Free will vs determinism

There seems to be a lot of philosophical discussion around free will (like does it exist) as opposed to everything being determined by previous conditions, including the apparent coincidence of you reading this.

Arguments for determinsim overlook the fact that our brain capacity is limited, so we don't remember the conditions that led us here. And it’s the main argument for the existence of free will. The illusion of free will is based on incomplete knowledge. We just don't remember why we do things. Practically everything we do is repetition of stuff we learned as kids or in school, It's how culture persists. We learn the actions that maintain some cultural aspect, but our limited brain capacity makes it superficial, so we cut corners and call it art. We come in in the middle of the movie and don’t know how the plot developed. We think of the cause of the cause as linear: A butterfly in Brazil flaps it's wings so a mosquito carrying a virus is deflected enough to become a meal for a bird that survives to migrate back to Canada and so forth. The movie "The Matrix" showed it as individual strands, but it couldn't be. It must be 3D because everything is connected to everything. Maybe like a hay bale with tangled strands or even a solid monolith, with no wiggle room anywhere and nothing evolves.

If we had access to something like the Hindu Akashic Record, which is a list of every event that ever happened (whew), then we could easily see how things develop,(where Jimmy Hoffa is buried, who groomed Jack Ruby, etc). It's probably good that we don't because if we did, we'd have to somehow be immune to the fatalism that goes with it. Yay stupidity!

The way we cope is by using pointers or envelopes that contain more envelopes and more detailed info. Then we don't have to open the whole can of worms/furnace, just check the label. and we don't have to constantly re-examine every aspect of trauma or even bliss (we got better & current things to do) so the labels fade. Sometimes frustratingly, sometimes mercifully.

There is an awareness that there are things we don’t know, and it bugs some people. The part that bugs is addiction to endorphins that are produced when we do something right, like eliminate a threat to the addiction. So we chug along making lists and collecting data expecting to eventually stumble onto a grand unified theory of everything. Or maybe our kids will or somebody someday. But honestly that’s not likely w/o a lot of genetic tinkering to improve recall. Before genetic science it was thought possible through meditation and study. Before that it was religious magic where someone could just plug into it with the right incantation. The Bhagavad Gita works too.

I suspect that if we ever access determinism it’ll be through the latest big thing: AI. We as a species, or even conscious beings, have been trying to find it since we learned to congratulate ourselves for our successes. It’ll be the gateway to eternal ecstasy (probably for sure) unless it reveals all the fatal events that people blithely try to ignore, like plastic pollution, entropy, climate change, desperate dictators believing they have to nuke their worries away. Don't worry though.

I’m a great believer in ignorance, because I aparently have no option. Having just come in the middle of this movie, I like to call it free will and I’m pretty sure this is how it works: Total access to determinism is yet to be discovered. All we really have are some models that indicate some kind of (at least partial) continuity of cause & effect (in the way of physical properties like waves and particles, atomic decay, gravity, etc) . Maybe AI will put something together some day, but for now there's no proof for either absolute free will or absolute determinism.

So (feel free to) take your pick :)

My favorite description of god is: He who is completely Unknowable, Inscrutable, Indefinable, All powerful, All knowing, immutable, irreducible, undetectable, on & on. so that God is essentially everything we Don't Know. The more we define him, the more we miss the boat.

It is what it is.

(existentialcomics.com)

a walk in the woods on the full moon.

The cats woke me up so I’d scare something away, I guess I did. We stood on the porch, they all stared smugly at something in the bush shadows. Big raccoon maybe. Skunks are pretty tame and they seem to get along up to a point. The moonlight was beautiful and my flashlight wasn’t charged. But I went for a walk anyway.

I could only see where to put my feet if moonlight hit the ground there. The trees around the neighborhood spring are 100+ yr old grand fir & Hemlock, around 100 ft tall. I used to hike at night when I was a kid and can see pretty well in the dark but the contrast with bright moonlight was stark, and it blinded me. The ground was thick fallen needles, hard to keep balance on even in the daytime. The creek below the spring is full of ferns and runs into the state forest. Down past the pump house, the trail is blocked by a fallen tree. I felt my way around it. I sensed a lot of joy out in the woods, it was like the elves and Island spirits that lure people into the wilderness. Next time I’ll dress for it better.

I sat on a log and decided that I shouldn’t trust all the joy. It might have been joy but maybe it was a Puma out hunting and thinking about how wonderful it would be to find a clueless meal stumbling around in the dark. Makes me purr just to think. It might have been owls or skunks, mice maybe, who were unconcerned with my excursion. Mountain lions don't come usually close to houses, but one showed up on a garage sentry cam farther up the ridge. I don't like them much because they attack from behind.

Most animals emit their feelings like a vocabulary, people do too but tend to ignore that part and use words instead. We get caught up in phrase tradition, syntax, that only has indirect meaning, till a speaker can say one thing while emitting something completely different. We get caught up in the description and confuse it with the real world. Most animals don't talk and avoid people because they think we're crazy (present company excepted of course).

I remember why I need to have a running camp wagon. Crooked cops be damned.

After awhile I got cold, walked home, and wrote this. Now I’m going back to bed.

Update, next night:

Got prepared w/ warmer clothes. Flashlight still doesn't work. Brought a can of mace for Goblins. I went the other direction down what used to be a Dope growers trail that goes from F rd to J rd, (about a mile one way). Nobody uses it anymore since Cannabis was legalized in Calif. Albion used to depend on dope sales for maybe 50 yrs. but times change. Now everyone's broke and the new store owners are from India who import employees and don't distinguish between hippies and Dalits.

I jog this route so I know there's few houses and only one dog. Also the first half goes by a goat pasture w/ no history of predation. The second half cuts through the woods. I made it to J rd but kept obsessing on the lion. As you might expect, I never saw him. In SE Asia loggers wear hats with eyes painted on the back to make Tigers think they're being watched because big cats are shy about being watched by their victims. The locals there say it works, so I figgured it wouldn't hurt to make some googly eyes that clip on the back of my hat. Yeah, works pretty good so far.

The bear I've previously met a couple of times, he's more considerate of people except when it comes to chickens, apple trees, bee hives, and trashcans. He avoids people and I didn't see him either. A few months ago I heard voices on the far side of a gully near a friends house, so I walked over to see who it was. It was the bear talking to himself. I said "Hi Bear" (from 50 yds away) and he quickly walked away probably in embarrassment from having been overheard, or maybe he felt guilty about being a delinquent.

Tonight there were no sounds except one car going up the ridge rd. In several places I felt very much at home, but in others I felt like I was trespassing on some critters territory. In a few places the trail cuts close to the canyon edge where cold sea wind blows up through the understory like a dark void.

I kept a steady pace and got home in 20 min.

Homeopathy

Homeopathy has a bad reputation for 2 practical reasons:
1. the volume of the actual effective ingredient in the final (diluted) solution can be so low that there is essentially no chance of any atom being present in the end product.
2. The effect of the active ingredient in that solution is claimed to be the opposite of whatever qualities it has in full strength doses, for example, Poison Ivy is used to cure itching.

Concerning the first: This is a video by a Nobel Prize recipient who provides clinical proof that water retains electromagnetic memory of molecules previously in contact with it, even diluted to the equivalent of one drop in the Atlantic ocean (youtube). The video never actually mentions homeopathy so it's perfectly safe to watch by people who don't believe.

The Second claim, that there's no proof that minute quantities of a substance can have the opposite pharmacological effect as large quantities is also unproven, but it's a safe argument because a negative can't be proven. Statical evidence from people who use Homeopathic remedies is interpreted as the effects of a Placebo. Scientific convention isn't infallible, illogical argument exist (not here of naturally), for example if some piece is flakey then the whole thing is too dangerous to drive and therefore don't believe anything you read on the internet. I hate to have to say so but that's bull.

The same qualification applies in reverse though: don't swallow the whole pile just because it has sprinkles on top.

I'm not claiming this above somehow validates this below. I claiming they both are wrongly judged because of misunderstanding the concept.

I messed with astrology for maybe 20 yrs because I was in a peer group that supported it. Much of it is second hand scrambled nonsense relayed by casual observers that quote self appointed authorities. There is no standard authority and nobody is looking for causes. My position: there ARE causes. Many of the effects are hearsay, some of them arent. The latest new age science & stuff (blogspot.com).

More Flash

OK here's another flash (if I can spit it out, covid did a number on my brain & I haven't been able to concentrate for zip):

There's a perceptual association between "spirit" and synesthesia. An Synesthete (someone with Synesthesia) can see colors on or around an object, letter, word, or number. I don't know if some credentialed authority/specialist with a narrower definition would agree, so I'm postulating that another form could be "reading" cards or auras, because as the covid introvert/recluse becomes more intimately acquainted with them, they have their own personality. There may also be a form that represents environmental factors with odd feelings: bad neighborhoods, creepy buildings, etc.

These forms of synesthesia are more technically approachable because they're fairly universal and don't require any hocus pocus to recognize now that they've been separately described by multiple studies in several countries. But a person might form synesthetic like association between other forms of perception, such as an event and a place, maybe like PTSD (but on a vanishingly subtile scale) So they have the impression that something may be about to happen before it does. But there's no studies linking these (as far as I know) and someone with a more a rigorous opinion might say this isn't synesthesia. OK cool, but maybe that definition is too narrow.

Take the Perception Census.

Fernando Pessoa

Not an Athiest manual: The Book of Discored Part 1 (youtube, 7 hrs 50 min), Ok it is. Part 2 (also youtube, 7 hrs 20 min) Prose like a dream journal, something to listen to while you're asleep.

What to do when you're dead

The Egyptians have one, the Tibetans have one, Catholics do too. There's several called the American Book of the dead; Everyone should have one, so here it is folks:

Bills Book O’ the Dead (Built more on the Tibetan model because their pantheon is less confusing) :

OK you wake up dead. Right off you find the stuff you depended on is gone. No circadian cycles, no physical stuff for memory prompts. Meaning is squishy, you cast around for a clue. Neurons and hormones continue to fire for a couple of days, but they become unreliable. You have a big background of memory that without stimulation, automatically shifts into fantasy mode, like when you dream.

You’re disoriented so you try to figure what’s next and how to deal with it. According to the Tibetan model, you’ve entered the Bardo. The Tibetan book says there’s several layers of this, but Bills model says they're all the same thing: You want to know how to get by so you imagine various forms of authority and interact with them. Bills model and the Tibetan model both come to the same conclusion on that: They’re all bullshit & you don’t owe them anything.

The Tibetan models first Bardo is usually the "lowest" it’s where gorillas chase you across a desert or hellish creatures claim you owe them your soul, stuff like that. It’s bullshit so just ignore them. The next bardo is better because the monsters are nicer and try to buy you, or something like that. Then it’s old friends & family telling you to come with them because there’s nothing here (or something like that). Next is Rock Stars or important heroes welcoming you (etc), Then Super beings like Jesus or Krishna or Buddha doing that same stuff, depending on your prior belief & experience. These higher ones are really attractive but the info they give you is unverifiable so it's the same thing: bullshit.

The Tibetan version says if you get past them all you attain the Great Liberation and are free from rebirth. Practically speaking, that seems like it'd be pretty hard to do because living things like entertainment, and we know it's all temporary and expect to wake up any minute to do it all again. Basically rebirth.

This could seem like a grim situation but it resolves itself naturally, it's just not that hard. For at least a Billion years living things have reached their expiration date and resolved into something else* (with the exception of some Cnidarians that physically regress themselves to a juvenile stage and start over (rebirth without the messy part). They don't have a brain, but they’re essentially physically immortal). *The “something else” I just referred to doesn't contain the neurons and memories of its previous learned stuff, it's more like the way living plants grow out of previously living (aka composted) plants. Even there though, soil fungus conserves proteins and amino acid chains from stuff it absorbs, so some information remains.

The "effects" that remain come from associations that a being makes to orient itself in some way (like recognizing your house in a dream), and establishing it as a reference (Home!) so it can independently pull the being to that point of orientation. I'm guessing that effect can have a greater or lesser attraction, because some memories are fleeting and some go back to childhood. Here's the point: That effect can be independent of the original stream of association (like a doppelgänger¹), and exist in association with things or places.

Traditional societies tend to keep their ghosts in places with a traumatic history because that's where peoples imagination go to give energy to those remnant effects. They could probably do it anywhere but it takes a meditative atmosphere that day to day living doesn't allow, and of course, some dude in a full Lotus to tell you what the spirits want.

Belated addendum:
Oh Boy! Dying Brains Silence Themselves in a Dark Wave of 'Spreading Depression' (livescience.com) Might be emotional preconception. Just change the description to something less fear biased.

1:
I knew a guy with a doppelgänger in Sausalito, He could announce himself with a sort of reverberation a minute or 2 before he showed up so we knew to get out more beer. He said he'd just envision his arrival and it happened by itself, it was unintentional. He could repress it if he wanted, but he liked the respect it brought (wow! Magic). Strangers seldom noticed. So it probably is with vagrant memories, we just don't notice, so they aren't reinforced and they evaporate. Sometimes that's good, sometimes not, usually it doesn't matter, there's more where those came from.

Follow the Money

Wondering who's behind those "Jesus Gets Us" TV ads? Don'r worry, it'll all be obvious some day. You might wake up in a bathtub full of ice with a missing kidney but at least you'll know you helped someone in need. :)

The Mental Block

There's an old hippy axiom that everything takes place inside your head. Sort of a narcissistic point of view that turns a totally subjective observation into an apparently objective one, because it's pretty hard to prove otherwise on a daily basis and most people are fine to go along with it so long as they survive when it's over.

Everyone except Jacob Dunningham from the University of Leeds and Vlatko Vedral from the University of Leeds and the National University of Singapore. Who proved that reality exists independent of our measurements: The Nonlocality of a Single Particle Demonstrated Without Objections (phys.org) 1994, That means the moon is still there when you're not looking. Most people take that so much for granted that they use the world for a kind of RAM short term memory and get confused when they go in another room and get distracted by the change so they forget why they're there.

Given that easy acceptance, I'd like to propose a modernized and updated revision to some traditional pantheons of angels and demons:

There's a phenomena called Mental Block, it's a version of negative placebo that you do to yourself. It's part of a persons libido (the fun stuff). When stuff isn't fun enough, or actually unpleasant, you just skip it. When you skip some definable category of stuff long enough, the routine begins to happen by itself and blocks whatever was down that train of thought. Presto! Auto brain wash = bliss, sometimes including the frustration of loosing track of it. Sometimes.

So this is a workaround in case you actually want to remember. There's some kind of brain mechanism that selects for influences that can be classified as me or not-me. The "me" stuff responds to my influence like when I move my arm or smile in a mirror. It's me! I remember who I am when I recognize some part of myself, it's a memory symbol similar to the assumption that the moon is there when you're not looking. An extension is writing symbols on a piece of paper that represent words, or (like Remote Viewers who scribble a line of some sort to represent some wordless impression) it's possible to ascribe traits to imaginary beings that will represent a group of traits, and give them names like Mars or Cupid. Those things were probably mnemonic devices at one time but you don't have to be a Harrapan priest to make them up. You just identify some group of traits that you want to work with and give it a name, same as a Buddhist Tulpa (just google it).

As far as I know there's no other process for doing this w/o lots of therapy (if you can afford and trust the shrink). Tulpas have a lot of lore, some of it is unnecessarily creepy (IMHO). Because generations of people have generalized groups of Tulpas into bands of Angels or Demons, good & evil, it's what people do. But one cultures demon is anothers angelic protector so just don't get freaky, the definitions are deceptive & they're all just made up anyway same as all powerful creators that ignore everyone because they're important.

But to get more specific in my own case, I got so frustrated by forgetting names and things that I know perfectly well (I'm famous for that) that I named the process. I knew that if I resented it, I'd just get stressed out and put up a bigger block because the association wasn't fun, so I made it fun. I named the process (like a stuffed toy), and he's a kid angel. When I have a memory block, I tell the kid. He wants to help people and I'm pretty sure he's helping me write this now because it's coming together all at once w/ fairly coherent descriptions after months of disorganization. I'm tempted to call him autonomous but then he woulkdn't be part of Me and might take on uncontrolable qualities. But that would also be false because he is me.

I'm guessing that there's also a version of dealing with stuff that you WANT to forget, like PTSD (duh obvis because it's a negative placebo too but instead of blocking a memory, it makes it hyper acute). You can name someone or some process that lets you remember w/o getting stressed, because it's not about the memory, it's about stress & cortisol. Identify it and name it, make it a friend so you can deal with it.

Full disclosure: I'm also taking mushroom memory supplements (WONDER DAY mushroom gummies from Amazon), made with Cordyceps, Lions Mane, Turkeytail, Chaga, & Reishi.