Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Free Will

[Kyriakos]

Minor nitpick: it should be "cosmoi" not "cosmii", since the term is not latin

 

[JohannaK]

Oh, this is an interesting discussion, even though it has most of the time been esoteric speculation and poetic or literary digression. I am currently reading many books, one of them being Schopenhauer's On the Freedom of the Will.

This matter of Free Will is also one which has been bothering me for a while. Essentially, Schopenhauer takes a somehow deterministic approach. He persuasively concludes that the person is free to do as he wants, while he is not as free to decide what he wants. What the person wants is simply determined by motivations, just as they determine animal behaviour. The main difference is that motivations in less intelligent species are of a sensible nature, whereas motivations for humans can be as dissociated with the present moment as far as their memory can go.

However, these influences are taken into account after filtered by one's own character, so a decision in very specific circumstances will differ from one person to another, but for every person that decision will always be the same given that the circumstances remain unchanged. That is an extremely brief summary of what I have read up to now, but only examples (in which he notes similar thought and discusses opposite thought from previous thinkers) and conclusions are left, so it is broadly a summary of the whole book.

 

[warpus]

Of course, but they can lead to very different conclusions about the nature of things and what is true.

So what does that tell you? Two people can feel completely differently about a pizza. If you want to understand that pizza inside out, you will ignore how different people feel about it - and analyze it objectively, unless you're doing a study on how pizza makes people feel, or something.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to experience something to gain a better understanding of it, either. But if you want to understand how it works, you've got to approach it from a more objective angle.

Different tools for different problems. If you use the wrong tool, you will fail. You will never understand how sex works on a macro scale for examlpe, by just partaking in it.

 

[Kyriakos]

^The distinction does (clearly) exist, but i would note that both you and BirdJaguar have a point, given that regardless of scientific examination being consciously focused on established adequate objectivity, at the same time it is equally obvious that it is heavily founded on subjectivity (is anthropomorphic, to put it concisely). So both play a part, in different ways when emotions also play a (very notable) role (which is the case for phenomena which are not primarily studied 'scientifically').

 

[warpus]

^The distinction does (clearly) exist, but i would note that both you and BirdJaguar have a point, given that regardless of scientific examination being consciously focused on established adequate objectivity, at the same time it is equally obvious that it is heavily founded on subjectivity (is anthropomorphic, to put it concisely). So both play a part, in different ways when emotions also play a (very notable) role (which is the case for phenomena which are not primarily studied 'scientifically').

Well, either way my point remains that in order to understand how something works, you've got to study it.

If you want to understand how it makes you feel, you partake in it.

Different objectives = different tools

 

[timtofly]

And if your experience does not jive with any one else's, it is not very objective.

 

[Gatsby]

Is gravitation a habit? Whats the difference between ingrained habit and law that has been set down? If something is ingrained it may as well mean its pretty well settled down, right? When some specie developes special capacity is it the actual specie who develops it or some inteligence behind the evolution? Is that inteligence trying to develope different species in harmony (ecological balance). I think so. But to do that you need laws not just habits. But again once you admit existence of a law then you are facing the question of purpose.

Gravity is a very interesting phenomenon. I’ve read of it being described as a ‘negative energy’ or ‘anti-energy’ critical to the genesis our universe because it balances out the ‘positive energy’ of matter and energy, thereby allowing our universe to come from nothing because it makes the total energy of our universe sum to zero.

Anyway, whatever the origin and function of gravity is, the ‘laws’ that describe its behaviour are imo really habits, or more precisely our conceptual models of those habits. The difference between an ingrained habit and a law that has been set down is that the former co-evolves within and as part of the cosmos, while the latter originates from outside the cosmos and governs it externally. From an everyday human point of view there is no apparent difference: these habits probably did most of their ingraining in the very earliest stages of our cosmos (both ontologically and chronologically), and they have had billions of years to further carve their grooves into the fabric of our cosmos.

When life first emerged on Earth, these cosmic habits had already been conditioning/reinforcing themselves and each other for a very long time. So from the point of view of the first organisms, these habits would have seemed just like laws as well. Life was therefore able to emerge and develop because our cosmos’ particular set of habits was conducive to life AND they were sufficiently stable. The development of life then proceeded to echo, in a sense, the development of the cosmic habits: organisms got caught up in their own growth-survival-procreation feedback loops, and their environments both conditioned (and in turn were conditioned by) the habits of behaviour and growth which informed their ongoing selection and evolution. The so-called ecological harmony which you speak of is an illusion: ecosystems are continuously undergoing a tumultuous process of Creative Destruction as organisms evolve, die out, move in and move out. Much of the perceived ecological harmony is due to our short term perspective and relentless evolutionary arms races between competing organisms.

Life is a complex dynamic of self-preserving and habit-driven systems interacting with each other and their environment in ways that naturally tend to build up to greater levels of complexity and/or diversity. This can give the illusion of an intelligence directing evolution. But we have to remember that intelligence itself is a product of evolution, rather than the other way around. Why do some jellyfish have venom deadly enough to kill humans? Not because a grand intelligence decided that they should, but because they have been in an evolutionary arms race with their prey in which they develop venom, their prey develops resistance, they respond by developing more powerful venom, their prey responds with greater resistance, and so on. Similarly with humans, the development of our intelligence is the result of a series of unintended consequences of living in a dynamic and competitive natural environment.

Speaking of an anthropomorphic construct....

I only used “experiment” for lack of a better word.

 

[Souron]

How do you know? Becouse the thing you are experiencing or examining carries in it power. Something which influences our practical reality.
How are you going to explain love? We know its one of the most important things in our lives. Our lives are constant interchange of love and under scrutiny you may be able to say that there is some chemical reaction going on in the brain or that there is this molecule influencing another one but if you tell someone this I dont think he will have a good idea what love is. He will have to experience it first. No matter what kind of intellectual language you use you will fail to explain it. And mind you we are just talking about something so common as human love. Even if you use poetic language and poetical inteligence you can always get couple of hints but not the reality itself.
So knowing something without capacity to explain it is fairly common human experience.

We know fair bit about physical reality since it is the easiest plain of existence for us to examine. But we are also vital and mental beings and in a sense much more that then just purely physical beings. Otherwise it would be impossible for anybody to take his life if only the physical survival was our only end.


When it comes to God I dont see how I could object if someone would describe It as Love, Peace or Bliss. It would seem to me that all these pov are more closer to truth then saying that there is something which is not God.

Two points:
1)I agree that there is a difference between knowing all about how love works and having experience with love. However, I'm not sure that experience with something like love is properly termed knowledge.

2)God is not a sensation. You may describe enlightenment as love, peace, or bliss, but not a being. Not unless that being is merely poetic language for the sensation you ascribe to it.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Can you name one thing that a mystic has given back in a high return, I assume beneficial?

Sufi poetry. Rumi, Hafiz et al.

Well, either way my point remains that in order to understand how something works, you've got to study it.

If you want to understand how it makes you feel, you partake in it.

Different objectives = different tools

I agree. Both are valuable for different reasons and to ignore one is to deprive yourself of half the story.

 

[warpus]

I agree. Both are valuable for different reasons and to ignore one is to deprive yourself of half the story.

Yep.

I hope you will agree with me that in order to understand something you need to study it, though.

I also hope you will agree with me that in order to understand how you feel about it, you participate in or try to engage whatever it is you're trying to understand better.

I also hope you will agree that both of these are completely different in terms of what you can accomplish with them.

 

[Gatsby]

This matter of Free Will is also one which has been bothering me for a while. Essentially, Schopenhauer takes a somehow deterministic approach. He persuasively concludes that the person is free to do as he wants, while he is not as free to decide what he wants. What the person wants is simply determined by motivations, just as they determine animal behaviour. The main difference is that motivations in less intelligent species are of a sensible nature, whereas motivations for humans can be as dissociated with the present moment as far as their memory can go.

However, these influences are taken into account after filtered by one's own character, so a decision in very specific circumstances will differ from one person to another, but for every person that decision will always be the same given that the circumstances remain unchanged. That is an extremely brief summary of what I have read up to now, but only examples (in which he notes similar thought and discusses opposite thought from previous thinkers) and conclusions are left, so it is broadly a summary of the whole book.

This all sounds quite reasonable to me, although if you can't really choose what you want then does it really matter that you can do what you want?

I think one way of looking at free will is to say that its existence depends on the point of view of an observer. If a person is focusing on a decision to be made at some point in the future, then we can say that they currently have free will regarding that decision because they don't know what their decision will be yet. But as the moment of decision approaches and the person gathers more information relevant to the decision, then given that person's own inclinations and motivations the 'right' decision will become apparent to them. With hindsight, that person (or an independent observer) can reflect on all the factors that lead to that decision and conclude that "in the end, I (they) didn't really have a choice".

Briefly put: free will exists when looking at the future, doesn't exist when looking at the past, and only exists at all insofar as relevant information is presently unknown.

 

[timtofly]

Sufi poetry. Rumi, Hafiz et al.

I know that poetry can be beneficial. What is there about this poetry that sets it apart from any other? I am not downplaying anything beneficial that was the result, but how can you say that their writings were purely from a mystical experience? They both seemed to be well rounded individuals with more than one interest in life.

I tend to downplay religion a lot, because I think that it sometimes takes away from an individual finding their own inspiration through life, and they just do religion out of habit. I am not even going to say that one cannot find God through religion. More than not, it is despite religion.

I just don't see how mysticism can be that ground breaking. That is coming from one who takes the Bible as literal, so that may have something to do with it.

 

[Rashiminos]

This matter of Free Will is also one which has been bothering me for a while. Essentially, Schopenhauer takes a somehow deterministic approach. He persuasively concludes that the person is free to do as he wants, while he is not as free to decide what he wants. What the person wants is simply determined by motivations, just as they determine animal behaviour. The main difference is that motivations in less intelligent species are of a sensible nature, whereas motivations for humans can be as dissociated with the present moment as far as their memory can go.

And therein one finds the tendency of some people to forget things (and all if you can stomach the thought of reincarnation).

However, these influences are taken into account after filtered by one's own character, so a decision in very specific circumstances will differ from one person to another, but for every person that decision will always be the same given that the circumstances remain unchanged. That is an extremely brief summary of what I have read up to now, but only examples (in which he notes similar thought and discusses opposite thought from previous thinkers) and conclusions are left, so it is broadly a summary of the whole book.

It's hard to attune or detach desires one is not consciously aware of.

 

[JohannaK]

Schopenhauer also defines the character as an innate quality. That is, that a person is born with his character and remains oblivious to it until he can start discovering it through his own decisions.

 

[Kyriakos]

^Pretty much echoed (in a way) in Nietzsche's later claim that "one becomes who he in reality was". (that Nietzsche was highly invested in reading, and altering, Schopenhauer is frequently mentioned by Nietzsche himself).

 

[Rashiminos]

I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that notion, but from my POV it seems that personality traits can be tacked on while the individual in question is not aware of it. I would hesitate to call such traits "innate."

 

[timtofly]

Does that not negate experience, since it was not experience that "shaped" the person. All that seems to mean is that the person got the wrong experience and never realized who he could have been.

 

[warpus]

JoanK, I just skimmed through what you wrote (the parts quoted above).

I read somewhere once, I think it was a Popular Science magazine or something, that our decisions are all made for us by our subconscious and that our conscious then is free to override these decisions as it sees fit.

So basically our free will consists of a bunch of pre-made decisions being presented to us and we can go "Yep, I'll indeed grab that bagel", and so on. Mind you I have no idea if this is the accepted scientific view of what actually happens, but I thought I'd mention it.

 

[Rashiminos]

Does that not negate experience, since it was not experience that "shaped" the person. All that seems to mean is that the person got the wrong experience and never realized who he could have been.

If that's addressed to me, I'd say no since experience is a likely way for such traits to be "tacked on." In my interpretation, negating experience implies a person who is invariant with respect to the events in their life.

 

[Kyriakos]

JoanK, I just skimmed through what you wrote (the parts quoted above).

I read somewhere once, I think it was a Popular Science magazine or something, that our decisions are all made for us by our subconscious and that our conscious then is free to override these decisions as it sees fit.

So basically our free will consists of a bunch of pre-made decisions being presented to us and we can go "Yep, I'll indeed grab that bagel", and so on. Mind you I have no idea if this is the accepted scientific view of what actually happens, but I thought I'd mention it.

Well, it seems fairly obvious that no one can make all the conscious decisions about everything in his whole world of thought (probably the easier way to 'prove' that is to note that if he was, then in turn his perfect consciousness would exist by itself, ie with nothing unconscious below it to base that consciousness on, which in turn seems impossible for the same reason you cannot build a room at 200 metres above the ground without having part of the building rising up to that point as well in a way that can sustain the room high above the rest).

On the other hand, i have no reason at all to think that the degree in which one is conscious of the variables he can alter, is somehow set. In fact it makes a lot more sense to claim that the degree always is in flow, without the person having to notice that either. We advance pretty much without "knowing" how it is happening, due to only noticing a tiny fraction of the variables which cause that advance.