pleasurable journey beloved forum members
Free will and self are interrelated because it's only the self that can have free will. But since the self is a product of conditions (and therefore not an unchanging entity), is there any free will in any real, practical sense?
I think that free will and free choice is possible, but that many of us are not able to practice it due to our ignorance and lack of self awareness. For most of us free will is an illusion.
You ever think of why we want the things we do? Why we have a certain ideal of beauty? Why does everyone seem to want to be famous or a doctor etc.? Mostly Fabricated conditioned dreams produced by society.
You ever notice how when you meditate you think that you have to think about breathing, but in actuality your body just does it automatically without any effort? Or how we think we need to produce thoughts, but when we are meditating the thoughts just come up one after another without us even wanting them to, (where do these thoughts come from?) and we can just observe them like clouds passing by in the sky? Again, no effort needed.
Who is the one observing the thoughts and who is the thinker?
All our actions are conditioned and driven by our hopes and fears. Most people are just like dead leaves just being carried on the winds of hopes and fears without any real control of their own and without being aware of the wind that is carrying them. Instead most people think they are flying and choosing where to go.
But if you are aware of these hopes and fears you are no longer controlled by the wind. You are no longer a dead leaf in the wind. You can be like the captain of your sailboat adjusting your sails to the wind and heading towards the true destination "you" intend. You might not be able to control the wind, but you can control your sails.
The philosophical question of free will has evolved along with our world view. Before science began pinning down the laws of cause and effect, we saw us having free will but that could be trumped by the will of the gods. Whatever choices you made, the gods had veto power over. And the gods were chaotic and capricious.
Jump forward and we began seeing the universe as a big clockwork machine where if we plugged in some numbers we could tell you where the very planets were going to be in the far future. Cause and effect ruled all the way down to the microscopic level, since the elements themselves obeyed strict laws. The only limit was our ability to measure all the variables but if we could, we could map the workings of your brain and tell you exactly how you're going to react at any given moment. Behaviorism as the philosophy of the mind was the new tool that was going to explain it all. In this deterministic, mechanical view of the universe there is only the illusion of free will.
Jump forward again to the information age, and it's not much better. Computers and software don't have free will. A program can only follow what the lines of code tell it to do. But, another theory was gaining strength and that was chaos theory and quantum physics. It turned out that at the very heart of the universe, cause and effect disappear and it becomes a "maybe, maybe not" world. There is a built in randomness to the universe that can't be predicted no matter how much information is gathered. The universe, the world, and as part of the world, ourselves, are not entirely prisoners of determinism. The unexpected and random can and does occur all the time. Free will has made a comeback. There just might be a ghost in the machine after all.
1
silverIn the beginning there was nothing, and then it exploded.USA, Left coast.Veteran
@Cinorjer - your latest post made me think of the book, The Black Swan, which I never did finish, but you'll see what I mean if you haven't read it already.
@silver said: @Cinorjer - your latest post made me think of the book, The Black Swan, which I never did finish, but you'll see what I mean if you haven't read it already.
Well, another book on my list. I will have to see if it's in the library system, but lately they don't seem to be adding anything but best sellers.
@federica said:
I cannot decide whether it's pseudo science or not.
Pseudo or not, read, mark, inwardly digest and choose which one you are most drawn to. That I think, determines whether you DO have free will, or not...
The key is in the addy... When you see the word "probably" in a scientific conclusion you can bet your bottom dollar it will inspire a branch of pseudo science and a scientifically reviewed paper is better than an opinionated blog.
We can use logic to find out which scenarios are more plausible but that won't ferret out the actual truth as we are still dealing with hypotheticals in that we wish to speculate that this means that when there are other things it could mean.
Pseudo science will turn that "probably" or other such term into undeniable fact with flowery imagery.
Well, generally all science is "probably." That's really the outcome of deductive reasoning. It can be logically certain, but that's based on prior observations which may or may not fully reveal everything. It still operates within the body of accumulated knowledge gained from observation and experimentation. Real science is a process that never claims to be perfect. Scientific theory just gives us the best possible explanation for natural phenomena. If the science is credible, it leaves room for the theory to be refined as more evidence is weighed into it.
@David said:
Also I can't shake the implications of a set future that come with the idea of predetermination.
Determinism says that everything has a cause. Predetermination says that the future is already decided. Often they are conflated but in my other thread on the frustrator effect, I think it can be argued that predictive knowledge of future outcomes causally changes the future so our choices can be deterministic without being predetermined.
Agreed.
I think the mere need to predict already contradicts the idea of "free will."
0
silverIn the beginning there was nothing, and then it exploded.USA, Left coast.Veteran
@silver said: @Cinorjer - your latest post made me think of the book, The Black Swan, which I never did finish, but you'll see what I mean if you haven't read it already.
Well, another book on my list. I will have to see if it's in the library system, but lately they don't seem to be adding anything but best sellers.
When I went to find it in my library system, there were several unrelated books, so to be sure, this is the one I'm referring to: The black swan : the impact of the highly improbable, by Nassim Taleb.
0
DavidA human residing in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Ancestral territory of the Erie, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Mississauga and Neutral First NationsVeteran
@federica said:
I cannot decide whether it's pseudo science or not.
Pseudo or not, read, mark, inwardly digest and choose which one you are most drawn to. That I think, determines whether you DO have free will, or not...
The key is in the addy... When you see the word "probably" in a scientific conclusion you can bet your bottom dollar it will inspire a branch of pseudo science and a scientifically reviewed paper is better than an opinionated blog.
We can use logic to find out which scenarios are more plausible but that won't ferret out the actual truth as we are still dealing with hypotheticals in that we wish to speculate that this means that when there are other things it could mean.
Pseudo science will turn that "probably" or other such term into undeniable fact with flowery imagery.
Well, generally all science is "probably." That's really the outcome of deductive reasoning. It can be logically certain, but that's based on prior observations which may or may not fully reveal everything. It still operates within the body of accumulated knowledge gained from observation and experimentation. Real science is a process that never claims to be perfect. Scientific theory just gives us the best possible explanation for natural phenomena. If the science is credible, it leaves room for the theory to be refined as more evidence is weighed into it.
What a conclusion probably means is beyond science and into philosophy. Philosophy disguised as science is pseudo science.
There is just no way to prove what can be predicted when all past, present and future variables are in. Just knowing all the variables could change some variables.
Is following the Eightfold Path really only a matter of choice/decision? When I am operating from my logical, decision-making mind, of course it is. When my son comes to me later and asks me for money even though I just gave him money yesterday, I have a choice to yell or respond with skillful speech. But if I were an advanced practitioner, (TNH always comes to mind in particular when I think about these things) would it be the same logical thought process for him? Or is he following the eightfold path as a matter of a life of practice and living from heart rather than logical mind? Right Speech doesn't seem to be a matter of choice for him. It is just who he his now.
that is different, I think, than my need to make a decision of how to react, as part of practicing the Eightfold Path. So i think there is a difference between practicing it and living it. At some point it changes. He still has a personality of course. And still has to make decisions. But I bet he makes them from a bit of a different place than most of us do. It seems we practice so that hopefully one day it is automatic and just who we are.
So it makes me wonder how free will plays into that. Is it different when we can operate from our true nature rather than our logical mind? It seems then that someone who is awake/realized/enlightened would automatically always make the best decision for that situation and it seems that free will wouldn't apply in the same way then. Is free will just an illusion and once we move past all those illusions there simply is not a need for it at all anymore? Is it just another thing we desire?
@karasti said: It seems then that someone who is awake/realized/enlightened would automatically always make the best decision for that situation and it seems that free will wouldn't apply in the same way then.
Interesting point. If always doing the skillful thing is natural and automatic, then a choice is not being made. It's like with the precepts, initially they are training principles but eventually they are just the obvious way to behave.
Are our choices always conscious though?
0
DavidA human residing in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Ancestral territory of the Erie, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Mississauga and Neutral First NationsVeteran
Now we're getting to the opposite possibility which is that we only use free will until we awaken.
A limited/conditioned free will and limited/conditioned self is a far cry from "no free will" and "no self". Just sayin.
1
DavidA human residing in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Ancestral territory of the Erie, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Mississauga and Neutral First NationsVeteran
@namarupa said:
A limited/conditioned free will and limited/conditioned self is a far cry from "no free will" and "no self". Just sayin.
Somewhere in the middle I'd wager.
Go figure.
1
DavidA human residing in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Ancestral territory of the Erie, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Mississauga and Neutral First NationsVeteran
@federica said:
I cannot decide whether it's pseudo science or not.
Pseudo or not, read, mark, inwardly digest and choose which one you are most drawn to. That I think, determines whether you DO have free will, or not...
The key is in the addy... When you see the word "probably" in a scientific conclusion you can bet your bottom dollar it will inspire a branch of pseudo science and a scientifically reviewed paper is better than an opinionated blog.
We can use logic to find out which scenarios are more plausible but that won't ferret out the actual truth as we are still dealing with hypotheticals in that we wish to speculate that this means that when there are other things it could mean.
Pseudo science will turn that "probably" or other such term into undeniable fact with flowery imagery.
Well, generally all science is "probably." That's really the outcome of deductive reasoning. It can be logically certain, but that's based on prior observations which may or may not fully reveal everything. It still operates within the body of accumulated knowledge gained from observation and experimentation. Real science is a process that never claims to be perfect. Scientific theory just gives us the best possible explanation for natural phenomena. If the science is credible, it leaves room for the theory to be refined as more evidence is weighed into it.
Sorry, I forgot to add that the hypothesis is the first step in the scientific method, not the last.
@David True, the hypothesis is the starting point, but even a fleshed out scientific theory is not meant to be the end-all/be-all, but rather a work in progress. It's just the best possible explanation, after being subjected to intense scrutiny in scientific journals and such, but open for refining based on further observation.
0
federicaSeeker of the clear blue sky...Its better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubtModerator
Getting back on topic though, I do not believe in predestination or similar ideas.... why are we thinking about that? aren't we supposed to be living in this moment only? I think we always have a choice. Some are harder to resist making poorly, especially when they seem like small transgressions... I would wager the buddha used his free will even after his famous moment under the bodhi tree. Just because someone is "awake" doesn't mean they are "magic." I see SG as a man. His choices were made easy by his knowledge of the truth of things.... but that doesn't make his choices any less. He still knew that he had the option to act other ways than in an enlightened way.... he just had no desire to do so, so he didn't! Yes it may be natural and automatic to choose correctly if you are awakened, but deep down, in your brain, you still have to make a choice.
Comments
I think that's just common sense.
I think we do make choices, but those choices are largely dependent on our personality traits, personal history, circumstances, habits, moods, and so on.
they are comprised of what we heard and read before (the knowledge we get from outside)
to turn the knowledge into wisdom one has to practice them instead of over-thinking
(since this is a buddhist forum, it is practicable to add 'practice the knowledge gain about Buddha's Teaching')
my intention was not to add more and more perception into the readers mind
but
that is what i had done
with good intention i would stop contributing to any thread here after
happy and pleasurable journey beloved forum members
Free will and self are interrelated because it's only the self that can have free will. But since the self is a product of conditions (and therefore not an unchanging entity), is there any free will in any real, practical sense?
I think that free will and free choice is possible, but that many of us are not able to practice it due to our ignorance and lack of self awareness. For most of us free will is an illusion.
You ever think of why we want the things we do? Why we have a certain ideal of beauty? Why does everyone seem to want to be famous or a doctor etc.? Mostly Fabricated conditioned dreams produced by society.
You ever notice how when you meditate you think that you have to think about breathing, but in actuality your body just does it automatically without any effort? Or how we think we need to produce thoughts, but when we are meditating the thoughts just come up one after another without us even wanting them to, (where do these thoughts come from?) and we can just observe them like clouds passing by in the sky? Again, no effort needed.
Who is the one observing the thoughts and who is the thinker?
All our actions are conditioned and driven by our hopes and fears. Most people are just like dead leaves just being carried on the winds of hopes and fears without any real control of their own and without being aware of the wind that is carrying them. Instead most people think they are flying and choosing where to go.
But if you are aware of these hopes and fears you are no longer controlled by the wind. You are no longer a dead leaf in the wind. You can be like the captain of your sailboat adjusting your sails to the wind and heading towards the true destination "you" intend. You might not be able to control the wind, but you can control your sails.
The philosophical question of free will has evolved along with our world view. Before science began pinning down the laws of cause and effect, we saw us having free will but that could be trumped by the will of the gods. Whatever choices you made, the gods had veto power over. And the gods were chaotic and capricious.
Jump forward and we began seeing the universe as a big clockwork machine where if we plugged in some numbers we could tell you where the very planets were going to be in the far future. Cause and effect ruled all the way down to the microscopic level, since the elements themselves obeyed strict laws. The only limit was our ability to measure all the variables but if we could, we could map the workings of your brain and tell you exactly how you're going to react at any given moment. Behaviorism as the philosophy of the mind was the new tool that was going to explain it all. In this deterministic, mechanical view of the universe there is only the illusion of free will.
Jump forward again to the information age, and it's not much better. Computers and software don't have free will. A program can only follow what the lines of code tell it to do. But, another theory was gaining strength and that was chaos theory and quantum physics. It turned out that at the very heart of the universe, cause and effect disappear and it becomes a "maybe, maybe not" world. There is a built in randomness to the universe that can't be predicted no matter how much information is gathered. The universe, the world, and as part of the world, ourselves, are not entirely prisoners of determinism. The unexpected and random can and does occur all the time. Free will has made a comeback. There just might be a ghost in the machine after all.
@Cinorjer - your latest post made me think of the book, The Black Swan, which I never did finish, but you'll see what I mean if you haven't read it already.
Well, another book on my list. I will have to see if it's in the library system, but lately they don't seem to be adding anything but best sellers.
Well, generally all science is "probably." That's really the outcome of deductive reasoning. It can be logically certain, but that's based on prior observations which may or may not fully reveal everything. It still operates within the body of accumulated knowledge gained from observation and experimentation. Real science is a process that never claims to be perfect. Scientific theory just gives us the best possible explanation for natural phenomena. If the science is credible, it leaves room for the theory to be refined as more evidence is weighed into it.
Agreed.
I think the mere need to predict already contradicts the idea of "free will."
When I went to find it in my library system, there were several unrelated books, so to be sure, this is the one I'm referring to: The black swan : the impact of the highly improbable, by Nassim Taleb.
@Deformed said:
What a conclusion probably means is beyond science and into philosophy. Philosophy disguised as science is pseudo science.
There is just no way to prove what can be predicted when all past, present and future variables are in. Just knowing all the variables could change some variables.
Is following the Eightfold Path really only a matter of choice/decision? When I am operating from my logical, decision-making mind, of course it is. When my son comes to me later and asks me for money even though I just gave him money yesterday, I have a choice to yell or respond with skillful speech. But if I were an advanced practitioner, (TNH always comes to mind in particular when I think about these things) would it be the same logical thought process for him? Or is he following the eightfold path as a matter of a life of practice and living from heart rather than logical mind? Right Speech doesn't seem to be a matter of choice for him. It is just who he his now.
that is different, I think, than my need to make a decision of how to react, as part of practicing the Eightfold Path. So i think there is a difference between practicing it and living it. At some point it changes. He still has a personality of course. And still has to make decisions. But I bet he makes them from a bit of a different place than most of us do. It seems we practice so that hopefully one day it is automatic and just who we are.
So it makes me wonder how free will plays into that. Is it different when we can operate from our true nature rather than our logical mind? It seems then that someone who is awake/realized/enlightened would automatically always make the best decision for that situation and it seems that free will wouldn't apply in the same way then. Is free will just an illusion and once we move past all those illusions there simply is not a need for it at all anymore? Is it just another thing we desire?
But I haven't finished my coffee yet.
Interesting point. If always doing the skillful thing is natural and automatic, then a choice is not being made. It's like with the precepts, initially they are training principles but eventually they are just the obvious way to behave.
Are our choices always conscious though?
Now we're getting to the opposite possibility which is that we only use free will until we awaken.
A limited/conditioned free will and limited/conditioned self is a far cry from "no free will" and "no self". Just sayin.
Somewhere in the middle I'd wager.
Go figure.
Sorry, I forgot to add that the hypothesis is the first step in the scientific method, not the last.
Is Free Will an oxymoron ?
Free=Not controlled
Will=The mental faculty by which one deliberately chooses or decides upon a course of action:
@David True, the hypothesis is the starting point, but even a fleshed out scientific theory is not meant to be the end-all/be-all, but rather a work in progress. It's just the best possible explanation, after being subjected to intense scrutiny in scientific journals and such, but open for refining based on further observation.
Free - Liberated
Will - Orca whale. Orcas are a variety of dolphins, not oxymorons.
WHAT???
my whole childhood has been a sham. Next you're going to tell me Pandas are not Bears.
I heard a rumour that Santa isn't real! Surely that cannot be true!
Getting back on topic though, I do not believe in predestination or similar ideas.... why are we thinking about that? aren't we supposed to be living in this moment only? I think we always have a choice. Some are harder to resist making poorly, especially when they seem like small transgressions... I would wager the buddha used his free will even after his famous moment under the bodhi tree. Just because someone is "awake" doesn't mean they are "magic." I see SG as a man. His choices were made easy by his knowledge of the truth of things.... but that doesn't make his choices any less. He still knew that he had the option to act other ways than in an enlightened way.... he just had no desire to do so, so he didn't! Yes it may be natural and automatic to choose correctly if you are awakened, but deep down, in your brain, you still have to make a choice.