The Maze of Free Will and Other Random Acts of Consciousness.

I am today out to bust your brain. I am writing about cognition, reality and us in a longer essay to be carried whenever it is done. This post is using an article from the New York Times on July 22, 2010. It is entitled: Your Move: The Maze of Free Will Click on it to go to my Archive to read it.

If your brain doesn’t bust reading the article the significance I see in it are two observations I make of it.

The first: Philosophers are much like lawyers, my former crew. It takes them longer to say less than any group I know.

The second and purpose of my comment is this: Free will, our claim of natural heritage which makes us different than the animals, that personal distinguishing piece of god-endowed creation we claim ours, is not all that it seems to be.

We live and go on in a unique time-space limited environment with the bio-chemical capacity to live beyond our birth until that biochemical mass we are poops out and dies on us.

In between the two most important events of our lives, birth and death, we survive, learning becomes a major endeavor of doing so, and we learn more from what we learn. The subject of the essay I am working on is about the purposeful day to day happening of this process.

Our exercise of free will fits into the process. It is and is not as much as we would believe it to be. With the exercise of will, all that occurs before, all expected after, influence the act of now. Sometimes our before will control it, other times we see it exercised in ways that happen before we can do anything about it..

It is of course a moral act as the writer of the article discusses. The morality of any free will exercised must be measured in the context of all about it, including the one exercising the free will action.

Looking at a decision in the instant of now is difficult to measure in terms of moral efficacy. Dealing in the instant is like the pilot steering the ship. He is at sea, bound in a direction, on the move. Taking no account for the ship being piloted, the sea in which they are bound, the conditions about them weather included, all of the other exigencies of the moment, how do you measure the efficacy of the pilot executing a turn? Was he right, wrong, was it good, bad, is there even anything to measure?

The exercise of will is something we do and we don’t. We need to look at this, as well as all other matters of us, our world, all in it, were in it, yet to be in it, in the context of all of that, measuring what it is and what it is not.

It is time limited to the time, we, they, the universe itself occupies this constraint of overall existence. Doing so we must measure it from the greater whole of which we are but part, a passing fancy at that.

We need to see it from the whole of it. In this context, limited in our measure of it, it is but with wonder and awe we ponder it and apply it.

Like consciousness, were I to be asked to give a quick explanation my only response would be: “It sure is an interesting anomaly of being, I must lean more about it!”