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Post by enigma on Feb 13, 2015 21:06:54 GMT -5
And which way would that be?  The TMT starts with the article dude.  ... yer interested in that guy's TMT but not the question that reveals it for that, and that's the non-investigation Niz was talkin' about. The question "does the absence of volition mean the fact of predetermination?" is an invitation to stop thinking about a purely conceptual dichotomy. The article was meant at a nudge for other guy in the conversation. Showing another side of the issue. Probably shouldn't have put it in your side of the convo. From this POV all discussion about volition, free will etc only concerns the "play of duality" we find ourselves experiencing. Can the sins/accompishments (tendencies) of the father's be projected into the 3rd and 4th generations? Absolutely. Abusers beget abusers. President Bush begets a President Bush. Does it have anything to do with who you really are? None what so ever. Does it have an affect on the character you play in the Grand Illusion? Yes. Can that character be changed/altered/improved? Yes. As Niz says, meditation can have a most beneficial effect on our character. But the play's the thing... |
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Post by enigma on Feb 13, 2015 21:25:29 GMT -5
If you picture culture as a sort of inverted pyramid, at the tip that is the base of the recognition of "me-in-the-world". Building on that is identification with the family unit and that in turn forms the basis of the clan which is the basic building block of the tribe. What comes after that? I don't know, what? I mentioned tribal life because of something I had heard before.. But it is more related to being self-centered or not.. It was like, some children there were told to run a race and get something to eat as the prize and the children said "why should we race and only the winner gets the prize, we will just share it".. It sounds like a culture that teaches that everything is done for the good of the tribe, which may be very useful for the survival of the tribe as a whole. It doesn't imply to me that there is less self identification. (I understand it may just have been the impetus to ask the question) |
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Post by justlikeyou on Feb 13, 2015 21:59:02 GMT -5
The article was meant at a nudge for other guy in the conversation. Showing another side of the issue. Probably shouldn't have put it in your side of the convo. From this POV all discussion about volition, free will etc only concerns the "play of duality" we find ourselves experiencing. Can the sins/accompishments (tendencies) of the father's be projected into the 3rd and 4th generations? Absolutely. Abusers beget abusers. President Bush begets a President Bush. Does it have anything to do with who you really are? None what so ever. Does it have an affect on the character you play in the Grand Illusion? Yes. Can that character be changed/altered/improved? Yes. As Niz says, meditation can have a most beneficial effect on our character. But the play's the thing... Indeed, and better than Disneyland by lightyears  |
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Post by enigma on Feb 13, 2015 22:26:04 GMT -5
But the play's the thing... Indeed, and better than Disneyland by lightyears Though Bambi free, we must admit.  The only reason in discussing and pointing beyond dualistic experience is to bring about an experience free of the illusions presented within dualistic experience. Even 'enlightenment' is all about dualistic experience. |
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Post by justlikeyou on Feb 13, 2015 22:34:16 GMT -5
Indeed, and better than Disneyland by lightyears Though Bambi free, we must admit. The only reason in discussing and pointing beyond dualistic experience is to bring about an experience free of the illusions presented within dualistic experience. Even 'enlightenment' is all about dualistic experience. Oh, you think I was somehow putting down the experience of duality?? No sir, its the only game in town and I'm addicted. |
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Post by enigma on Feb 13, 2015 22:45:56 GMT -5
Though Bambi free, we must admit. The only reason in discussing and pointing beyond dualistic experience is to bring about an experience free of the illusions presented within dualistic experience. Even 'enlightenment' is all about dualistic experience. Oh, you think I was somehow putting down the experience of duality?? No sir, its the only game in town and I'm addicted. Okey dokey. |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 13, 2015 23:34:41 GMT -5
Maybe it is inevitable but probably it (self identification) is less severe in tribal life. ? To my knowledge, there isn't one that doesn't self identify as separate persons, though I would be interested if there is. New baby information. It has been proven that human babies up until 6 months, can identify individual primate faces. As in, different ape/monkey individuals can be seen to show familiarity in pre-6 month old babies, upon being re-shown and re-seeing their unique faces. This capacity, obviously because human animals, aren't any longer in immediate primate faces, 'stops being so easily accessible.' |
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Post by tzujanli on Feb 14, 2015 6:38:04 GMT -5
Well, as that's as vague as it is convoluted, I've responded in detail here out of respect for the others on the thread, but it's worth mentioning that the absence of volition very obviously doesn't mean that people can't be held accountable for harm done to others. Excerpt from Is Free Will an Illusion? Oct 20, 2011 |By Shaun Nichols Unknown Influences To discover the psychological basis for philosophical problems, experimental philosophers often survey people about their views on charged issues. For instance, scholars have argued about whether individuals actually believe that their choices are independent of the past and the laws of nature. Experimental philosophers have tried to resolve the debate by asking study participants whether they agree with descriptions such as the following: Imagine a universe in which everything that happens is completely caused by whatever happened before it. So what happened in the beginning of the universe caused what happened next and so on, right up to the present. If John decided to have french fries at lunch one day, this decision, like all others, was caused by what happened before it.When surveyed, Americans say they disagree with such descriptions of the universe. From inquiries in other countries, researchers have found that Chinese, Colombians and Indians share this opinion: individual choice is not determined. Why do humans hold this view? One promising explanation is that we presume that we can generally sense all the influences on our decision making—and because we cannot detect deterministic influences, we discount them. Of course, people do not believe they have conscious access to everything in their mind. We do not presume to intuit the causes of headaches, memory formation or visual processing. But research indicates that people do think they can access the factors affecting their choices. Yet psychologists widely agree that unconscious processes exert a powerful influence over our choices. In one study, for example, participants solved word puzzles in which the words were either associated with rudeness or politeness. Those exposed to rudeness words were much more likely to interrupt the experimenter in a subsequent part of the task. When debriefed, none of the subjects showed any awareness that the word puzzles had affected their behavior. That scenario is just one of many in which our decisions are directed by forces lurking beneath our awareness. Thus, ironically, because our subconscious is so powerful in other ways, we cannot truly trust it when considering our notion of free will. We still do not know conclusively that our choices are determined. Our intuition, however, provides no good reason to think that they are not. If our instinct cannot support the idea of free will, then we lose our main rationale for resisting the claim that free will is an illusion. The issue one of willful ignorance, separating subconsciousness from nonsubconsciousness, it's all consciousness with an artificial barrier.. freewill/volition are descriptions of observable human activities, conditions where the experiencer influences their relationship with what is happening, and also influences the happening itself.. rather than explore the depths of consciousness, some people find comfort in theorizing 'about' those depths, willfully surrendering to to an ignorance that serves their purpose.. but hey, use your freewill to choose as you will.. |
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Post by tzujanli on Feb 14, 2015 6:45:05 GMT -5
The "escape hatch" is the illusion that you have no 'free-will', so that abusive behavior can be blamed on something other that the choice to be that way.. It's possible to simultaneously see free-will as an illusion, and yet to expect persons to behave in accordance with the norms of the social contract, and to see that a perpetrators actions are the cumulative result of a long life of aberrant conditioning, and allow for the presumption of free-will and personal choice and intent as being some sort of metric for determining justice. The underlined in your post is a very very dead horse. Please refrain from the insult of continuing to whack at it. Anyone at anytime has the opportunity to let go of that conditioning, and the choice to ignore that opportunity based on beliefs about theories is the 'dead horse' you're still trying to ride.. if you're insulted, that's your choice, too.. |
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Post by zin on Feb 14, 2015 7:05:58 GMT -5
I don't know, what? I mentioned tribal life because of something I had heard before.. But it is more related to being self-centered or not.. It was like, some children there were told to run a race and get something to eat as the prize and the children said "why should we race and only the winner gets the prize, we will just share it".. The next level in the hierarchy after tribe is city-state, and that's what comprises a nation. It's an arms race from the fig leave to the hydrogen bomb. The story you mention is a pleasant one and even if it never happened it illustrates the point that a close knit community is likely to have less in the way of boundaries between the individuals and the groups that comprise it, but historically, isn't such a community more than likely to form a different boundary looking outward? Doesn't that community, relative to an individual or a family or a clan, potentially form an expanded horizon for us vs. them? In terms of survival, isn't it just a different form of identity than an individual facing the world alone? I was not thinking of next levels at all. I thought like, just now, just today, the child lives in a tribe and lives in a less self-centered environment. S/he doesn't have too much reason for thinking about or defending 'self', etc. I admit that I didn't think about 'self-identification' much, didn't see it as the problem of separate selves. Did you write this about the isolated child idea? |
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Post by zin on Feb 14, 2015 7:22:47 GMT -5
I don't know, what? I mentioned tribal life because of something I had heard before.. But it is more related to being self-centered or not.. It was like, some children there were told to run a race and get something to eat as the prize and the children said "why should we race and only the winner gets the prize, we will just share it".. It sounds like a culture that teaches that everything is done for the good of the tribe, which may be very useful for the survival of the tribe as a whole. It doesn't imply to me that there is less self identification. (I understand it may just have been the impetus to ask the question) Yes, I wrote somewhat in the last post, I hadn't understood self-identification well. Here I am not thinking as "group's interests versus individual's interests", my thought is more about lightening the pressure of focus-on-self by interaction with nature and with others as brothers (not as rivals). |
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Post by zin on Feb 14, 2015 7:27:44 GMT -5
Maybe it is inevitable but probably it (self identification) is less severe in tribal life. What sort of tribe are you thinking of? To my knowledge, there isn't one that doesn't self identify as separate persons, though I would be interested if there is. I usually suffer from TLT I was not thinking anything special, just the usual impressions about tribes, at least a more natural environment. But I got curious, I will make a search on this later, ie about how children are raised in various tribes. Maybe there were such ones but then they got lost |
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Post by laughter on Feb 14, 2015 11:13:56 GMT -5
The article was meant at a nudge for other guy in the conversation. Showing another side of the issue. Probably shouldn't have put it in your side of the convo. From this POV all discussion about volition, free will etc only concerns the "play of duality" we find ourselves experiencing. Can the sins/accompishments (tendencies) of the father's be projected into the 3rd and 4th generations? Absolutely. Abusers beget abusers. President Bush begets a President Bush. Does it have anything to do with who you really are? None what so ever. Does it have an affect on the character you play in the Grand Illusion? Yes. Can that character be changed/altered/improved? Yes. As Niz says, meditation can have a most beneficial effect on our character. But the play's the thing... Ain't nothin' more the real thing than the here and now. |
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Post by laughter on Feb 14, 2015 11:15:49 GMT -5
Though Bambi free, we must admit. The only reason in discussing and pointing beyond dualistic experience is to bring about an experience free of the illusions presented within dualistic experience. Even 'enlightenment' is all about dualistic experience. Oh, you think I was somehow putting down the experience of duality?? No sir, its the only game in town and I'm addicted. |
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Post by laughter on Feb 14, 2015 11:28:50 GMT -5
The next level in the hierarchy after tribe is city-state, and that's what comprises a nation. It's an arms race from the fig leave to the hydrogen bomb. The story you mention is a pleasant one and even if it never happened it illustrates the point that a close knit community is likely to have less in the way of boundaries between the individuals and the groups that comprise it, but historically, isn't such a community more than likely to form a different boundary looking outward? Doesn't that community, relative to an individual or a family or a clan, potentially form an expanded horizon for us vs. them? In terms of survival, isn't it just a different form of identity than an individual facing the world alone? I was not thinking of next levels at all. I thought like, just now, just today, the child lives in a tribe and lives in a less self-centered environment. S/he doesn't have too much reason for thinking about or defending 'self', etc. I admit that I didn't think about 'self-identification' much, didn't see it as the problem of separate selves. Did you write this about the isolated child idea? I wrote it about self-identification in general ... please forgive my overthinking about hierarchies as that was just offered as a counterpoint to the idea that self-identification is potentially less severe in children from a tribal society. Obviously a child in a simpler culture has less to think about and a world view that's relatively uncluttered by the sophistication and complexity that presents itself to a kid in the States, but the point of the counterpoint was to highlight that any "measure" of self-identification is at the root of that hierarchy. Dialog about self-identification can easily turn toward two lines of contradictory reasoning, and that has to do with the nature of identity. The fact is that all of those boundaries in the heirarchy: self, family, clan, tribe, city, state are all creations of the mind. |
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... yer interested in that guy's TMT but not the question that reveals it for that, and that's the non-investigation Niz was talkin' about.
