On May 1, 1:49 pm, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 3:38 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote: > > > > You can choose to create a new reason and act based on that. > > Certainly, and you created a new reason and acted on that for a reason OR > you did not, there is no third alternative.
No, you don't need a reason to act on the reason that you create. You are creating it for no other purpose. You are making up your mind. > > >> You did X rather than Y because you preferred X, and you preferred X for > >> a reason OR you preferred X for no reason, there is no third alternative. > > > The third alternative is that you cause your own preference for X. > > So your preference for X was caused by your preference for X. Yes, the idea of cause is redundant. You just prefer something actively. You can use that preference as a cause of actions, and the preference itself arises from entangled ensembles of causes, but your mind is the instrument which ties it together into a creative event. > Philosophically I'm afraid that is not very enlightening, Newton would not > be famous if all he had said was apples fall from trees because apples fall > from trees. Newton wasn't studying awareness itself though. If awareness is primordial, there is really nothing more or less to say about it other than that it is primordial orientation itself. > > >you can actually determine your own preference in real time. > > Yes in real time, that is to say you often don't know what you are going to > do until you do it, just as you often don't know what word you will say > next until you say it, and when you do say or do it you are often as > surprised as anyone at the result. That's true, but it doesn't mean that who it is that is determining what you say isn't also you. Our consciousness is really complex and nested, all of the parts of ourselves aren't all presented simultaneously. Part of you can be making a decision while another part is unaware of it in one sense but aware of it in another. Interior dynamics aren't discrete like physical systems, they are figurative and ambiguous. > > > We call it 'making up our minds'. > > Yes, or you could call it "finishing a calculation", and you don't know > what the result of a calculation will be until you finish it. That isn't how it works though. We don't arrive at a result at all, we fluctuate and approximate. We participate and persuade ourselves. It's completely the opposite of a computer, which always arrives at the same result given the same conditions. The computer has no preference, ever. > > >> but everybody agrees that a yellow traffic light is a traffic signal > >> that is yellow, > > > If you are going to get technical, no, color blind people do not agree > > that it is yellow. > > Being color blind does not make you stupid, they agree that a yellow > traffic light is a traffic light that is yellow, Huh? No. Color blind people agree to follow a colorless traffic light and call it yellow, sure, but it's never going to be a traffic light that is "yellow" to them if they can't see yellow. > they also agree that a > klogknee light is a light that is klogknee even if they don't know what > klogknee is; they even agree that a klognee spifflow is a spifflow that is > klogknee. They would agree that it is for other people, and they learn how to act in the right social context, but that doesn't make it so for them. You don't seem to get that color doesn't exist outside of our awareness of it. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
