Ontological resonance and the linking of will with inertia is lovely. Are you aware of Rudolf Steiner's epistemics? Also this puts me in mind of Zak Stein's metapsychology of transformation in the transcendent, ensoulment and developmental ontologic/genous spheres. As far as neuroscience goes Iain McGilchrist comes to mind. Thank you. I look forward to reading your other pieces.
The question is whether we have free will or the illusion of free will. I would argue that the freedom of our will is tightly constrained. We do have free will in some respects, but not in others. Anyway I was hoping to get in touch with you regarding this idea I had to solve the problem of social media addiction. What if there was a network that incentivized people to post as little as possible on the network? If the network encouraged and rewarded people for reading books, becoming educated, and taking steps to do good things in the real world for the planet, people might log off and try living in the real world with purpose beyond getting 900k likes for a cat picture on twitter.
Jan 15, 2022·edited Jan 15, 2022Liked by Alex Ebert
I still don’t see how your kitchen inertia example cannot be easily explained by determinism. You had inputs that created your inertia and then you had a tipping point input (the feedback from your partner) that altered your behavior. There was never necessarily any freed state for you to make a choice, as it could have just been a mechanical course correction. Albeit a complex course correction that included thoughts and observations (all also mechanical) about your actions but not necessarily any choice. Even in a creative state it could simply be a highly complex mechanistic expression of the uncountable number of inputs up to that very moment. Also, thinking about your comment on culpability… If “will cannot be exercised by choice unless it is freed” how can one be culpable if he/she/they aren’t exposed to an external stimuli strong enough to free their habituated inertia? A killer could simply have an innate inertia so strong that only an improbable input could “free their will”? Anyway, enjoyed reading the article :)
Theravada Buddhism might argue that truly free will is technically impossible as long as our perceptual filters are clouded by bias; and that bias subsequently taints our desires. If a conman convinces you to spot him your life savings, will your gift be made as a truly free being?
More to the point is whether our acts of will are beneficial or harmful, to both ourselves, our loved ones, our planet. Thus the emphasis in Buddhism on "Right" action, "Right" speech, "Right" thought. Supposedly, until we reach the awe-inspiring brilliance of total enlightenment, our will cannot by definition be totally free, but at least can do more good than harm.
It's taken me a few weeks to free up enough will to sit down and comment on the will conundrum. My excuse: old fashioned lazyness, but also it took time to digest, mull over, reread, contemplate some more. In the final analysis the piece is what the Brit's would call "Brilliant!" (But they seem baked in a pie where everything is either brilliant or bollocks...).
Weirdly, the thought that came to mind in my musings was how this might apply to the human collective in a fractal-like fashion. There are debates in cosmological circles about whether the universe itself is a fractal.... and in quantum social science circles about how each of us is a fractal, living out our self similar patterns over our lives. And in the human phenomenon variously called humanity, society, civilization, the "human race" we can see patterns in systems at different scales that have their own inertia and challenges for mustering collective will for change, with the status quo having the upper hand.... until it doesn't. Just as some of us struggle to keep the kitchen clean-ish, so collectively we struggle and often fail to overcome inertia and the proverbial violence inherent in the systems.
I saw a study recently about the global fractal we humans have conjured up, inventing rules and regulations, systems and structures out of thin air, using ideas and language to entangle us. The article was focused on trying to transform society from fossil fuels to renewable energy, pointing out that sometimes the inertia is at the individual level, sometimes at a more local level, but often times at the scale of what were once called "fat cats": folks who have vested interests in keeping the inertia locked down, thank you, since we're just making too much money with things just as they are.
Anyhow....
Somehow, this notion of freed will holds the seed of something important and (potentially) liberating. But it's like that quote about water: hydrogen two parts, oxygen one.... but there is a third thing that makes it water and we don't know what it is.
Ontological resonance and the linking of will with inertia is lovely. Are you aware of Rudolf Steiner's epistemics? Also this puts me in mind of Zak Stein's metapsychology of transformation in the transcendent, ensoulment and developmental ontologic/genous spheres. As far as neuroscience goes Iain McGilchrist comes to mind. Thank you. I look forward to reading your other pieces.
The question is whether we have free will or the illusion of free will. I would argue that the freedom of our will is tightly constrained. We do have free will in some respects, but not in others. Anyway I was hoping to get in touch with you regarding this idea I had to solve the problem of social media addiction. What if there was a network that incentivized people to post as little as possible on the network? If the network encouraged and rewarded people for reading books, becoming educated, and taking steps to do good things in the real world for the planet, people might log off and try living in the real world with purpose beyond getting 900k likes for a cat picture on twitter.
I still don’t see how your kitchen inertia example cannot be easily explained by determinism. You had inputs that created your inertia and then you had a tipping point input (the feedback from your partner) that altered your behavior. There was never necessarily any freed state for you to make a choice, as it could have just been a mechanical course correction. Albeit a complex course correction that included thoughts and observations (all also mechanical) about your actions but not necessarily any choice. Even in a creative state it could simply be a highly complex mechanistic expression of the uncountable number of inputs up to that very moment. Also, thinking about your comment on culpability… If “will cannot be exercised by choice unless it is freed” how can one be culpable if he/she/they aren’t exposed to an external stimuli strong enough to free their habituated inertia? A killer could simply have an innate inertia so strong that only an improbable input could “free their will”? Anyway, enjoyed reading the article :)
Theravada Buddhism might argue that truly free will is technically impossible as long as our perceptual filters are clouded by bias; and that bias subsequently taints our desires. If a conman convinces you to spot him your life savings, will your gift be made as a truly free being?
More to the point is whether our acts of will are beneficial or harmful, to both ourselves, our loved ones, our planet. Thus the emphasis in Buddhism on "Right" action, "Right" speech, "Right" thought. Supposedly, until we reach the awe-inspiring brilliance of total enlightenment, our will cannot by definition be totally free, but at least can do more good than harm.
It's taken me a few weeks to free up enough will to sit down and comment on the will conundrum. My excuse: old fashioned lazyness, but also it took time to digest, mull over, reread, contemplate some more. In the final analysis the piece is what the Brit's would call "Brilliant!" (But they seem baked in a pie where everything is either brilliant or bollocks...).
Weirdly, the thought that came to mind in my musings was how this might apply to the human collective in a fractal-like fashion. There are debates in cosmological circles about whether the universe itself is a fractal.... and in quantum social science circles about how each of us is a fractal, living out our self similar patterns over our lives. And in the human phenomenon variously called humanity, society, civilization, the "human race" we can see patterns in systems at different scales that have their own inertia and challenges for mustering collective will for change, with the status quo having the upper hand.... until it doesn't. Just as some of us struggle to keep the kitchen clean-ish, so collectively we struggle and often fail to overcome inertia and the proverbial violence inherent in the systems.
I saw a study recently about the global fractal we humans have conjured up, inventing rules and regulations, systems and structures out of thin air, using ideas and language to entangle us. The article was focused on trying to transform society from fossil fuels to renewable energy, pointing out that sometimes the inertia is at the individual level, sometimes at a more local level, but often times at the scale of what were once called "fat cats": folks who have vested interests in keeping the inertia locked down, thank you, since we're just making too much money with things just as they are.
Anyhow....
Somehow, this notion of freed will holds the seed of something important and (potentially) liberating. But it's like that quote about water: hydrogen two parts, oxygen one.... but there is a third thing that makes it water and we don't know what it is.