The Most Essential Texts from This Blog to a New Reader

The Best Way to Live

Mindfulness, living in the moment, living slowly…

And living your entire life as one situation.

Demolish your old time horizon. The next minute, the next hour, the next day, the next week, the next year and the next ten years are the same thing, and you should make them all as good as possible. This way, life won’t go by too quickly and you will instead get out of it all you can get out of it.

Becoming Free of Fear and Probably Something Else Too

People are, first and foremost, their visual fields. In addition to that, they speak with their mouths, move their bodies and make facial expressions. They are not their faces. And body sensations that arise in you, such as fear, are just body sensations. You don’t need to care about them and they can fade in time. In reality, there is only empty space between you and other people, but your mind can semiautomatically write a horror story about it. In the worst-case scenario, you will need to fight, but there’s never any need for fear. (You can come to terms with the possible defeat — it’s probably about right and wrong decisions — beforehand: reality simply allows things like that to happen.)

The Beginning of Everything

The comprehensible nothingness or the incomprehensible beginninglessness? (”Rewind as far as you want. You won’t find its beginning.”)

The answer has to be one of the two. That means things can happen without a cause: the beginninglessness has always existed and nothing caused it, and something that came from nothingness can have no cause because nothing existed before it.

Is it easier to believe in something as incredible as free will — and even ”the supernatural” — after understanding the incredibility of the beginning of everything?

(Or many beginningless things? Beginningless things that can be said to be separate?)

Time

Can the same event happen with the same speed in a shorter time? Can time exist? Or is it just change, such as slowing down and speeding up?

I suspect that time is intervals. Or distances between yardsticks such as taps or movements of a minute hand. Intervals have a length. They can be even. Events have a duration measured in intervals.

According to eternalism, which is supported by the special theory of relativity, the past, the present and the future all exist. I see the existence of the past and the future as conceptually impossible. If they exist now, they are the present. Time travel would be moving from one place to another in the present.

I believe that events are very damn ”absolute” and let’s say ”definite”. And because of that I also believe in a totally absolute event order. Events happen exactly where they happen and exactly when they happen; one after another, at the same time or partially at the same time. Observation is a different matter.

Free Will and Consciousness

You are a consciousness, the individual experiencer of a conscious experience. You can be conscious or unconscious.

You recognize that you are conscious and exist. You can be absolutely sure of that.

A consciousness could possibly be in a bit more extreme state than sleep paralysis, conscious but without free will or illusion of it. No action — not even a mere action of willing — would be possible or would seem possible for you. You wouldn’t be able to even try to move a limb. (And you wouldn’t be able to even want to try to move a limb?) You can know that state by imagining it and acting it out.

Only a consciousness could be free, so we are at least halfway there. Everything else is dead matter. (Or something that’s not matter, but is still dead in comparison to a consciousness, such as antimatter and fields.) There wouldn’t be an actor there. We are probably dependent on matter though and ran by our brains. {Unless we shift to an emphatically supernatural worldview and wonder about the freedom of nonconscious spirit beings, for example.}

You recognize other things besides you existing and being conscious. Events that feel like your actions, for example. If unfreedom is true, they are pseudo actions (a will [a will to move your arm with the illusion of choosing it yourself] and the willed event [the movement of your arm with the illusion of moving it yourself] happen one after the other) and if freedom is true, they are actions. You notice their beginning and end.

{The will and the action seem to happen about concurrently.}

(An action the cause of which is not freedom, and in the place of which there couldn’t have been another action, is not a real action in my opinion.)

You may also notice apparently outer forces, such as very strong wind or another person, move your limbs. These events don’t feel like your own actions. Things would be very crazy if they were, so you are probably right.

I believe you get the rest of it right too. A consciousness can reach a state of completely free will. We are in it for most of our time.

The readiness potential observed in lab studies doesn’t disprove free will. It is interesting though. Is there truly a related brain event 0.3 seconds before every action you make? Has a test subject ever attempted to upset the prediction visible to him on a monitor? Would he never be able to make a surprise? Would voluntary stopping of actions with an involuntary beginning be observed?

(In Libet’s experiment, the test subject reports his decision to move his finger. In my opinion, this is not the real decision. We don’t work like that. The real decision is in the movement of the finger.)

[A. Hard determinism: The universe causes your will to move your arm, the movement of your arm and your illusion of doing them freely yourself.

B. Compatibilism: That counts as freedom.

C. Agent-causal libertarianism: You as a free agent and, in this regard, independent from the rest of the universe, are the cause of your will to move your arm and its movement.

Some believe in the existence of randomness. That would be unfreedom just like determinism, I think.]

On Animals

Is life a gift for factory farmed animals even though it ends in getting slaughtered? Should you support the continuation of giving those gifts?

Can animal production ever be acceptable? Is it always a little ugly at least?

(Or do they even notice their lives?)

Does animal rights activism need a clarification that it’s also about animals’ right to not be born? To what extent can animal production be defended for giving animals a life? Does it at least alleviate the ugliness of eating meat in an absolutely unique way?

(The animal could not have been born very different or in a very different place. The potential for it was particular and it — and it was only that — was located only in particular places. The only other alternative in this respect was non-coming to existence. In addition, there is that which can go many ways.)

Some are antinatalists on human life too. I personally stabilized elsewhere.

Is fish farming, for example, an ugly way of ”playing with reality”? (Consciousness playdough?) That probably isn’t part of a beautiful life.

Can you ever minimize total animal suffering and premature death, insects included, by eating something else than plants?