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Free Will, Good/Bad vibes, Meditators vs. the status quo

iridescentblack

iridescentblack

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"Using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) technology, other researchers have observed that brain signals predict some decisions up to *seven seconds* before you make a conscious choice."

The quote is taken from a paragraph in Andrew Holecek's Dreams of Light, where he explores in one particular chapter the idea of Free Will. At first the author comes off a bit like he is completely debunking free will as nonsense, thus presenting ^ this quote. From there, though, the author takes the reader to other areas of exploration, going on to imply that free will is present, but mostly in the meditator.

I recently started to boycott an establishment that makes breakfast sandwiches because a woman who works at the restaurant fucked up my order. I don't so much mind getting a wrongly done order but once I found out about something called the "expectancy effect", I started to notice the kinds of people who will intentionally screw an order just because they're used to hearing things a certain way. Certainly takes the term "social" out of having a job that requires one to be social. Though, couldn't it be argued that restaurant jobs, especially fast food services, aren't really social? Desensitizing employees to be like robots seems to be the main work protocol. Does being social on the job require more training, more prep to the station, or does that require more homework, selfwork, or self-care? For those whose ears don't quite filter the right content, is meditation possibly the solution?

Back on the main topic, though, it would appear to me that a lot of humans in this society are a lot like automatons or robots. It's hard to back this with science though. In fact, the only resource I think I've gathered to suggest what I mean here is the one quote I've left at the top. Meditation on the other hand seems to free up space in the mind and allow a person to be more spontaneous. What do you think? If hooked up to an fMRI, would a meditator present the same results?
 
Freewill must relate to the circuits in the brain..

The electrons and firing synapses.. electricity comes from the spirit. The Holy Spirit. Electricity GOLD?

Yes enlightenment is related to this as well..

One would obviously like to be enlightened and go with the flow of things..

Based on cause and effect it does seem possible for the brain to make preordained experiences..

This moment is cusped by Gold. Electricity. The very firing of your neurons..

And this connects to the soul.. electromagnetic radiation!
 
Free agency is a illusion the buddha discovered it. Its apparent during deep states of meditation aswell. We are not our thoughts they come and go appearing out of nowhere but they are not us. This brain is a biochemical computer reacting to chemical reactions controlling our actions. We are but instruments of the divine plan.
 
I have heard this argument before, that since we are chemical, at some of our most basic structure, that the path of the earth in orbit and its general velocity in space can somehow dictate our movements and effectively end our free will. I just don't get it, though. I feel like it either needs more scientific study or needs to be wiped like that flat earth nonsense.
 
We have freewill as degrees of freedom..

Option select..

To select the easiest or best possible outcome..

We as consciousness are stuck in the middle of cause and effect..

Our so called choice station..

But it is clear based on cumulative upkeep that we have many necessary tasks to do.. some under our free will.. and some in bondage.
 
I think some people have automatic triggers for when the walk by people, like they're getting ready to attack. Similar to jocks in high school who would suddenly stomp their foot in front of weaker looking teenagers to get a reaction. In some cases people grow out of those habits, but there's this one jogger who jogs around where I live and every time I see him he's always getting prepared to attack. Don't ask me how I know. It's hard to explain. But as I'm going through more and more books on the subject of dream yogas and meditation, I find that meditators are at a clear advantage - being far more spontaneous than the rest. Certain yogis explain that free will may be an illusion, but it is you that becomes free will. Remove the egoic self from the equation and what's left is all this space to fill with virtues and such and free will becomes a very big part of that.
 
All that is is the resistance that is caused by our unresolved emotional and psychological issues. We are all victims of trauma and social programming and it plunges us into unconscious living and deterministic patterns of behavior and thinking to where we are not even aware of most of what we are thinking and feeling and the things that we are aware of is really just the tip of the iceberg. I would say more likely around like 10% or so which is why you here this concept or theory that people only use ten percent of their brain. It’s more like a myth or misinterpretation of how the mind really works and operates. Meaning that it does not just start with the physical brain and the chemicals and neurotransmitters that are associated with it. That is more like the middle ground with the actual thoughts and ideas and emotions being the precursor and our conscious awareness being the succeeding faculty that then expresses itself into words or action.

People who meditate and integrate their darker aspects will have an easier time making decisions and knowing what is the right decision for them to make personally in their lives so that it lines up with their authentic free will and not the automatic delayed responses that causes them to make decisions that are in essence not a reflection of their true authentic self and their free will and are also just a result of bad parenting and social pressure and influence. These childhood traumas and societal pressures essentially dulls down our mind and makes us become zombies where we have this delayed reaction in our conscious awareness that has been observed through these scientific experiments. There is too much self doubt and hesitation and resistance within the mind so much so that it apparently takes 7 whole seconds for our mind to work through all of the subconscious crap that it has built up inside itself before it can have a conscious awareness of the thought that it was originally thinking.

The more meditation and spiritual work that you do you will naturally strengthen your awareness of what is really going on around you as well as what is really going on in your mind and how much you are really able to perceive and to know and how fast you are able to know it. And the further you progress on this path you will realize that you can reach a point of such intense focus and awareness that you will instantaneously know something that might have taken a whole week or two for you to figure out. Or you can become aware of things that aren’t even in your vicinity or in your area of observation and you can pretty much become psychic.

But I as well would love to know if there is anyone like this that has been a subject of this kind of experimentation or study. However I do think it’s very unlikely that there will be any definitive answer to something like that given the variables surrounding that type of endeavor. For example the science community is already very skeptical and dismissive of people who claim to have gained special abilities through spiritual practices and such. So they will not take the experiment as seriously as they should nor will they be familiar enough with the nuances of the spiritual life to set up the proper conditions and to guarantee an accurate and sound conclusion that genuinely reflects objective reality. Are we talking about normal everyday people that just use meditation for relaxation purposes and stress relief to get on with their day? Or are we talking full on gurus and psychics who have spent their whole lifes trying to reach that point of total awareness and clarity and integration of mind and soul through a multitude of different spiritual practices including meditation, yoga and fasting? The latter would be very hard to find as they tend to separate from the rest of the socialized chaos (which includes scientific experimentation) and they eventually become solidified into an environment that is more suited for their being. They will likely not be found in situations like that because there is too much of a vibrational disturbance between their consciousness and the scientists consciousness. It would be very difficult to arrange a scenario to where they can share the same experience and interact with eachother properly.

Because remember that the scientists or specialists conducting the experiments are also victims of trauma and are also subjected to this delayed reaction time in the mind that is caused by unconscious thinking and societal influences. If they weren’t then they wouldnt be interacting among people who are. It would not be possible. Showing that scientists themselves go about things as unconscious robots just as average everyday people do and yet they have devised an entire enterprise or establishment which is solely based on a limited and one sided view of how to interpret reality and how to perceive the world around us which is why they are not exempt from the polarizing conflicts that come with this society and have engulfed themselves in an on going perpetual battle between them and the religious establishment and the new age spiritual community and flat earthers and conspiracy theorists. They are all just reflections of themselves fighting against themselves sharing the same vibrational resonance. One is not more intelligent than the other.
 
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Very good read OBS.

While I don't hold any traditional views of spirituality, this dance between science and experience has a few catches people don't often look at.

When someone of spiritual weight (long term meditation practices maybe not a "guru" but solid meditation practice), is using their practice, others can feel them but science has never shown a measure of force. We have always assumed the spiritual energy isn't something we can measure, I'd suggest we are using the wrong tools.


Science searches for energy reading or signs of affects from particles etc. All science uses dead tools to look for a living energy. My cells are all alive and I can feel the presence of another human. Perhaps we need to look at our own body and learn what the living sensors on us are doing. I really don't think science will ever measure spiritual energy with dead material sensors. Just my 2 cents.
 
With regard to people who can't get orders right due to expectancy, this issue is our society.

Humans are meant to be social, some less some more. We have built a society that doesn't care what you are born as but rather forces you to become whatever you can for the most money you're capable of grabbing. A vast number of humans, who don't socialize well and shouldn't try, take jobs that pay more money but require human skills more vs taught behavior. Managers who were great at previous jobs suddenly turn companies into chaos when they reach for money despite their own skill set.

Some of us (myself in this) are great socializers and work wonders with stressed people or in chaotic settings.Because chaos is almost a preferred work environment for me I often take emergency jobs with high pay that require real strong people at each job. The people who co-ordinate emergency workers must constantly sift out people without the skills looking for higher pay.

I don't know who to credit for this quote "Do what you love, and do it so well people give you money for it". When we get the cart before the horse we are just people doing the wrong job and blocking traffic.
 
Maybe I'm just getting old, or fed up, or I don't know...

But the answer to free will vs. determinism for me is: I don't care.

It doesn't change that I'm here, that I suffer, that I'm stuck on this planet with all of its problems, that I have to eke out survival for myself, find ways to mitigate suffering, and also look for ways to possibly enjoy life. No matter what you believe, it all leads back to this present moment, where you have to deal with being here. The people who are out there making their lives happen, they don't have time to sit around and ask these questions. So I think that the philosophical mind, in general, is ultimately an obstacle. Most of history's major philosophers were privileged folks who had a lot of idle time. The same is true of "gurus" and "enlightened" masters who everyone reveres. Their lives are taken care of, so they can sit around pondering the meaning of the universe.

Embedded in all this is the myth of progress, that if you figure out the answer you'll somehow go somewhere or transcend. You ain't going nowhere. Mentally check out all you like but your body is still here and you have to deal with shit even if your software is busy pretending it doesn't have to.

This is all to say... there are people out there who think they've overcome the system, but they haven't. Nobody is above the system of life. We are all subject to the same forces, capabilities and limitations that the universe imposes on all living things. There are only degrees of adaptability. It doesn't matter if you believe you're doing it or something else is doing it, it's what's happening.
 
I find the whole free will debate a bit silly. When people believed the earth was flat and they spoke about 'the earth', did they fail to refer to it in virtue of the fact that the earth is round? Has quantum mechanics shown that all those who took themselves to talk of objects which are fundamentally composed of atoms could not have been referring to objects? I take it that the answer to these questions is, quite obviously, no. It is, perhaps, a mildly contentious issue among theoretical linguists and philosophers of language, but I think it is fair to say that there is wide acceptance among practitioners in these areas that a speakers beliefs about X are, generally speaking, quite frequently divorced from the semantic content carried by their utterances about X. Why should a scientific understanding of free will be any different? It seems, quite straightforwardly, modern science tells us that free will cannot be what many have understood it to be. So, like so many other phenomena, we are faced with a choice: should we completely abandon our beliefs, or should we revise them? This is not really a scientific question, it is a philosophical one. Moreover, it's not even a question about how the world actually is, it's a question about how we should talk about the world. The facts are, for the most part, not in dispute. The real question is: what should we do with these facts? My interpretation is that nothing in modern science has shown that free will doesn't exist (or, to put it slightly differently, that free will carries no normative weight), but that we would do well to recognise that the phenomena which has been singled out by our linguistic and social practices is more watered down than many of us have taken it to be, and to reconsider the role that the idea of 'free will' plays in causal explanations of human behaviour. (To be clear, my personal view is that free will deserves a less prominent role in explaining human behaviour, not that it should be eliminated as a factor in said explanations.)

To address the OP more directly; do I believe that a so-called meditator could replicate the the results of modern science? No, I don't. If people had an innate capability to understand the world based on some kind of self-reflection then we probably wouldn't see such frequent gaps between common understanding and the scientific picture of the world. At the least, I would think, the predictions from these armchair experts would converge, rather than - as it seems to me they so often are - being wildly divergent.
 
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The topics here have given me some time to absorb some of the fundamental processes that I've been going through since this thread's inception. Probably the major emotion pulling me to put forth a mixed set of ideas to support the free will debate was "spontaneity". I realize now, that alone, doesn't support an argument at all. In the growing crowds of the spiritual community I hold a somewhat preserved -albeit outdated- sense of superiority that originally started with "talking heads", like an angel and devil concept. I'm talking mainly about those spiritual memes people post reiterating the same doctrines that noticing "signs and symbols" (a philosophy made popular by Carl Jung) in order to justify the means to be here. And that adaptable learned behavior is the very focus that drives the Western spiritualists these days. Angel numbers, synchronicities, coincidences that have somehow polled a spiritual reverie.

I do, however, despite my many gains in the practices I have performed, often find myself being hit by the common man, at times, forcing a look inward that suggests I actually haven't reached "true" stages at all but have actually been more of a turncoat. Whatever is supporting my actions before looking inward appears to be an air that supports my claims to fame -as it goes. Maybe if all my hard work were stripped away at a moments notice I would see underneath it all that I am the hypocrite I fear to be and in turn I press forward against others with the same "means to an end" mentality that I often feel I've overcome.
 
Ok so my point of view is that freewill or anything else you think of is real..

Everything that you think is real..

Cause and effect.. materialistic determinism etc..

Every category of existence is real..
 
Foreigner said:
Maybe I'm just getting old, or fed up, or I don't know...

But the answer to free will vs. determinism for me is: I don't care.

It doesn't change that I'm here, that I suffer, that I'm stuck on this planet with all of its problems, that I have to eke out survival for myself, find ways to mitigate suffering, and also look for ways to possibly enjoy life. No matter what you believe, it all leads back to this present moment, where you have to deal with being here. The people who are out there making their lives happen, they don't have time to sit around and ask these questions. So I think that the philosophical mind, in general, is ultimately an obstacle. Most of history's major philosophers were privileged folks who had a lot of idle time. The same is true of "gurus" and "enlightened" masters who everyone reveres. Their lives are taken care of, so they can sit around pondering the meaning of the universe.

Embedded in all this is the myth of progress, that if you figure out the answer you'll somehow go somewhere or transcend. You ain't going nowhere. Mentally check out all you like but your body is still here and you have to deal with shit even if your software is busy pretending it doesn't have to.

This is all to say... there are people out there who think they've overcome the system, but they haven't. Nobody is above the system of life. We are all subject to the same forces, capabilities and limitations that the universe imposes on all living things. There are only degrees of adaptability. It doesn't matter if you believe you're doing it or something else is doing it, it's what's happening.
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i agree with everything here, almost entirely

i would ask, do you think that discussing these things is a self sabotaging coping mechanism or does it offer value to those who are (for example) depressed to talk about what they are thinking?
 
thegreenhand said:
i agree with everything here, almost entirely

i would ask, do you think that discussing these things is a self sabotaging coping mechanism or does it offer value to those who are (for example) depressed to talk about what they are thinking?
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It can be many things. I didn't mean to sound insulting to those who talk about it. I guess I'm mostly talking about myself. If I wasn't disabled and had a productive daily life, I probably wouldn't stop to think about this stuff very much.

Those who have the gift of language and can put words to their deep thoughts/feelings can surely help others.

I am just increasingly jaded these days. :(
 
Foreigner said:
It can be many things. I didn't mean to sound insulting to those who talk about it. I guess I'm mostly talking about myself. If I wasn't disabled and had a productive daily life, I probably wouldn't stop to think about this stuff very much.

Those who have the gift of language and can put words to their deep thoughts/feelings can surely help others.

I am just increasingly jaded these days. :(
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Sorry @Foreigner i don’t frequent P&S that much

Didn’t mean to imply you were insulting. Genuinely just wondering..

often I think philosophy is just a human invention to try to nominalize conscious experience. But I’ll admit it can be damn fun to talk about
 
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