Faust wrote:Well, at the risk of being seen as condescending, the issue presented here is a bogus one. The brain is the seat of consciousness. But our entire "selfness" is not rightly seen as consciousness alone. This is a religious notion.
While I agree with Jake that "will" operates in a state of tension, it is more than that, of course, for Jake has not said what will is, but only what it does, in part. "Will" is a term that describes several processes. We are physical entities - just what it seems we are.
"Will" describes the amalgam of processes that react to our environment.
Yes, this ambiguity is what I mean to integrate (and make less ambiguous) with value ontology; beings as valuing the world in terms of their basic requirements; having come into being as such.
Interpretation based on these values. Will to power as interpretation of whatever is encountered into values, positive, negative widely ranging purities and intensities of course.
But what is a being to itself?
What is truly a basic requirement? How does the mind interpret itself? Morality becomes a primordial substance when nature becomes "sapient".
Ns solution was to reduce man back to
taste - the animal instinct closest to aesthetics, which in turn is vey close to ethics.
This environment may be the ambient temperature, or people around us, who are constatntly acting. The human body can survive in only a small range of temperatures - our will to build a fire in the cold is merely an act toward survival. I say "toward" survival because over-dramatising the case leads quickly to error. We need not be in an immediately life-threatening scenario for will to operate. The risks are too high if we wait to the last minute. Hence the will to put on a sweater (jumper).
Will is, in effect, a reactive force - again, it is overdramatising the issue to conceive of will as too much a progenerative force. Consciousness provides information - much more valuable information than that which is available to plant life, for instance. And to be sure, civilisation masks this - we need to have an entirely primitive will to survive, but a complex society requires much more complex behavior - will is "extended" to reactions that seem to bear no relation to survival - and many are only indirectly related.
Freud thought all we wanted was to get laid. He discounted the other survival skills we need, because he never studied people whose very lives were in a precarious situation. He studied those who were left with almost vestigial survival needs.
My brain and my will - the mechanisms that my body has evolved to employ in order to survive, interact. "I control my brain" is nonsense. I am my brain and everything else that I am. This organism, "me" reacts to its environment. That environment influences me, it engenders certain reactions - many of which are accidental, trial-and-error. Think of muscle-memory. Patterns. Patterns help us to survive - intelligence is measured often only by our ability to recognise patterns. We cannot help but recognise patterns, because we would be dead if we didn't.
Cause and effect does not exist is any modular way - it doesn't begin within me or end there. No one is in complete control. The idea itself makes no sense, and is not reflective of reality. It is a vestigial religious notion. "Complete control", however employed, will always ultimately lead us back to God. Any notion of will that has attached to it the word "free" will lead us to God. I agree with Jake that we might as well start there, then.
That's too brief, but the full explanation of my position is book-length. I have tried to present the pith of my view, and have probably failed. But I do not then consider to have spoken randomly, nor will I edit. I have read the material.
Well said, as usual. Now all that rests (or rested, as far as Im concerned) is the discrete rendering of what which it is not not. That what it is.
A further question is: what do we want to do with our understanding, once it is gained? Chances are understandings will present themselves like maidens with short skirts, temptations by all the modes of belief that can afford some outward abundance. This is why we stand as value-neutral in the analysis; the only way to do that is to fix the given of valu
ing at the outset of the equation, or logical string.
It makes psychological analysis extremely easy. What it doesn't naturally builds a model of the cosmos; it would rather command the assumption that such a thing could not exist without having an alternative, an outside; timespace is relative, it is not reasonable to assume it walled into synthetic universal quantity of stuff. It is not reasonable to expect there to be an end. It must be viewed from a dimension that takes time and space not as merely Relativistic criteria, but also a definitive cognitive object of reason.
So instead of an objective limit, we have an objective form of limitation. It carries the name Death, but is much larger and includes time and space.