The Self Evident Truth Of Free Will

"The Judeo-Christian insistence "that man is free was born out of the perspective that man was given freedom not in order to do anything he wants to but that he should be able to do what he is supposed to do." We are created free so that our actions "may have that merit which only a freely performed act can have. " ...from One Cosmos: Degrees and Chimes of Freedom Fleshing

Ohhh... so True.

Gagdad continues "To say that free will does not exist is to void one's argument at the outset, since one's arguments can appeal to neither truth nor to that which may know it"

And I think they know it - insofar as denying what is plainly before your face, refusing to grasp it, can be called Knowing.

What most people want is the ability to deterministically 'know', without the burden of gnowing it, and Free Will makes that impossible.

Knowing something for sure, Understanding, can't be just a domino trail of facts that assemble themselves into deterministic proof, True Certainty requires that YOU be involved, your consideration and decision is the mortar that holds the bricks of Knowledge together. It requires your examining, considering and concluding for yourself about the nature of the evidence Conceptually and Perceptually (Vertical and Horizontal) - aka Reasoning - the facts alone won't do it for you - you must Deiside.

In a very real sense, You are what holds the world as you know it together.

Which leads to a very disturbing implication - that You just need to remember that your understanding could be incomplete and your conclusions from it could even be mistaken. Just as Aristotle or Ptolemy or Columbus. Reasoning and Knowledge provide no free ride to perpetual peace, Knowing is a verb, it must always be active.

You also must keep in mind that your decisions about reality, your vision of it, doesn't alter Reality, only your perception of it, and your ability to inter-act with it. Most people, and especially leftists, want Understanding to be something like how a camera operates, that you just flicker open the shutters of your mind, let the image make an impression on your brain, and close again. Click - you understand. Open-close-done. Open [insert remark from Hillary] Close. Presto, you now 'know', and you're done 'thinking'.

But what a camera does is not the same as what your brain does, when you See. The camera provides essentially what your eyes do, to your brain, but that is only sight, not Vision. As with most blind people who have their eyesight restored, they find themselves awash in the data of sight, but they have no knowledge of what they are seeing or of how to see, and therefore never regain Vision.

The problem is that most people want to use their Free Will to deny it exists, to deny that they must choose to understand anything at all, including the Truth of their own Selves. They'd rather assert that things just are, that they don't feel that they need to understand them, and that they cannot be mistaken in what they 'know' to be 'true'.

Most people run from Understanding, it terrifies them, they want conclusions that just are and do not require their understanding and consent. They want Ideas to just BE true (with a very little 't'). All worthwhile things are already discovered, already known, true without having to be concerned about about contradictions - in fact, contradictions are their secret delight, that things can exist in a convenient jumble of facts that are just so, reaffirms that things just are and so don't require you to Reason through them, that it is, in fact, pointless to do so.

Evil Corporations and global conspiracies are the ultimate assertion of this, that control is elsewhere, and understanding and decisions are futile, things just ARE, and all must just be accepted and are little 't' true without your involvement in understanding them.

Scratch any leftist and you'll find a determinist. Just don't scratch too deep - you won't find anything there.

One Cosmos: Degrees and Chimes of Freedom Fleshing