From: Patrick van den Berg (cirandar@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Jun 04 2003 - 23:14:56 BST
Hi,
Sorry for the long answer, hope you don't mind ;-)
Johnny wrote:
We can deliberate longer than
lightning, but in the final analysis, the action that we do is always
what
appears best, it is what we want to do most at that moment.
Do we, psychologically speaking? I can be reasonably depressed when I
think of people all around the world suffering from hunger, during my
eating a quick treat from the local pizza or french fries 'restaurant',
for example. At that moment, I am thinking 'damn, this is not good: I
can choose this fat food because I feel like it, but so many other
people can't. I must do something about it.' And what do I do? I just
focus on some conversation and forget about it. Why? Because if I really
want to do something at that moment about it I would have to join the
World Food Program instantly and put all my efforts in promoting this
institution and maybe go to certain places in Tanzania or whatever; in
effect, to change my life drastically only to do the best for those
hungry people I see...
The problem is, how I see it, there are a few obstacles in choosing the
best path available: in many circumstances, there is more than one
'good' option to choose from (ignoring, for the moment the 'ego-other'
of 'selfish-altruistic'-split), and even more so when we consider the
often seemingly insufficient knowledge we have about things. In real
life, we make choices based on incomplete knowledge. It's a SOM illusion
that we can choose the best path available, once we objectively know all
the concrete consequences of our doing this or that. Then we wouldn't
have a problem seeing the 'best' path, and we could choose this path
then consequently (but we don't have to. If in Heaven we would have have
free will, we could always choose evil (so heaven can't exist, by this
reasoning)). Problem is, in real life we never have a complete objective
knowledge of things. Free will then, is linked to uncertainty. If it
would logically follow that we have free will because we have to act on
uncertain or incomplete knowledge, I don't know, to be honest.
Greetings, Patrick.
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