The concept of Libertarian Free Will (and the contextualizations that must accompany it) is really just too big to tackle all at once, so I’m going to begin with a thread to serve as a basic primer about my view of Libertarian Free Will (LFW) – what I posit it to be, ontologically speaking, and how I describe it.
The basic difference between compatibilist free will and libertarian free will is that compatibilist intents are ultimately manufactured effects of unintentional brute processes. No matter how many layers of “pondering” “meta-pondering” one adds, or how many “modules” or “partitions” are added to the mix, it all still ultimately boils down to intentions being sufficiently explained as effects of brute (unintentional) forces. That is the root of all will in the compatibilist view; ultimately, humans do as they will, but do not will as they will, regardless of how many pre-action “intentions” they put in the chain.
This fits into an ultimately reductionist view of existence; even emergent properties are generated bottom-up and produce no effects “on their own”, so to speak. In the reductionist view, mind may be an emergent property, but if you damage the brain, the mind becomes dysfunctional. Calling something an “emergent property” – such as free will – doesn’t change the fact that eating a pepperoni pizza on wednesday might, through a biological butterfly effect, cause you to make a different decision the next day than you would have had you not eaten that pizza.
IMO, compatibilist “free will” exists, and it is the kind of “free will” most living creatures utilize. While LFW is available everywhere, IMO most living creatures do not, or cannot, utilize it. They can do as they will, but cannot will as they will. This is a very important distinction.
In Libertarianism, however, free will is not an effect itself; it is a causeless cause. It is taken to be a fundamental “first thing”. This position is an a priori ontological premise. Thus, the primary difference between CFW and LFW is simply whether or not one’s free will is itself caused by something else.
My particular view of LFW is that in individuals, it is an aspect of God’s Will, or Logos, the Word, Shabd, the Demiurge. It is the intent of god, so to speak, whereas everything else is the body of god. The knowable universe is comprised of and powered by two things: psychoplasm & Logos. Everything “in particular” is a reflection, characterization, individualization, or aspect of these two fundamental pillars of existence – Self (Logos) and Other (Psychoplasm). Perhaps at an unknowable level of existence they exist as one thing (monism), but that is by nature unknowable and cannot be meaningfully experienced.
Just like our body obeys our intent, the body of god obeys god’s intent. In fact, our body/mind (careful with the word mind, it can have many connotations) is an actual reflection of the composition and nature of the relationship of the divine body/mind relationship. This fundamental dichotomy is both necessary for individuated experience and is universally mirrored in all things. Individuated experience requires A/not-A, self/other, mind/body. Looking at the body, one need not know anything at all about how it functions to make it work; all they really need do is intend. With no knowledge about how to transform sugars into chemical energy, or how to make neurons fire, or how to make musles work or even any knowledge whatsoever about biology, all one requires to make their body function is intent. One intends, and the body responds.
An observation worth making here: if one existed at the size of, say, an atom, a human body would be a universe. The amount of stuff that goes on just to simply wave your hand is staggering. With no more command and control knowledge than a basic intention, a miniature universe of organized activity springs into action, dedicated to manifesting that intention, and all of that activity occurs lightning-fast. When one takes into account the planck-distance transitions that occur, the quantum leaps at the subatomic level, that an intention can drive such organized activity without the operator having any understanding of the process is about as miraculous a thing as one can imagine. Intentional movement itself is about as “magic” as anything gets.
IMO, this is what occurs when the Logos activates the psychoplasm. LFW is another name for the driving, ordering, creative fundamental force; it is ultimately what orders the physical world into the patterns we see. It is primordial and uncaused; it is that which causes everything that can be experienced to take shape.into a format that can be experienced in the first place. Just as human intent moves trillions of subatomic phase transitions and quantum leaps in accordance with a purpose, so too does Logos move the body of God.
William J Murray,
It is obvious to everyone William, that your logic is faulty.
Please take another look at what you have written.
It is illogical.
Right.
There is no paradox. Material forces transition you to a state of having free will. You didn’t choose to have it. At that point, with access to free will, you can either choose to employ it, or choose not to. If you choose not to, you state returns to the function process. It may or may not ever accomplish the phase transition again.
William J Murray,
Are we talking about the same type of “free will” that a theist possesses?
William J Murray,
Let’s try an anology.
I go to my boat, pull out a map and plot a course to San Diego.
I tell my friends I’ll be gone a few days for my trip to San Diego.
They tell me, “But you’re in San Diego right now”.
I tell them, “I know, but I’ve decided to go anyways.”
Getting free will is not a choice. Continuing to have it is.You can always choose not to have it and return to the non-LFW state. You may or may not ever have the opportunity again, because once you return to the non-LFW state, material processes take you wherever they take you.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a theist or not, your material events can take you to the point of realization, you then have a choice to make: to keep operating from LFW, or to abandon LFW to once again be the functional product of material processes.
If happenstance trade winds happen to blow your boat into San Diego Bay, you didn’t choose to go there. Once you find yourself there, you can choose to stay, or you can go back out into the ocean and let the winds take you wherever they might, perhaps never to see San Diego Bay again.
From time to time, I ask if anyone has ever seen anyone reject the scientific understanding of the theory of evolution, rather than some distorted caricature. So far, nobody ever has. Now, I don’t know if this consistent pattern is due to unwillingness to address the actual theory (and the evidence on which it’s based), or an inability to understand the theory, since it fails to fit within the conceptual framework within which the rejecter is imprisoned.
But whichever it is, I would never have described it as “free will”. Childhood indoctrination, yes, that fits. Emotional insecurity might also be a good fit. But “free will” comes quite close to being the exact opposite of what might cause this pattern. Maybe the minds with the least actual freedom to decide SEEM to be most free to themselves, much like those who know the most SEEM to themselves to be the most ignorant.
This site implores us “think it possible you might be mistaken.” This request seems basically impossible to those with the most “free will”. Very curious. From this thread, I tentatively conclude that “free will” MEANS never having to admit you can’t learn.
It’s consistent with the finding that those who are least competent are also the least able to judge their competence.
I agree that whatever your philosophical position is on free will, a decision to believe something cannot be free if it is not informed.
What material states initially transition an individual to a state of having free will?
I think this is close but not quite there. WJM’s notion of free will seems tightly bound to the ability to believe DESPITE any amount of evidence to the contrary. And it sounds like LFW is a rationalization for the personal inability to base beliefs in facts, when preferences are so much more congenial.
His beliefs ARE informed, they simply aren’t formed by evidence. I read about an experiment where people who’d never smoked and people who had quit for at least a decade underwent brain scans while they watched a video of someone lighting up a cigarette and taking a puff.
Now, the ex-smokers quit for good solid health reasons, and they had MUCH more knowledge in general than the never-smokers about these reasons. But the never-smoker’s brains stayed quiet during the video, and the ex-smokers’ brains lit up like Christmas trees! The neurons had not forgotten!
I think Elizabeth, given the OP here, would consider that these neural trained pathways constitute “informed” in some low-level sense. WJM seems quite well aware that the evidence for what he rejects is enormouse beyond comprehension. On what basis can it ALL be simply tuned out and rejected? Ah, he’s found one – LFW. Works great. And so, again, LFW means never having to admit you can’t learn.
I have no idea. Anyone can have just such an epiphanic moment and nobody could have ever seen it coming; others appear to be on a path towards such a transition from various different cultural perspectives, as they work towards or through various ontological and epistemological constructs or more deeply travel the one they are equipped with. Who knows what sort of butterfly effect might ultimately trigger such a realization?
Woah. William J. Murray is Deepak Chopra! I think I just had an epiphanic moment.
William J. Murray,
It would be interesting to know what the limits are to the relationship between LFW and reality. For example, if someone wishes to be Superman, and actually manages to believe that he’s Superman, then he’s presumably exercising free will by your definition. Does that individual then actually become Superman in the physical world, or would he end up practising self-deception? IOW, are there physical restraints on LFW?
I’m trying to follow this discussion, but I simply find WJM’s concept to be completely incoherent. Congrats to the rest of you for trying to make sense of it, but there’s nothing there to make sense of.
No. There you go again blithely insisting that any of this makes logical sense. It is not logically possible to choose what to believe and not choose what to believe at the same time. Trying to make it sound as if these are consecutive states instead of simultaneous states (for your scenario to work, state *non-LFW* would need to be accomplished while the person is in state *LFW*) is obfuscation, and is not making the logical error go away.
madbat089,
I finally understand what William J Murray is saying now and why none of us can get anywhere explaining it to him.
Replace the term “LFW” or “free will” with the appropriate version of the term “theist” or “theism”, and now it makes perfect sense.
People have an epiphany and either act on it by accepting the lord and being re-born or continue with their lives as non-theists, or atheists.
That’s why it is OK for him to “choose to believe” which is of course, a definition of the term “faith”, and shows his position has nothing to do with logic at all.
dr who makes an on point comment and asks an on-point question:
I think that the only true constraints are logical ones, because IMO the order imposed on the psychoplasm by the logos/LFW is the order rooted in the fundamental characteristics of the logos/LFW itself. I think most of the practical constraints of the relationship between one’s LFW and the form of the psychoplasm has more to do with the identity/nature of the individual applying it – the habits and deep patterns of their physical programming.
BTW, I realize this view isn’t anything new or novel – there are many philosophical/spiritual groups under various names that practice so-called willful manifestation or creation techniques. They’re easy enough to google and read up on.
But, to get back to dr who’s comment, it is my contention that the LFW/psychoplasm model as described can be useful whether or not it is true. IF it is true (in the sense that it is a good working model of who experiential reality operates), then it would be up to the individual to discover, explore and perhaps stretch the limitations of what they can create physically in the psychoplasm via LFW techniques.
I would argue, however, that even if LFW doesn’t “actually” move matter extant to the body of the individual, it still moves the matter of the body & brain of the individual around. IOW, what we believe affects our body, thoughts, moods, and decisions. A simple example: if you believe X is impossible to achieve, you will most likely not attempt to accomplish X. In fact, believing that X is impossible can drain one of all motivation to even try to to accomplish it; it can affect one’s mood and overall sense of satisfaction. If you believe you’re ugly, it affects every aspect of your life. What one believes matters a great deal in how one’s life plays out.
For those who are going to insert commentary about “believing you can fly and so we jump off a cliff”, I’m not talking about that kind of belief at this point. I’m talking about beliefs that are more psychological than anything else; IOW, LFW is initially a practical tool for overcoming certain psychological issues that might be negatively impacting one’s potential for having a more successful/enjoyable life (however they define it) – even if LFW doesn’t actually move extant molecules around.
One example from my life. About 12-13 years ago my wife and I had no money saved, were making a combined income of maybe
do you expect anyone to give us a loan for a house, much less be able to make that kind of a payment???”, while I used LFW to intend, “we’re going to find the house we want, we’re going to buy it, and I’m not going to be the guy that doesn’t take the next step out of disbelief.” At the very least, I was committed to not being the guy that prevents what I want from happening just because I don’t believe it possible. As long as “the next step” wasn’t “stepping in front of an oncoming truck”, I would go wherever the “buy a house” storyline led me.
I refused to let my belief-habit get in the way of the physical process of looking for a house. My material-habit thoughts were, “this is never going to happen” (even in the face of several such kinds of things having already happened by this point), but I wasn’t going to physically stop the process. If my wife wanted to go look at houses, we would go, and I would be supportive and do whatever the next step might be in trying to buy a house, no matter how impossible such an end-result seemed to me to be.
To contextualize this, my wife didn’t just have faith that we would find a house, but a particular kind of house – the kind of house there was just no mother-friggin way we were going to be able to get a loan for or afford unless we won the lottery. Here’s an idea of what we found on average: a single-wide, mobile home on a smallish city lot in small town 10 miles away for
32,900. Outrageous. Unbelievable.
The point is: had I not been using my LFW model, there would have been no way I ever would have followed those steps all the way through to the point we were signing papers on the mortgage, because looking at it from point A, there was no rational, possible course I could see to get to point Z. There was no point in even trying.
I have @20 years of stories like that, and that’s not even close to being the most unbelievable one. Again, it’s not that my personal stories prove anything, but it’s an example of how the ability to choose what you’re going to believe about a situation can be of practical value and change the course of your life.
Another example: I bought a
60 and consider it a happy, accidental investment that would be returned to me – somehow – tenfold.
If that was where the story ended, that would be enough; I was able to prevent a bad mood and a pissed of frame of mind going into work and go into work happy and in a good frame of mind. But, that’s not where the story ends.
After I had been at work that day for a couple of hours, I went to the back to get some coffee and the printer asked me how I was going to spend my rebate. I asked him what he was talking about, and he told me about some tax rebate they had signed into law. I checked into it and, sure enough, my wife and I were going to get a rebate check for ….. (wait for it) ……
600 rebate or not, or just coordinated it, or it was just a coincidence, isn’t the point. The point is that I was able to use LFW technique to overcome/circumvent psychological habit to, at the very least, enjoy my life more at the moment (going forward) where I psychologically interpret the meaning of an event as something other than what any available evidence would normally indicate to my matter-programmed view.
My apologies for the long-windedness of the post.
So, even as a purely psychological tool, the LFW model can be useful in a practical, every-day way, to choose different interpretations of events that serve to make life more enjoyable, and which do not prevent you from attempting accomplish goals that might otherwise seem highly improbable. There is direct physical benefit to be gained from a more upbeat, happy, positive perspective, and the potential for more diverse opportunity in how events unfold based upon the actions stemming from one’s beliefs.
However, I think there is more at work than just psychology – I think will of any sort (compatibilist or LFW) actually directs the experiential manifestations of the psychoplasm, which is why materialists experience nothing that contradicts their view, and others experience all sorts of phenomena that would contradict standard materialist views.
Each group is experiencing their own particular psychoplasmic variation as a subset of a larger, shared experiential manifestation.
RB: “What material states initially transition an individual to a state of having free will?”
WJM: “I have no idea.”
Thought not. But you do assert that certain unknown, wholly determined physical states are required for that transition. Which is to say the onset of free will is contingent upon the occurrence of wholly determined physical states. The possibility of free will arising in one individual versus another, or at time B versus time A, is determined, not chosen.
Keeping in mind that every fact about an individual prior to that moment was wholly determined by material events, devoid of choices, do you have a sense of what causes, factors, or reasons result in some people choosing to persist with free will, and others to revert to a course of material causation? It seems to me that if, in reply, you cite facts about the individual, you are citing wholly determined facts, and hence it follows that the outcome of the choice itself is determined. So if not facts about the individual, then what? And if facts about the individual are irrelevant to that choice, then why valorize that choice?
In those individuals in whom deterministic physical events yield a moment of proto-free will, and who choose to employ and sustain that libertarian free will, are there physical and material states that must continue to obtain for their free will to persist?
Of course, they must continue to live, and continuing to live is contingent upon countless physical facts. But I am asking: It follows from what you are asserting that the physical state the individual was in a week prior to their moment of proto free will was not sufficient to enable that moment. A week later wholly deterministic events happened to culminate in that moment. Therefore the emergence of proto free will is contingent upon the difference between those states occurring.
Were an individual who is capable of sustained free will to become physically different, for some wholly physically determined reason, such that they assumed the state of a week prior, would they cease to be capable of libertarian free will?
William J Murray,
William, I think this is the “big money” question here and before you answer, please read Reciprocating Bill’s complete comment.
I think you’ll find that according to you, “free will” is a result of deterministic events.
According to your explanation, some of us will never get the opportunity to “choose” “free will” through no fault of our own.
That kind of stacks the deck against some humans, but gives others a pass.
Why?
I don’t think that’s what I actually said. I don’t know that they are “wholly determined” in the sense of pure deterministic materialism. I’m saying that as a practical model of, in general terms, how one can move from non-LFW to LFW and what that mean, that is my functional description of the process. But I’m not going to undermine or quibble about it in relation to the points/questions you raise in your post.
Sure. The LFW perspective appears to be crazy from the non-LFW perspective. It operates in a prescriptive, faith-based manner, not in a descriptive, justified-by-the-evidence manner. It places an incredible amount of responsibility upon the individual along with an unsettling amount of personal power and authority.
Believing whatever you want is a crazy amount of personal power and authority, by non-LFW standards.
Also, it’s just hard – at least in the beginning. LFW is about conscious, deliberate, focused attention and intention; it’s really just a lot easier to go with habitual pattern and let the flow of the “real world” carry you along in the current. Being aware of every habit, pattern, impulse, reaction, thought, interpretation and reigning them in and reprogramming them is daunting work.
Because facts and evidence are considered by LFW doesn’t mean those facts cause the LFW decision. They may be necessary for the decision, but that doesn’t mean they are sufficient for the decision. There is a profound difference between necessary and sufficient cause. Facts and evidence are necessary for every act of will; the difference between non-LFW will and LFW will is that in non-LFW, facts and evidence are also sufficient cause for the decision.
In LFW, the premise is that while facts and evidence are necessary, they are not sufficient in and of themselves. All the facts and evidence can indicate that there’s no way I can ever buy that house, and if those facts and that evidence in itself were sufficient causes, I would most likely not even try (see my personal story above). But in LFW, I have the capacity to believe and decide in contradiction to such facts and evidence.
Maintaining free will is a bitch, because the entire habitual and programmed pattern of your material self is basically in contradiction to that kind of existence, even though it brought you to the transition point. It’s like any phase transition, say from crystal to liquid water – it’s an entirely different kind of existence. Imagine being ice and a portion of your self transitions to liquid water … it’s completely unlike anything you’ve experience before. It’s crazy. It goes against everything you know as ice.
There were many times that a few weeks had passed, and I “wake up” and go,”CRAP!” because I had become non-LFW for a few weeks. The difference is like being asleep and then waking up every time. There were times when I’d literally say, “What the f*** am I doing?” and then have to extricate myself out of a situation I’d gotten myself into in a non-LFW state.
Here’s the thing about LFW: it literally is deliberate, focused intent. Not using it is a choice to move fro LFW to non-LFW. You’ve heard the adage that not making a decision is itself a decision; that’s the case with LFW.
Yep. “Emergence” in the sense of revealing a fundamentally existent force, not in the sense that it is something brought into existence by material interactions.
Certainly there are physical states that make it, for all practical considerations, impossible to maintain a state of free will at least for a time – like sleep. Even in a dream state, however, it is possible to reconnect to free will and direct your dream via lucid dreaming.
That’s one of the most interesting things IMO about the human condition. I’ve examined the dreaming and lucid-dreaming states quite a bit, and I think they offer a lot of insight as to the non-LFW/LFW states and transitions and how memory and perception, and even sense of self can be modified by physical states and LFW techniques.
One of the LFW techniques I use is, as in lucid dreaming, to deliberately set up patterns and programs that keep me on my LFW toes, or bring me back to it quickly. Something as easy to do as putting a note on the computer monitor “LFW” can help tremendously when it comes to staying in the LFW zone.
I hope I understood your comments and questions correctly.
Funny, I kind of look at it the other way; humans that don’t ever hit that transition point are the ones who get a pass. Even better are the ones that enjoy their lives and never have to face that transition point even to decline it. They’re the ones, IMO, who are golden.
IMO, ignorance can often be blissful, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way whatsoever.
Which brings up something I didn’t address adequately in my previous explanation of states that might prevent someone from taking up the free-will reigns: maybe they’re satisfied with their life. Why take on such a drastic change of course and beliefs on faith, if life is going well already? If my life had been going well, I doubt I would have moved forward with LFW given the opportunity.
RB: But you do assert that certain unknown, wholly determined physical states are required for that transition.”
WJM: I don’t think that’s what I actually said. I don’t know that they are “wholly determined” in the sense of pure deterministic materialism.”
Let me rephrase, using the vocabulary you employ:
You do assert that unknown, unintentional, brute, mechanistic biological processes result in, or perhaps unveil, the moment of proto-free will that provides the opportunity for full libertarian free will to emerge. Which is to say the onset of free will is contingent upon the occurrence of wholly mechanistic biological processes that are themselves devoid of free will and intention. The possibility of free will having its onset in one individual versus another, or at time B versus time A, is determined thereby, not chosen.
RB: Do you have a sense of what causes, factors, or reasons result in some people choosing to persist with free will, and others to revert to a course of material causation?
WJM: Sure…
I’m sorry, but nothing in the five paragraphs that follow is even remotely responsive to my question. Ok, necessary and sufficient conditions, etc. etc.
What combination of necessary and sufficient causes, factors or conditions result in some people choosing, in that initial moment of proto free will, to persist with free will, and others to revert to a course determined by brute biological mechanisms?
RB: are there physical and material states that must continue to obtain for their free will to persist?
WJM: Maintaining free will is a bitch…
Again, I’m sorry, but nothing in your reply is remotely responsive to my question.
Are there non-intentional, mechanistic biological states, of the sort that may be absent one Thursday but present the next, that must continue to obtain for free will to persist?
Reciprocating Bill:
If you’re asking me about specific biological states, I have no idea.
William,
if the mind boggles, does the psychoplasm come out in boils?
Seriously, I haven’t got the foggiest what you are trying to convey to the wider public. What is your personal concept of “psychoplasm”? Goole yielded results connecting it to the band Ghoul, a reincarnation dude, Marvel-comix and 19th century vitalists.
Please describe what “psychoplasm” is – and don’t skimp on the adjectives.
WJM:
Are you saying that you believe there are non-intentional, mechanistic biological states, of the sort that may be absent one Thursday but present the next, that must persist for free will to persist, but you have no idea what they are?
Or are you saying that you have no idea whether or not any such state must obtain for free will to persist?
And a question you passed over:
What combination of necessary and sufficient causes, factors or conditions result in some people choosing, in that initial moment of proto free will, to persist with free will, and others to revert to a course determined by brute biological mechanisms?
The practical uses of this seems to employ the same arguments used by William James in his Leap of Faith, or perhaps in the Power of Positive Thinking.
Oddly enough, it was a strategy used by evilutionist Stephen Gould in fighting his cancer.
Christine,
I’d hardly call the group here “the wider public” but, according to Merriam-Webster, psychoplasm is:
You can google or bing “manifesting techniques” and find all sorts of particular versions of the same thing. A lot of this was brought to the wider public via popular books and movies like “The Secret” and “What the Bleep Do We Know”.
I saw that DVD on “What the Bleep Do We Know?” when it first came out and was circulating around the Los Angeles area a number of years ago.
It is not surprising that you have been taken in by it.
Mike,
I was doing this long before that movie came out. My book describing how manifestation works – Unconditional Freedom – was originally copyrighted in 1993. What The Bleep Do We Know came out in 2004. I had what I call my first big success in manifestation as early as 1992 as the first publishing company I sent my first book to – Anarchic Harmony – offered me a contract and sent me an advance.
As I said before, I’ve been doing this for 20 years.
And as I said, it is not surprising that you were taken in by it.
Did you also get taken in by “Pyramid Power?”
William J Murray,
I looked for your books and came across some background on you on Wikipedia.
Life throws people some curves and I have to say that if had been thrown your curves, I think I would have reacted in about the same way.
What I’m trying to say and maybe badly, is that you are far more rational than I have given you credit for.
No need to apologise, of course. The post helps us understand how you are thinking. A lot of what you’re describing sounds more like “positive thinking” (as Petrushka has already mentioned) than the conventional understanding of LFW.
Going back to my Superman point, and relating it to I.D. Do you think that utilizing “LFW” (meaning your description) because one wishes for there to be intelligent design (intent) bringing about what we observe in this biosphere can actually make that be the case? Can the designer be willed into existence?
I ask this partly because it has always struck me that there’s a strong element of wishful thinking in the I.D. movement. Although most of its proponents don’t realise this, it seems possible that you might be an exception.
I also ask because you seem to think (albeit tentatively) that desire may be able to shape reality (beyond the normally understood sense of cause and effect – as in me wanting a cup of coffee could lead me to make one).
As with the Superman question, could mass belief in an intelligent designer actually lead us towards a reality in which there is one?
I think you might have got the wrong WJM. Elizabeth asked about this on another thread.
My wife loves this stuff! Under her side of the bed are a host of ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ books. Something (possibly being married to me!) led this fellow biochemistry graduate to seek something ‘other’. There seems nothing too preposterous for her to at least consider. And I have frends whose metaphysics helped them overcome, or at least cope with, mental illness. And this is where I demur. I can argue (my version of) rationality till I’m blue in the face, but I can’t offer anything ‘useful’ in it. Science is interesting, it is cool, and wilful misrepresentation of it frustrating, but ultimately, convincing someone is not going to give them what their religion (or its New Age surrogate) does.
The battle for “freethought” is amusing – the ‘naturalist’ defines it in terms of breaking out of the shackles of cultural programming, the ‘supernaturalist’ by one’s ability to overthrow the tyranny of empiricism (in order, in many cases, to preserve those shackles!).
I think that the psychological games that can be played can be dangerous – Jonestown, Waco, 9/11 are all manifestations of the extremes to which a belief in something ‘other’ can lead. Less dramatically, the intense anti-scientific effort continuing to be pushed by the “ID community” into schools, the media and popular thought provides a frustrating counter to efforts to educate in the scientific method (the same souls take their cancer medicine without a thought as to how it was arrived at … except for the ones that don’t, because “it is in the hands of God now”).
For my own part, such difficulties as I have encountered I have overcome by the realisation that I am in control. Not the psychoplasm, or angels, or the intercessionary whim of a being to whom prayer might elicit a “oh …. go on, then. I had other plans, but what the hey”. That control is limited by circumstance, but since I cannot for the life of me swallow any of the metaphysical notions on the groaning shelves of the “Mind, Body, Spirit” section (dwarfing “Popular Science” by some way), it does provide a practical way through, at least as empowering.
If the LFW model is correct, then LFW (intent, logos) is itself the intelligent designer of experiential reality. Psychoplasm doesn’t organize itself, it must be acted on via some kind of intent. Otherwise, it’s just quantum potential waiting for an observer to collapse waves.
I embrace the term “wishful thinking”. It’s just that I believe “wishful thinking” works in a very practical sense on several levels – psychologically, physiologically and as a reality manifesting device.
In order for psychoplasm to be anything in particular, there must be intelligent (in the sense of intentional) designers affecting it in the first place. This model requires a necessary being (intent) that organizes, just as it requires a necessary substrate that can be organized.
Alan Miller,
That’s interesting. That pretty much describes my relationship with my wife when we first met, except my wife wasn’t into any new-thought stuff at the time, she just had (and continues to have) a deep faith in the creative power of god and prayer (even though I wouldn’t have characterized her as a Christian, per se).
Without her, I have no doubt I would now either be dead or locked up somewhere. She definitely saved my life and gave me reason to carry on through some very dire times.
Somehow I don’t find this compatible with the concept of “free will.” Perhaps it’s just semantics, but my concept of being free involves being able to believe against desire and even against self interest when that’s the way the evidence.
Examples abound in the history of science. There’s even an aphorism that says science progresses as the old guard dies off. Meaning that people in general are not able to free themselves from obsolete ideas. The major transitions from classical physics to quantum mechanics and relativity are the usual examples. I would add evolution.
My own take is that people who believe absurdities can commit atrocities. One can argue about what is an absurdity in any given context, but in general, a “free” person gravitates toward propositions that have long term utility.
This particular winding road leads me back to the topic I have been requesting, which his whether the ID paradigm has utility in science. Not whether it makes us happy or whether it leads us to hug the spouse and kids, but whether it has entailments that suggest useful lines of research.
Back to semantics. At the end of the day, LFW is just a way of saying that a variation generator that is free of direct causation (for which I read stochastic) can produce more and possibly better possibilities.
Reality is unaffected. You still make the leap or you fail, but a person who does not automatically do what he has always done or what everyone else does may find a new and unexpected solution. Or he may fall short and into the crevasse.
Petrushka:
Interesting.
There is an element of confirmation bias, I think (and one has to incorporate that, or say it doesn’t matter, for the technique to be employed with any enthusiasm). I’m reminded of an old RI teacher who said that God always answers prayers. Sometimes he says, “yes”, sometimes “no”, and sometimes “wait” – an equivalent strategy to a Magic 8 Ball!
Hence the need for methods and institution for minimizing confirmation bias.
In the case of the magic self-help books, one needs to notice that success stories get remembered, and failures get forgotten. Same for prophecies.
Same for biological evolution.
Petrushka:
And as Nicholas Humphrey famously observed, “In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.”
A bias you can sink your teeth into.
dr who,
Thanks for the heads-up.
I’ll check into it further.
Rational? I wouldn’t go that far. Understandable? Certainly. Obsessive crusades based on reactions to childhood experiences are not necessarily unreasonable, but that doesn’t make them rational, either.
The best means we have to judge the validity and truth of WJMs statements is by parsing their logic, comparing them to the external world, and testing their implications. Either we can do that or we can’t. Either they pass the tests or they don’t. Whatever our sympathies for his personal history may be, they don’t effect whether his claims are coherent.
llanitedave,
WJM is not this WJM. He’s this WJM. He’s already stated this in a previous post.
Unless I misunderstood.
The narrative WJM has given about the process of using what he presumes to be LFW is, as others have already noted, basically a description of the psychological technique of positive thinking. There is nothing magical or uncaused or incompatible with non-LFW in your desire for certain outcomes motivating you to work towards those outcomes and thus make them more likely to actually occur. I use this technique myself quite a bit for example to successfully deal with stressful situations like a highly competitive job interview.
The only part in WJM’s narrative that, unnecessarily to the functioning of the process itself IMO, introduces a component that’s usually thought of as LFW is this:
So, the question here is: what is the sufficient cause in the *LFW-zone* for the decision? It can’t be desire to achieve a certain outcome, because that is nothing but the result of the combination and competition of all the accumulated facts (i.e. the innate and learned desires determined by our history). The person making a decision based on that desire is not free to make the decision against that desire. So what is it?
Yeah, I read that previous response after I’d posted my own. However, what I wrote pretty much applies to anyone, even me.