Crawling Out of the Cave
2,360 views · Published 15 November 2007 · 9:46 · Indexed 17 October 2026
Channel: Footnotes2Plato · 2007 · People & Blogs
... and back into the light. No free will? If you agree, great! If you disagree, well then I agree with you, too. There is free will. But it is absolutely powerless. All it does is want and believe. It has no ability to manifest or carry through with an action. Action requires faith, which just means trust in the unknown. Faith is surrender. Free will requires separation from the Other; it distances the self from origin, it looks into the mirror and sees somebody else. Once we even start asking the question: "Is there free will?", it seems we've already gone too far. The real question is "who wants to be free?" Whenever you say "I will", you're projecting an image into the future of what you would like to happen. But where does that desire actually come from? Did "you" decide to have it? And even if you think you did, does the image of what you wanted ever line up with what you actually get? So how can you freely chose something if you never know what it is really going to be until you've got it? Free will vs. determinsim? Tell me what time is, then we can start taking cause and effect seriously. Until we have a solid definition for temporality and a full proof explanation of becoming, differentiating causes from their effects is artistry, pure imagination. Unless anyone can provide an adequate theory for time/becoming, I am going to claim that deciding between freedom and fate is impossible and makes no sense at all. My guess and intuition is that time cannot be explained precisely because time is not space, it can't be laid out on a flat surface and examined. Thinking about time is what forces us to move into the "verb" world(ing) instead of staying in the usual "noun" world. There's no beginning or ending to time (it is not a noun), because those boundaries make sense only in terms of space (or distance between places, which require time to elapse). Or more simply, time and space are one. and any bounded "object" or "noun" with a beginning and an end makes sense only within time and space among many other "nouns" with their own beginnings and endings. Time itself cannot have a beginning and an ending, because what then does time exist within? what could possibly exist outside the "boundaries" of time, the very creator of boundary itself? time is eternal. it is infinite. it is a loop. you can't possibly stand outside it to direct its course. you don't carry it. it carries you. it never began, it will never end. it has no boundary. it just happens. it can watch itself tick, but don't let the watch fool you for the time (don't mistake the dualities of language (observer and observed, describer and described) for the seamlessness of experience.
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