OccultForum.org

This is Sam Harris pretty clearly stating something that I began to see back in 2009. IMHO he's dead-aim on this one. The way I'd simplify what he's saying into a breezy one-liner; time itself fossilizes all events to fixed coordinates within itself and makes entire timelines, in our example our universe from big bang to cosmic rip or implosion, something like a 5-D crystalline solid. Every life is tracing a path along this crystal that's 100% predetermined.

It makes me wonder, as a magical full-determinist, what I can extract from the various ontologies to understand my world and model it better. I know Ann Davies and Paul Foster Case took the full-determinist outlook on spiritual evolution and I give them a lot of props on that, but I'm equally curious as to what role magical ritual and activity plays, in a blow-by-blow sense, in this Heron of Alexandria mechanical play that we inhabit.

I am not watching 55 minutes of this, sorry. Can you maybe take a few more sentences, to sum it up clearly?

I am familiar with Sam Harris's work though.

All hail the new high priests of secularised rationality!

Organised religion is failing in the West and Capitalism is now clearly being seen for the corrupt beast it is, so how do we maintain the status quo?

How can we justify and reason the immense wealth of the few against the poverty of the many?

Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated. Meh.

Determinism again,only now it's a physics related temporal directive, instead of the divinely pre-ordained will of a monotheistic god.

Perhaps my cynicism is showing again, but as an atheist myself, I find men of such ilk more than a little unpleasant and I strongly dislike the strident rigidity and thread of certainty that runs through their assertions.

And as I haven't actually watched this, the above may not even be that relevant to the specific topic, if so, sorry.

No worries. In my experience so far in posting videos on the internet, and the reason I usually abstain from it, is it's a lose-lose scenario. Not talking about this instance but much shorter ones, like 5 to 10 minutes and the response would be 'tl:dw - explain it'. I understand that treatments of bandwidth and data counting is different across the world so referencing a video like this would be a very different thing where bandwidth is counted rather than flat rate monthly service like a lot of our ISP's have in the US.

The Sam Harris video I posted you really wouldn't need to watch much more than 15 or 20 minutes to get the bulk of it. Rather than trying summarize his opinion I'll restate my own observations and why I'm a full-determinist. The whole thing I was trying to say about time as a crystalline structure goes like this; I can look at any five minute interval of my life, set a start and end point for that five minutes, hypothetically replay it once, ten time, ten million times, and it should be an exact carbon copy all the way down to the subatomic particles and their placement - mainly that all activity is on precedent, or precedent and future pulling whichever the case may be. I'd add to that we don't own our genes - those were given to us, we don't own the upbringing we had, we don't own the inputs, experiences, and injuries that made us who we are today and attempting to overcome the bad or a spotty past is still a reaction to an impulse. IMHO if we don't own the sensory or informational input and we don't own the processor, ie. our brains, we equally don't own the output regardless of how much we might feel like we're in the cockpit of a vehicle driving its every motion. We find ourselves intimately involved with the outcomes and consequences of what our brains and bodies do or what our external situations put on us, which causes us to have a very intimate relationship with the consequences of our lives and environments, but that feeling isn't necessarily the same as us having the ability to assert previously non-existent forces on the situation nor do we have the ability to exercise options in these situations that we don't know we have.

My confidence in this is that it doesn't change whether a person is talking about a reductive materialist universe where a person begins existing at birth and stops existing at death or a universe where consciousness is eternal and even drifts into time by the seven planets model of restriction unto incarnation - nothing really changes the behavior of participation in time whether your I experience bubbled up as a byproduct of time or was planted in time by a higher self. Similarly if an inner planes adept pulls on my sleeve and my life changes, if that adept has non-temporal aspects to his or her existence, all the fruit of that is also not in my free will. Outside intrusion and randomness don't add free will to the progression of time. In the case of the adept perhaps they lend the possibility for vast improvements to the course of the future but what they don't give is individual free will for people dwelling within time.

I was hoping not to make reading this even more involved than watching the video but with topics like these it's quite difficult not to.

Spida wrote: Determinism and Fatalism seems kinda pointless at face value.

They're not the same thing, and him and Joe spend a good portion of the video deliberating that point.

A side note for everyone who said 'TL:DW'

You can take a snippet of the video below where I think Sam makes is case flawlessly in the space of 1 1/2 minutes. To get to that tune in at 29:30 and listen through to 31:00:

Spida wrote:Dude you are Brilliant. Off/On Topic whatever.

Are you still having issues believing in things that transcend material existence?

No, it's not like that.

I guess I need to take the time to articulate this directly since it's being brought up again.

Where I'm at and where I've been for the past few years is acknowledging that its as flaky a dynamic as it is real and that spiritual growth of the kind I want, as far as my own intuition can take me, needs painstaking accuracy if I want to build a solid enough foundation not to either blow my cork, be the next Billy Meier, or end up being a channeling mouthpiece for the Intergalactic Federation of Bullshitters. I really want to understand what all of 'this' is in as circumspect a way as I can and in aiming for that type of understanding of it I feel an obligation to weigh and measure reality at every level and across philosophies and be able to honestly answer as many of the hard questions as are out there that I can - otherwise I don't feel like I've gained closure on them, it feels like a dodge or evasion, and that's an assault in my faith in what I'm doing.

To thread the eye of the needle the way I want I find myself inclined to walk a very delicate line between on one hand cultivating my faith and admitting that I've had things happen to me, such as visions conjoined with spectacular synchronicities, that I have to admit that there's something going on that transcends neurons, and on the other hand realizing that this is a very dangerous place in that it has very few solid landmarks and you can get spun around so bad that you can't tell the difference between what's an external entity and what's your own thoughts getting reflected back at you. Staying moored and solid to me means keeping my skepticism razor sharp. When I say skepticism I'm counting false-positive and false-negative assumptions both as undesired credulity, ie. I want to avoid falsely dismissing a spiritual experience as much as I want to avoid calling a plane or meteor a UFO. If I'm sorting out all the variables I'm maximizing my integrity and minimizing the risk of getting blown off course.

I like Sam Harris and his podcasts because I think he makes exceptionally good points both on politics and on free will. He's also a practicing Buddhist and apparently has few decades of practice and experience under his belt to where he's had the breakthrough in examining the base nuts and bolts of his own consciousness.

Anyway I hope that helps clarify things a little. In summary I do believe in this stuff, I just don't feel comfortable either assuming that I know what it all is on face value nor do I feel comfortable hiding from thoughts that challenge the structure of my beliefs. If anything I find intellectual and spiritual challenges as healthy as necessary (at least in high quality) for separating the wheat from the chaff and strengthening what I have left as something closer to truth than I could have had without testing and refining my beliefs.

I guess I'm still kinda bummed out that this thread is going to end up being about me and why I'm posting these rather than the actual content of what I posted.

Spida wrote:Am I affecting the Macrocosm, or am I just rewiring my brain to make me think I am? I could be in the same boat to a degree, but I get confirmations regularly that manifest Macrocosmically. Of varying degrees. But the Skeptic within will nag at me none the less. Yes, my female companion will confirm things for me as well.

I think anyone who's had the vision and synchronicity combo spooled tightly together has experienced something that's, per physicalist philosophy, ineffable and permanently unexplainable. That's part of why I consider physicalism a dead-end because it ends up in tautology, circular reasoning, and finger wagging when people bring up the exceptions to the Newtonian 'feel' of things.

Another thing I might add:

Tarot Key 12: The Hanged Man seems to fit part-in-parcel not only with full determinism but the acknowledgment of full determinism. I caught that reminder in reading my BOTA monographs (I'm a little past midway through Tarot Interpretation) and the emphasis seems to lean on trusting that one's consciousness is a piece of the universe that weaves in and out of life and that once you really take on the understanding that all of this is predestined based on the universe's plans for you, or at least your trajectory of motion based on its laws, that certain doors of perception begin to open.

That's another part of this - I can't imagine the universe penalizing our psychism over our demands for accuracy. In life in general rigor and discipline are rewarded and, as far as I've seen, almost any of the magicians who were able to get off the ground let alone be considered great adepts of their maintained and recommended rigorous discipline in order to obtain their results. It's not to say that one shouldn't enjoy life, just that if one wants to geek out on the details its probably part of their personal evolution and they should enjoy the ride the best they can while using that information to inform what they do with their impulses and instincts.

Spida wrote: Anyways, this is a very deep subject when you actually start getting into it. You can't ignore
the possible influence of things that transcend materialism. Which makes things a bit messy,
so it falls into the category of things that are unproveable/unknowable.

The way I tend to look at transcendental realities and their involvement with this - it's more complexity but I don't think it changes the basic mechanics. Time and its behavior seem to be what makes the case for me.

Spida wrote:One of the things that makes me believe in absolute free will is Genocide. Could external factors or the Divine lead up to this sort of thing? One would think not, but doesn't Human Nature come from
external factors, and isn't it at times innately Evil? So there exists an undesirable compatibility. Which
doesn't exclude Determinism. Which is to say. I guess it could go either way, But most would prefer to think
of Divinity as something that is good.

To me when I look at the theodicy challenge of it - I have to look at God as either alien to us in Its morality, ie. either both good and bad, neither good nor bad, or indifferent as it's all part of a process. The other possibility is the notion that what we're in might be a macro-organism where individual suffering is about as well attended to as single cell suffering in the human body; my own concern with that analogy is that even if it is true it can't be turtles all the way up - at some point upward there'd probably be some ultimate which is structured differently than that super-organism whose neural networks, per some people's theories, are made of galaxies.

Spida wrote:If you could rewind the Universe back to a time prior to some action, and if the Macrocosm, AND Microcosm
were in the exact same state, i believe the outcome would be exactly the same. So i agree with that
Deterministic angle.

Consider a Spectrum, and I might be inclined to position the slider somewhere between the two.

I have to take Girlfriend to work now.

Are you suggesting then that microcosm and macrocosm are tethered together bit by bit, like a spectrum, based on the big bang being an outpouring of microcosm from macrocosm? You'll have to say a bit more perhaps on what you consider the consequences of that to be.

Have a safe trip!

Spida wrote:It seems the inclusion
of Divinity renders a more Deterministic System, but I don't think entirely.

Is that to say divinity necessarily or just to say a single source of motion/reaction?

I tend to think that with even multivariant input we still have a system that's quite difficult to leverage differences at the same point in time out of. 'Level 3 Muliverse' seems to attempt that but it does so by making copies of everything that could happen or, the way I've thought of it, sending the experience of a given bit of matter to a different segment of it's own wavelength (thinking of a point of matter across probabilities as being experienced a bit like a cross-section of a piece of spaghetti).

Spida wrote:There is also the abstract concept of what happens just prior to a thought. Some unknown
precursor, subtle influence. What caused me to have this thought? I think Sam may have
mentioned that.

Sam I think would suggest that the coalescence of that thought that you've experienced is something that you're experiencing as your own activity but that you're simply experiencing the after-effect of a process rather than being the initiator of that process.

Spida wrote: That is another scenario. I remember something like this. Probability Wave Function? And Multiverse Theories. There are a given set of possibilities, or Realities that exist, and when a choice is made they collapse into one. Something like that. Truth is stranger than fiction. Certainly doesn't make things any easier.[/align]

That brings up the other challenge - determinism is technically an unfalsifiable claim, albeit a highly intuitive one. Because it hinges on input/processing/output regardless of timeloops, multiple dimensions, etc.. that one would need two different beginning states to get two different results. It would back right down the claim of probability-collapse and ask if there's any possibility that the input could be different before the process started for it even to be called the same process.

Really I guess the other challenge as well - one might refer to 'determinism' or 'indeterminism' based on the question of whether everything is shooting out like billiard balls from the big bang or whether there is authenticly noise in the system that's not directly related to that event. That kind of determinism I would say is unlikely to account for everything, just that it also doesn't tough the free will vs. no free will issue - ie. input + proccessing = output and that a different input by definition is a different process.

I listened to the snippet you pointed out near 30 min mark plus some, before I responded I wanted to clarify what you were looking for since you voiced concerns on the thread becoming about you? My first impression of the conversation though was one of admiration that their discussion was so civil and calm, its nice to see people discussing without getting all hateful and angry over topics that can potentially shake a person to the core. Also I have met many christians who somehow believe both equally that god gave us free will while at the same time believing that god controls everything and the future is already laid out by god and they still curse the devil even tho by that absurd logic the devil is controlled by god. Its quite the 2 step.

I also wondered how much the one argueing against free will sam I think really believed what he was saying vs just playing "devil's advocate".

Daremo wrote:I also wondered how much the one argueing against free will sam I think really believed what he was saying vs just playing "devil's advocate".

I think in that 29:30 to 31:00 stretch of the Harris/Dennett talk - the dynamic Harris is talking about is pretty damning to the idea of libertarian free will and it was the same realization that I had around 2009 on my own that pretty much sealed the deal. The analogy I used to give people is that if I walked into a casino, walked up to a craps table, and rolled lucky 7's I could rewind that sequence of walking in the door to the dice landing 10x, 1000x, a googleplex of times, and that stretch of time would be an absolutely flawless replay every single time. Being that walking in the door of the casino and the dice landing are arbitrary start and stop points - there's little reason to believe that the same dynamic wouldn't apply from the very beginning of time to the very end of it.

The more I've thought about it I know that there are things that can bend and warp time, I'm not averse to the possibility that some things could slice through and augment it as well, but I think we and our behavior would still be a crystalline and fixed commodity - that even if the crystal of time shattered at some point it would mean that we'd come down with some incredibly strange blindspots.