Study Found: When It Comes To Knowing True Self, Believe In Free Will

Ahanu

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You would have to start looking at the reasons for communication, but use of language assumes utility in some sense. Negotiation, sharing experience, etc. Change. Christianity puts a lot of emphasis on the "word". God "spoke."

If someone is telling you about lack of free will, it especially applies. It violates that philosophical law about how you can't make an argument that invalidates your argument or something like that. It would be like saying "language has no meaning." If it's true it's false.

But that is just confusing the issue by somewhat removing free will from the personal...like this universal question of free will. Kind of doesn't matter.

In your actual life, someone who says free will does not exist and then gives reasons, I think that person has some deep confusions. Almost like living but not living. They walk around and talk but equivalate their brain to rocks or something? I think you have to acknowledge the unique brain.

Someone who acknowledges free will and treats their decisions as mattering, they are dependable, predictable, and will help you be a better person.
Good points but still does not proove free will. And i think It is the other Way round: It is very uncomforting to think that "no free will" could be true. Think about the implications. Our society is in many aspects built on the believe of free will. Our personalty etc..
 

Xisca

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You would have to start looking at the reasons for communication
Create a sense of safety from the inside of us.
If it Works, then there is no need to go to sympathic activation. Communication and co-regulation is less energy demanding to live among humans (mammels) while feeling safe.

When the lack of free-will is felt because of the weight of the charge of groups, like felt-too-big-groups like compagnies, administrations etc, it creates impotency. Free-will, and mainly feeling it, connects with inner strength.

Free-will is not as important as the SENSE of free-will. 2 persons can sense very differently the same situation! The sensing and the belief are related of course. You believe what you sense, and this has an effect on us.
 

Xisca

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It is known because measured, that there is an impulse in the body before doing any movement. We decide to do something because we feel the impulse, which is called pre-movement. So it seems we have no free-will.... But we have, or can have, if we look at deeper level and become able to sense what is happening inside us.
So there is a way to think about free-will as I said before, relating to the outside world, and try to not be too influenced by ads, by culture etc (up to the point we need to still live in there and adapt), and there is a way to sense free-will by relating more to intuition, which menas sensing more the body and physiology!
 
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@pimpnamedraypeat

I guess my most basic point is cause and effect. Even if it isn't atoms or particles, and is instead energy, or something beyond physical matter, it still follows cause and effect, right?
 

Xisca

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How is this physically possible? I think either the study is bunk or there's something fishy going on here. How can human awareness transcend causality?
about your reaction to what Lisa published.... I put in bold letters the words I emphasise, in the study mentionned by Lisa just below.
It is all about the different faculties that our cortex and our autonomic nervous system have. We just usually put a scientific name on what does our cortex or our neuro-transmitters system, but put very subtle names to what we do not perceive through our conciousness!
But is has a name and is studied. This does not remove anything from the magic of this subtle conexion! The autonomic nervous system is at work without us noticing it enough... You can see this very well in the experiment:
"Researchers have found that your intuition often knows the right answer long before your reasoning does.
It took about 50 cards before the subjects said they had a hunch about which deck was safer, and about 80 cards before they could actually explain the difference between the two decks.
However, what is most fascinating is that after only 10 cards the sweat glands on the subjects' palms opened slightly every time they reached for a card in the dangerous deck. It was also around the tenth card that the subjects started to favor the safer deck, without being consciously aware that they were doing so.

In other words, long before the analytical brain could explain what was going on, the subjects' bodily intuition knew where there was danger, and guided them toward safety.

... the researchers also measured the subjects' subtle physiological responses. Remarkably, they found that the subjects' bodies were able to predict the correct curtain 2-3 seconds before the computer had even decided which curtain to use.

In both of these studies, the subjects did not always follow through with what their sweaty palms were telling them, even though the slightly sweaty palms were most always right. In fact, their palms actually had the ability to predict the future by about 2-3 seconds."

It is about danger and safety, and how to notice it quick. If we listen to subtle body changes, and are able to do so without changing the sensation, then we can more quickly make the safest choices. If we wait for the cortex brain to understand, we stay in danger more time. Our bodys are able to feel much more, we are just quite bad at knowing how to use this system!

For example, if you know that you have to take care of the slightly sweaty palms, it is difficult to not modify the feeling and just put some attention to it. I guess that is why the study says that the slightly sweaty palms were (only) most always right.

Just try to put attention on your breathing without modifying it, it is not so easy.

The autonomic nervous system is much more than a fight and flight and freeze response. And it is very important in free-will, in belief systems and is in charge of the coherence of this Little and at the same time huge universe called body!

And the autonomic nervous system is above the endocrine system. The endocrine system is triggered, and then can loop back to the nervous system, but as we can see there, the advantage of the ANS is its SPEED.
 
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@pimpomproduct

Maybe the sample size was really small (so that an effect was found), or perhaps they somehow sensed it through a mechanism we don't understand yet (like perhaps sensing the energy of the environment or something idk).
 
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lollipop

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@pimpomproduct

Maybe the sample size was really small (so that an effect was found), or perhaps they somehow sensed it through a mechanism we don't understand yet (like perhaps sensing the energy of the environment or something idk).
@BigYellowLemon @pimpomproduct what BigYellowLemon supposes is my guess: a mechanism we do not understand yet. Truth is in the last year they discovered a new ligament in the knee, a new bone/part in the heart. We do not have it all figured out yet. For instance, Sheldrake's research with dogs knowing their owners were on the way home without any logical way for them to know. Solid methodology - his research is sound. How to explain?
 
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lollipop

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Again for me free will seems to be a scale AND a greater proportion seems to come with greater awareness, healthy metabolic energy and even resources. For example, I am not able to control whether a thunderstorm hits my community, but I have free will to be pissed about it and refuse to go outside OR grab an umbrella and head out. I also do not think moment by moment lived experience can be separated out of the conversation about "root" of free will. We are embodied consciousness.
 
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@BigYellowLemon @pimpomproduct what BigYellowLemon supposes is my guess: a mechanism we do not understand yet. Truth is in the last year they discovered a new ligament in the knee, a new bone/part in the heart. We do not have it all figured out yet. For instance, Sheldrake's research with dogs knowing their owners were on the way home without any logical way for them to know. Solid methodology - his research is sound. How to explain?

If sheldrake knew and the dogs were around him they could probably pick up on it

Perhaps they could hear the car from a few blocks down

and on and on and on
 

Tarmander

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Good points but still does not proove free will. And i think It is the other Way round: It is very uncomforting to think that "no free will" could be true. Think about the implications. Our society is in many aspects built on the believe of free will. Our personalty etc..

You aren't really going to find a proof of free will that will be satisfactory. It is an emergent phenomenon from a seemingly deterministic universe. Maybe not seemingly. You can always take a higher view and say "well technically it's not free will because those were the determined options and your decision was determined by those circumstances." Or some such nonsense.

No, free will emerges. It comes upon you and isn't something that you can really logic your way into. As you evolve to higher energy levels and higher complexity, like a butterfly, free will is there all of a sudden.

The most advanced societies, mainly Rome at the turn the of the millienia and America at the end of the 1800s and before WW1 have free will as their basis. Even other less evolved societies reach towards it in small ways before being dragged under by corruption and entropy. Eventually things are dragged under and no one thinks their own thoughts anymore, but we get bread crumbs from the people who reached a level of complexity that allows for free will.
 

Tarmander

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I understood it to mean "get out of the way of your Self."

Zen describes itself in four famous lines, traditionally attributed to Bodhidharma:

A special [or separate] transmission outside the scriptures [sutras];
Not dependent upon [or, not setting up] words and letters;
Direct pointing at the human mind;
Seeing one's [true] nature, becoming Buddha.

That's cool, kind of like "a transmission outside what is known, not dependent on well foundationed thoughts, having a sense of knowing being, knowing self."
 
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lollipop

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You aren't really going to find a proof of free will that will be satisfactory. It is an emergent phenomenon from a seemingly deterministic universe. Maybe not seemingly. You can always take a higher view and say "well technically it's not free will because those were the determined options and your decision was determined by those circumstances." Or some such nonsense.

No, free will emerges. It comes upon you and isn't something that you can really logic your way into. As you evolve to higher energy levels and higher complexity, like a butterfly, free will is there all of a sudden.

This. Free will emerges in an embodied consciousness with awareness, strong metabolic energy, strong expanded energy expression.
 
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lollipop

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If sheldrake knew and the dogs were around him they could probably pick up on it

Perhaps they could hear the car from a few blocks down

and on and on and on
Read the research. Was not performed on himself literally. Good stuff. Read it before you reject it.
 

pimpomproduct

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Not according to the study posted by lisa where awareness broke causality

@BigYellowLemon @pimpomproduct An interesting discussion. A point to consider however. The only thing physically proven that can exceed the speed of light is quantum entanglement, and that can not be used to transmit information. It has been suggested since the time of Wolfgang Pauli that consciousness arises out of some kind of an amplification of quantum fluctuations, so there is a very real possibility something can break cause and effect, BUT ONLY IF WE ARE NOT CONSCIOUSLY AWARE of this breaking. In other words, the minute we pay attention to something, the effect would disappear, because it would require information to be transmitted and acknowledged. But if it simply happens as part of the background (e.g. it appears random), it may be that cause and effect (which is governed by the speed of light) isn't as absolute as we would like to believe.

There are so many things we don't completely understand about the nature of the universe we live in, that there are almost certainly untold mysteries around the human body.
 

Ahanu

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No, free will emerges. It comes upon you and isn't something that you can really logic your way into. As you evolve to higher energy levels and higher complexity, like a butterfly, free will is there all of a sudden.
i too would like it to be like that.
i just wonder: what speaks against "no free will" other than our wish that we have free will.
we don´t need free will to explain anything, do we?
 

Tarmander

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i too would like it to be like that.
i just wonder: what speaks against "no free will" other than our wish that we have free will.
we don´t need free will to explain anything, do we?

It's a good question. What speaks for free will? Obviously none of the animals or anything that cannot think like us.

I don't really have an answer. I just know that people who profess determinism seem to have bad life outcomes that they are okay with. They have a kind of sickness. And if you stay around them too long you can get sick too. They also tend to be very intelligent in some rational ways.

People who profess free will are sometimes challenging but the feeling of meaning around them is redemptive.
 
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lollipop

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Disambiguated. Words, deeds, actions, thoughts in line with the energy that is there in any given moment.
My yogacharya used to say be in a straight line from the core to the skin in thoughts, words, actions. Interestingly similar to your studies...
 

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