New Discovery

Perhaps this forum is not about who is right or wrong, and even though I have not red the author’s invention, it appears more of a test mentioned in passing ; -in the present, - of long term contribution to others trumping short term self indulgence ; which has more to do with free will, then any other choice that could determine the truth.

You’re right, this forum is not about right or wrong, but if this author is right, the implications are huge. The idea that we can sacrifice immediate self indulgence for future gain does not grant us free will. I spoke about this but I guess you weren’t here. The author did not invent anything. He made astute observations after a lifetime of voracious reading of literature and philosophy. This finding lies behind the door of determinism. He said that if he didn’t make this discovery, someone else would because this knowledge is part of the real world. But why should we wait another thousand years when we have the knowledge now that can bring peace on earth? But this can only happen if people stop jumping to premature conclusions that he’s wrong without even giving him a chance. If you’re interested in the book, you can get it on Amazon as an ebook. I’m working to get the print version out but I don’t believe it’s available yet. I’ll check tomorrow to see where it is in the queue. The book is called, Decline and Fall of All Evil by Seymour Lessans. If you want to read the first three chapters before deciding whether you want to buy the book, here is the link again.

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Yeah but this is the kind of thing you gotta present to the whole world all of a sudden and at once, for it to have any impact. All educational systems the world over would have to integrate this into their curriculum to prevent the next generation from becoming the liars, or imbeciles, or both, that the former generation was. And with this revolution would come drastic changes in the superstructures of government… namely at an economic, sociological level. The first thing you’d notice would be a magnificent rejection of the thesis by those who profit from the criminal justice system and the prison industries. Next you’d be forced to contend with conservatives who reject the interference of government in social engineering. The upper classes won’t like the idea of their taxes being used to raise the quality of life and education for what would otherwise be the criminal class… which would then be followed by the capitalists’ protest against the same. Blue collar crime would decrease in proportion to the improvement of the quality of life for the proletariat/lumpen-proletariat… and this, obviously, would follow the intervention of government into the private sector. Lower and middle classes would be more wealthy, and therefore less prone to commit crime.

Yeah the whole thing would shake the present paradigm at it’s very core. We’re talkin’ maaaajor change, homegirl.

Oh and religious, evangelical rackets would be out of business, too. The very bloodline of their deceptive enterprise is the thesis of freewill. They’d be totally shut down.

You have no conception of how amazing this paradigm shift is, and as the author stated many times, this shift has nothing to do with him. He just happened to see the laws that govern our behavior in a more crystallized fashion. What will compel people to become citizens of this new world is that the benefits will outweigh anything that they have in their present life. It will be a maaaajor change, and I’m glad someone here appreciates how big this really is. The biggest thing of all is that it can be achieved. This is not pie in the sky wishful thinking. No one can be hurt when transitioning from the old world of free will (blame and punishment) to the new world of no free will (no blame and punishment) because no one will lose their wealth nor will people whose profession is becoming extinct, such as floor walkers and locksmiths or anything that is redolent of blame, lose one penny of their accustomed income. They will be guaranteed their standard of living never to go down.

i once told the doc over in the ethics thread that i had lost faith in this, but you’ve given me new courage, peacegirl, and i look toward a future brought to light by the beacon of hope that you shine so brightly.

can i buy you a coke?

Yes it’s exciting to be at an age where old world hostilities may be a thing of a past long forgotten, and participate in the new world, where liberty has sprung from the dark ages of oppression.

Can’t wait to get the book. I can really relate to the possibilities of the coming transition, which if the author is right , is happening as we are talking.

Yes, we are evolving as a human race every minute of every day. Look how far we’ve come, but this formal transition will catapult us into the Golden Age of man — an age where there is no war, crime, or poverty — more quickly than anything heretofore. I’m glad you’re interested in the book. If you find it compelling, I hope you will join me in the mission to get this knowledge thoroughly investigated and brought to light. I want to warn you that his chapter on Words, Not Reality (Chapter Four) has caused some people to react harshly since he claims that the eyes are not a sense organ and why this knowledge matters. Anything that challenges established science is going to be ridiculed at first. There’s no getting around it. I just hope you keep an open mind.

That does sound challenging , but am used to such , and because of the aforementioned , am willing to make allowances to benefit hope through faith.

excellent. now that the human species has finally stopped bullshitting around, we can focus our collective efforts on space colonization, exploration and expansion.

the headlines will read: the year two-thousand-something… when humans got their shit together and finally stopped behaving like monkeys.

I believe you’ll see the value of this knowledge once you grasp the fundamentals. It’s okay to have some doubt until all questions are answered to your satisfaction. What’s not okay is when people disregard someone’s work because he didn’t have the “right” credentials. The author urges people to read the book more than once because there’s a lot to digest. I also want to remind you that this is not a religious work. I hope that doesn’t discourage you.

Just remember we couldn’t help but go through the necessary stages of evil to reach this turning point in history!

yeah but 80,000 years? i’da done it in 40,000 if they put me in charge.

=D> :slight_smile:

Not at all, I consider organized religion somewhere between opium and ecstasy but not for the lucid mind but for the people.

However , fluctuations and overlaps can make that pronouncement probably self effacing.

But: You still got to “choose” to type those words, right? So, even though your own particular “I” is but one more thing that nature is wholly responsible for, it’s not completely intertwined in…what?

Somehow “in your head” the relationship that nature compels you to believe in regard to this relationship with nature is different from that which nature compels me to believe about it “in my head”.

In other words, me “choosing” [anything] is no less a necessary component of nature. There is no being external to it because nature is, well, “all there is”.

So, when you say “we have no control over what we think up and what we choose” you are still able to “choose” to say that in a way that…

Well, damned if I know what you mean by it.

And every attempt on my part to yank that out of you…

…results in just more obfuscation.

Okay, but you can’t tell me that I’m not making only the “choice” that the laws of matter [embodied in my brain] compel me to make. Your clarification then being no less compelled by nature itself.

John rapes Jane. Jane becomes pregnant. Jane aborts the unborn baby. What part of this existential sequence is not essentially compelled by nature? Hurt abounds here. Make it all go away in the author’s “progressive future”. Only this time actually demonstrate how it can be made to go away [in a world of conflicting goods and conflicting hurts] without all of the theoretical assumptions about how the “discovery” itself makes it all go away in the author’s head.

In other words, you can’t. Instead just another “general description” “assessment” in which words define and defend the meaning of other words that go around and around and around in circles. If only as nature complels it to.

The only idea that I can have [in a determined universe] would seem to be the idea that nature compels me to have. Thus my “agency” is but another component of nature. And that is no less applicable to you. In other words, our choices change only because our brain matter is compelled to change in order to remain in sync with all of the other mindless/mindful matter it comes into contact with. The mystery is still mind. Matter like no other matter before it.

That’s what the hard guys and gals in the scientific community are still struggling to come to grips with. But, unlike with you and I and the author, it’s not all just a “world of words” for them.

Yes, some believe the choice that they make is a manifestation of their free will. Others believe there is no free will and they “choose” only what they could never have not chosen. But either way once the choice itself is made, it can’t be unmade.

I can only presume that I must be compelled by nature to misunderstand what nature compels you to believe here.

Luck? How, in a wholly determined universe that is unfolding only as it ever can unfold – re the laws of matter – does “luck” ever come into play? Something might seem to be luck to you and I but there was never any possibility that it would not seem that way.

All I can note once again is how fortunate you are that nature has compelled you to think this way. Thus providing you with a comforting peek into a future that only has to exist inside the head of you and the author to be true. In the interim however nature seems more content to let things unfold in an entirely more problematic manner.

Or: Nature compels you to believe that you are at a disadvantage because it compels me not to meet you halfway. It compels you to be stuck trying to explain to me something that it compels me not to do in regard to those chapters. In other words, it has yet to compel me to read them.

You will no doubt concur with this. And yet somehow I am still the one who is responsible for the impasse between us.

In other words [somehow]:

I am being compelled by nature to make the “choice” not to read the chapters by, in turn, being compelled by nature to shift the blame to nature.

Not to get too technical here, but…huh?!

Which I am now compelled by nature to bring back around to this:

Or it is probably eaisier for you because nature has necessarily paved the way for it to be only as it ever could have been for you. And only as it ever could have been for me.

Then what?

On the other hand:

Words are only another manifestation of nature embodied in the brains of matter able to become conscious of itself as matter able to define things. But: This doesn’t change the fact that the definitions [like our perceptions of reality itself] are only as they every could have been.

No less so than the manner in which you attempt to make “choice” here both of nature and not of nature. Whereas I don’t pretend that my own frame of mind is grasped as either wholly determined or autonomous.

I make certain assumptions [always subject to change] and…leap.

And, [b]again[/b]…

You simply duck the question. Another “general description” assessment that in no way brings us any closer to closing the gap between the author’s “world of words” future and the world we actually live in here and now. A world in which we are making choices over and over an over again.

Instead…

Ever and always you are stuck here. The only possible escape being that nature compels you to be stuck here.

You provide me with very, very little in the way of encouraging me to read the book from cover to cover.

What truly substantive points has he raised that might allow me or others to at least imagine a way in which evidence might be accumulated, experiements conducted, predictions made and results replicated.

Just one then. That which you deem to be the best example from the book.

There’s really nothing I can add that hasn’t already been stated ad nauseum other than to say that I’m sorry you didn’t take the time to read anything I offered. You’re obviously not to blame because I know you can’t help yourself, but it’s futile for this conversation to continue as a result. If no one else participates, this thread will die a natural death and that’s okay too. I’m sorry iambiguous that we were not able to progress further. All I can say is that the laws of our nature that make us who we are do not always cooperate. :confused:

listen to your heart, peacegirl, before… you tell him… goodbye…

Yet again nature has compelled you to end an exchange with me. So, sure, yet again, nature might compel you to start it back up.

Here I can only assume that nature is compelling me to point out that bit by bit my arguments are chipping away at your arguments. And that can’t be good, right? You simply have too much invested psychologically in the comfort and consolation the author’s discovery has provided you. So, above all else, your defense mechanisms will kick in to sustain that.

Just as it has with all of the other objectivists I have encountered over the years – fierce folks adamantly convinced that in either the either/or world or the is/ought world, they and they alone have pinned human reality to the mat.

The irony here being that I can only assume the possibility that I am wrong regarding my own understanding of determinism…or in failing to understand the relationship you have between “no free will” and “choice”.

And that’s before acknowledging that in fact “I” may well embody some measure of autonomy here that is simply not understood by those who, unlike the author, actually do approach these relationships phenomenologically through actual experimentation with actual human brains in the act of actually choosing.

True.

But what peacegirl fails to provide [me] is the sort of empirical evidence that might encourage me to explore further the author’s discovery as it relates to this so-called “progressive” future. Is there anything at all that I can do [or an experiment that I can perform] in order fathom how the near future is both the embodiment of “no free will” and of “choice”?

What on earth – in terms of the behaviors we choose – does she mean by that? In other words, “for all practical purposes.”

After all, what are neuroscientists who explore this experientially doing but probing actual brains in the process of choosing. Are there chemical and neurological processes going on biologically in the brain such that it can finally be determined once and for all if any particular choice is only that which it ever could have been?

That’s why I always come back to dreams. In my own dream states, “I” am utterly convinced the interactions are “in reality”. My own dreams in particular because they almost always revolve not around the fantastic but around contexts that I am completely familiar with – childhood dreams, army dreams, war dreams, college dreams, political activist dreams, job dreams, family and friends dreams. They often involve people I once knew intimately. And “in the dreams” the events are unfolding not at all unlike they once did “in reality”. And they are astoundingly elaborate. I find myself reading things, hearing things, experiencing things in great detail.

How to explain that?

From my frame of mind however this discussion is for another thread. When morality is discussed in terms of particular political prejudices, I can only assume that value judgments are embodied in autonomy. Otherwise “right” and “wrong”, “progressive” and “regressive” behaviors are all embedded only in the psychological illusion of good and bad behavior.

If the brain is necessarily in sync with the laws of matter then anything it concludes about the is/ought world is merely another manifestation of the either/or world. The future will be only what in can be – only what it must be. You and I are just along for the inevitable ride. We are basically nature’s dominoes that “choose”.

But never choose in the sense that free will advocates are compelled to believe.

Or so it seems to me.

And she simply refuses to explore the points I raise about dasein and conflicting goods and political economy. In part because, once again, these things would pertain only to a world in which at least some measure of human autonomy exists.