Could this comment then maybe affect the chain of your future thoughts, and result in you seeking a psychologist?
So far as I have been shown:
People ask not to be born.
People ask not to be born to the parents they are blessed or cursed with.
People ask not for the environment within which their formative formative years occur.
So far as I have been shown, no angel descents from the heavens to bestow upon everyone equally the magical gift of just knowing right from wrong. Indeed, the very idea of right and wrong are wholly dependent on the circumstance of one’s birth. Did their mother whisper them tales of evil men who would lay with another, or did a kindly neighbor teach them the value of kindness and friendship? Or were they beset by men addled by inherited hatred and were they taught to wield a gun before they even knew love? 'Tis true most people will know pain from pleasure, but even what you perceive as pain and what as pleasure depends upon how you formed before you set eyes on the world. As we share most other features that make us human, we can assume what hurts you will hurt another, what pleases you will please another - but there is ever an exception to every rule. It is but a human tendency to associate most pleasure with good, and most pain as evil. Useful one to be sure, if one values the well-being of one’s kin. But an universal truth it is not.
If you say some people turn to evil no matter how they were taught: how then could they choose to be different? If you say some people turn kind regardless of any suffering they had to endure: how then could they have chosen otherwise?
Furthermore, you yourself do not even know the nature of the next thought before it has already revealed itself. Think now of an animal.
Did you know what animal would manifest in your mind before it already found purchase within it?
If you say you may deliberate a thought before a choice is made, how did the choice to deliberate come about? You do not know if you will ponder a choice for an eternity before you have already done so. You may say “I’ll think about it” but you do not know if you have thought about it, before you have thought about it. You did not choose the tendency. And if you say, you chose to learn: how did you know you were going to choose to learn, before you were learning it?
No, I do not believe in free will. It is but an artifact of ideologies that cater to our more base desire of being utterly beyond reproach of other women and men. It pleases the zealot in our hearts who wants to think of itself as the paragon of virtue. For if there is no absolute good or evil, and no inherent ability to choose one from the other, how would it partake in the joy of judging others to be lesser than it? It could not. It would have to see itself as no better than the most heinous of criminals, but for the circumstances of their life. This is the bitterest of pills to swallow, and thus even those of us most conscious to these realities gag when faced with that which truly offends us. Which is why this is no mere lever you pull in your brain and have it be set once and for all. No, it takes lifelong vigilance, facing the zealot every time it reaches for the gavel and fixing it with your unrelenting attention, until it recedes back into the darkest corner of your heart. There is may merely be an advisor to your desire to do good in the world, but no more.
Datz@szmer.info 4 days ago
oreoreore@lemy.lol 4 days ago
You suggest I see a psychologist, yet psychology confirms my point: we are the products of our neurobiology and our environments.
If you believe there is a part of the human mind that exists outside of cause and effect, I’d love to see the clinical study that located it.
Datz@szmer.info 4 days ago
There is no point, you’re correct. The problem is, these kind of rants remind me of my friends who either say they want therapy, or needed therapy (though that was probably more severe? Saying they’d be friends with murderers and all that, which is technically fine in right circumstances, but, who the hell talks like that?), or me on lonely, depressing nights.
We don’t have free will. So what? Even if you’re aware of this, that could make you appreciate the complexities life even more, but the whole thing comes off as pessimistic.
oreoreore@lemy.lol 4 days ago
Since you mention lonely, depressing nights, I’ll drop the act.
I actively worked to understand the things I wrote because that finally let me forgive myself for not being perfect. I’m the perfectly natural consequence of everything that ever happened, so I had no reason to beat myself up anymore. But of course, the requirement for that realization was to allow others the same grace.
You are exactly right that it made me appreciate the complexity much more. It was much easier to think there was some objective “good” (that I always failed to be), and it definitely was easier to think people I didn’t like were “evil”, instead of coming to the very sad understanding that I could be them if not for luck. But having that understanding doesn’t lead me to depression, it leads me to write bizarre pompous manifestos on Lemmy for fun. And working in health and wellness industry, because I realized also that I’ll never know what could happen, before it has happened (as there’s a difference between determinism and fatalism).
Gathorall@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Now, then, you’re only upset about this because you want to be. Those people calling other aren’t bad for calling someone stupid or lazy if they don’t have free will.
If you assume free will doesn’t exist, evil or good doesn’t either. Murder or curing cancer, it’s like the sun shining, and inavoidable, neutral fact.
oreoreore@lemy.lol 4 days ago
You have grasped it.
Correct.
Correct.
No, you have grasped exactly what I said, at least on the level of the intellect. I realize of course you resist as it goes against what you merely WANT to be true. This I cannot do anything about, as you said. But you have understood perfectly. Well done!
Gathorall@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Well, this conversation is really pointless then. Kind of embarrassing that the universe compelled you to post this drivel, but it can’t be helped.
oreoreore@lemy.lol 4 days ago
Oh if only humanity did have an universally agreed upon meaning and point, so much strife could be avoided. Alas, such a thing does not exist in reality, but only in the minds of people. Those ever malleable and shifting minds.
I do as I do because because I am compelled, indeed! Because I wish to see less cruelty in the world. It is simplicity itself.