From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Jun 05 2003 - 00:03:25 BST
Patrick asked:
>Do we, psychologically speaking?
Yes, we always do what appears best at the moment of choosing. That means
you not thinking about Tanzania and just guiltily enjoying your pizza
appeared best to you. It had the highest quality. You might want to think
that springing to action to fight hunger has more quality, but if it did,
that's what you would have done. Quality is irresistable and is the reason
for everything.
Don't take this to any silly illogical conclusions and become passive,
remember the big inter-related picture.
Johnny
>From: Patrick van den Berg <cirandar@yahoo.com>
>Reply-To: moq_discuss@moq.org
>To: moq_discuss@moq.org
>Subject: MD Re: Free Will
>Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 15:14:56 -0700 (PDT)
>
>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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