My evening is smoking joints and working on a paper on the neuroethics of free will.

Which is just one of the many areas where Western philosophy gets locked into black and white thinking about determinism vs free will.

Devotional polytheist living a monastic lifestyle centered on curiosity, simplicity, and joy.  Exploring the intersection of technology and spirituality.

My counter argument is that Western philosophy tries to oversimplify reality into maxims that don't end up holding up over time. 

Like the whole free will vs determinism debate is never going to find an answer because it's not either/or, it's both. The Universe has some deterministic qualities and some probabilistic qualities, and humans have metacognition - we can think about our thinking and change our thinking - that lets us lean more into the probabilistic to overcome the deterministic aspects of reality, and THAT is what free will is.

Ant chance you’d be willing to share your paper? I’m def interested to read it.

The concept of free will has been top of mind all year for me (due to multiple stressors hitting at once and my seemingly successful navigation of them) and frankly I’m leaning hard towards the “free will is an illusion“ camp but on the lookout for counter arguments.

Moderate-to-severe symptoms.


Writing a book /mirror-loom : https://paragraph.xyz/@mirrorandloom/

We're, as far as we know, the only creatures with metacognition. We are conditioned by our environments and experiences as all animals are, but we have that added ability to condition ourselves, if we so choose, and that's where our free will lies.  But we first must make the choice to actually engage that will, and honestly, a lot of people don't because they're locked in systemic oppression and don't have the cognitive bandwidth to engage in the sort of reflective thinking about values that truly engages that free will.

yep. it’s like motion. is the train arriving at the station, or the station arriving to the train? depends on your perspective