☮ Social ☮ PD Social Tripping Thread: Euphoric Rambles for Swirling Souls

[Solipsis]

Sure, strictness is probably never wise - it suggest rigidity when you should always keep an open mind. I would, but I really need a little more than what I tend to pick up about subjects involving unseen forces and whether they are there or 'imagined'.

Chakra / body energies are a good example though: I don't dismiss it, especially considering the experiences I have had sober and tripping... but to me it is more a holistic approach to things that still don't have to take more than our nervous and secretory systems among others.

I'd like someone to make an argument about something beyond determinism though, which would make it supernatural I guess? Dialectics style, merit and plausibility always count most imo - and I think it can only be enriching to consider all possibilities.

Actually determinism can feel icky to me, I feel like I have to constantly make choices between disillusioning truths or sometimes wonderful, beliefs. Actually that is already pretty arrogant since it assumes that only determinism leads to truth. Reducing things is much worse even: often enough scientific explanations can be as mindblowing or even more - assuming everything has to be boring predictable mechanics seems like a mistake.
Emergent phenomena are an example of something not that easily reduced or determined even if you try... treating them like unreal or illusory seems wrong, holographic or something like that seems much better. Exceptional.

 

[perpetualdawn]

It's really hard to prove that there is an exception to determinism, I think at some point it becomes faith.

I guess there's two areas to look at for an exception to hard determinism: the idea of free will, and quantum level uncertainty.

Personally I believe we do have some thin amount of free-will (or maybe it's just free-won't, our conscious mind sitting on top of the pyramid rejecting options fed to us from sub-networks of our mind). It's hard for me to imagine why we would have a sense of some of our functions being automatic and others free-will-able (like heart beating vs. moving my arm to pat my head), if it were actually all just automatic.

As far as uncertainty and randomness from the quantum scale, I think there are arguments that it's still deterministic, but in a way that we don't understand, or on a scale that we can't observe. I don't really know enough about this area to speak with any conviction.

 

[Solipsis]

I haven't heard about quantum uncertainty being deterministic...

About free will, I think both the yes and no answer to it make it extreme and reduce it to something it is not necessarily. I think the way we are with the preferences and desires we develop, those steer a lot of decisions that may ultimately have some automatic / deterministic nature but are still very much us because they pertain to our identity that way. Furthermore I think the way it feels like we have free will counts for a lot and that if there is ultimately predictability to it that it doesn't change as much as you'd think. It sounds shocking, but it only really becomes that way when you overthink it to the point of driving yourself crazy. Other than that, it isn't likely to drive you crazy out of the blue.

If there is quantum randomness at the cutting edge of our coherently operating mind, that actually doesn't change anything for the contrary either as far as I'm concerned. Oh so now it's not that predictable anymore, is it then suddenly more free than it was without it? If it means some dice are being thrown to figure out some outcomes in some ways that makes it seem even less free to me. I say seem though... ultimately I think it's all the same, and just a very tempting thing to draw wrong - e.g. defeatist - decisions from.

Nihilism also possibly, but perhaps there are more sophisticated things behind that which I might be interested to read about out of curiosity. But definitely not the idea that then it just doesn't matter and you can do just whatever. Clearly it is that decision playing a major role in whatever disastrous thing you might do after that. Nobody involved is in the position to say: well I could have predicted that. That just seems absurd. Even if an illusion, it's one to play along and pretend that it doesn't matter apart from some curiosities - since effectively it doesn't seem to matter.

sorry for derailing the tripping thread.. fwiw i am having a few scotches.

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