Tuesday, July 31, 2012

On Free Will

· Prelude caveat
: To the best of my knowledge (a rangy ken of bits)- I am of a faith that the following essay,in every punctuation and point of grammar, is of my sole creation. I placed certain words in an arranged fashion not aware that perhaps another force may have compelled my every choice, so that you, the reader, may have some modicum of understanding on my notions of "Free Will". The alphabet I used was not of my creation, however, nor the lingusitic rules of English grammar and syntax employed which formed these variois symbols into a tranferrable coherency to you- I hope it will be coherent anyway. So , in this sense, certain constraints are already inherent in a language i did not construct from scratch. So in this sense my articulated thoughts are not entirely original as i am bound by these constraints;else in total free abandon my sentences might appear like this: &$#(*^@!O(BNJ13689#@)*88~ ~ ~ ~ %^)**@T^IO)(>MMMM()(*&*#$^^^^.. I will admit that such glyphs like this do flit about in my mind from time to time like hai lai balls bouncing from one cranial wall to another.... but this is neither here nor there to you, the reader, as your hai lai balls may be as strange and unintelligible to me. basta! As just stated,I am not aware of any other force or agent outside my own origins that sets down these letters and words. Perhaps there are angels or demons lurking in my synapses that pull levers and tweak dendritic filligrees in all their networking overlaps, but there is no evidence to this as far as I know. So, I will avail myself to the full responsibility of the following words and do so now begin w/ a full and unfettered sense of Free Will begin my assail on this notion that we do not have it. This ended up as the long answer to my wife's fb post on the various frictions that can develop when certain free wills struggle to find the rules of engagement in convergence. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ I would love to give a short answer here, sweets, one that might humor you as i imagine that's what you are hoping for from other ether connections that exist more as hologrphs in our imaginations here on "spacebook" though they too are of flesh and bone somewhere. However, we share the same physical space and are in each other’s lives like no other connection in terms of intimacy and physical proximity, so I will take this opportunity to elaborate on this topic since issues of free will and the tussles it puts us through as a couple, is far more important than the ancient question as to whether it (free will) exists or not. So, because i move from my own "free will" (perceived anyway) with this open space in the comment box stretching below me, please allow some sat. morning ruminations as i have thought about "free will" since i was in 3'rd grade where sister marie hugh filled my liitle brain w/ concepts like “original sin,” “free will” and “ always was and always will be”... thus began my own odyssey of thought about this strange world of "consciousness" and "being" and awareness that by some fiat I came into .. it began this short journey where I see myself as a little cupped leaf of sentience floating on a great river whose free will I can say or do nothing about beyond the rim of my little cupped leaf; this float about becoming more and more of an adventure in unknowing wonder and cluelessness the older I get…. The reason we still debate this notion of "fee will," I think, is because ancient philosophers came up with this notion that in a world composed by a creator (first assumption) every blade of grass and wisp of wind had to be orchestrated by the creator right down to the last trivial thing- including all our thoughts and actions... that nothing can be or act independent according to its "being" w/out its connection to that which created it. This debate has therefore been strained through countless eras and religions in history and is always colored by the context of the times and the religious society it currently is discussed in. Descartes tried to squeeze it into Christian morality and so it got a whole new head of steam after Augustine wrestled his own lions in his own circus maximus of the 4’th century. It morphs and wends and moves through various labyrinths in the convolutions of this or that human brain that finds these questions worthwhile to ponder. Billions upon billions of human beings have not found this question to be one necessary to wrestle with and so after a few rounds of eternal return, I too have discarded the quest of the holy grail as to whether or not I have free will. All I “know” is that the last sentence composed appeared to come from my own original thought processes, and that’s all that matters. For me it is a moot exercise in thought that we have assumed is a necessary pursuit because great Christian philosophers such as St.Augustine made it an occupation of theirs and in lofty prose spent many thousands of words in pursuit of an answer that will always remain elusive. I do not buy the original premise that we should even ask ourselves if we have "free will" because the very question itself utilizes free will, and therefore the question for me is not even important,, though reading some of the translations of St. Augustine is a sublime experience, I think he spent a lot of mental activity in things that just fulfilled mental activity for its own sake. Just like the things our little minds spend so much time on in this context in the early 21’st century, may be seen as superfluous and silly a thousand years hence if people are still contemplating philosophically the nature of thought. To each and every one of us, the perception that we control our thoughts and actions far outweighs some greater philosophical wrestling point construed in the thinking chambers of men who deal in these esoteric frames of thought. If we have the perception that a thought or action is ours, then it is ours and it does not matter if some unseen or unknown hand manipulates the marionette's strings from above. And that’s all I have to say about that and will not pass much thought again on this topic . Thnx for the cause / effect catalyst , Sweets