Mike

Actually, I am still here, but rarely posting. What I do is simply check in briefly a couple of times per week, and gaze at the “All Activity” page to see if anything outstanding is going on. What I see is boredom, in all the trivia forum posting. And I also see grappling for a some kind of post-TWI and post-GSC perspective on life and living and even God. …pretty much where I was at 52 years ago, before my first twig, experimenting with all sorts of religion. This thread got my attention, as I have been noting the recent years of deaths, retirements, and no-shows that are such an extreme stark contrast to 20 years ago. I no longer grapple with finding strategies to enlighten you folks to the easy possibility of getting back to the greatest Light to shine on humanity since the First Century. I am totally satisfied with the small group of GSC grads that have privately formed relationships with me over the years, most of whom left GSC long ago. To the topic at hand, I want to thank both Pawtucket and YOU, Raf, for your extreme dedication to free speech, even to the point of REPEATEDLY standing with me, defending my right to post in GSC, in spite of immense pressure from many others to ban me. My hat is off to both of both of you for resisting the emotions of the crowd back in the early 2000s, and an atmosphere of the most glaring hatred I had ever seen. The set of several times you, Raf, stepped into the “Absent Christ” thread last year to shame the logic of a crowd gone mad to reason, was a paragon of fair unbiased journalism ethics. I was very fearful before and shortly after posting here in 2002, due to the crowd’s hatred, but management here consistently fought that off, and things finally got civil… most of the time. Kudos also to any other mods who adopted these excellent standards that Paw and Raf established. Bravo

Well, I did say this: "Many gaps in my knowledge were filled in; many old questions answered." Joseph and Jacob were always mysterious stories to me, and now they are not. I get it. I just was not in the mood to debate what was hot and what was not. It's pretty subjective. But the teachings were extremely informative, and I could relate to the characters as real humans, and fellow believers.

Why define it? Just go and listen to all 5 teachings and you'll know what I mean.

In the past few weeks I have listened carefully to LCM's 5 most recent teachings, all on Joseph of Egypt. Part 1 is here: https://archive.org/details/harvest-pt-8-the-remnant-of-joseph-254-12-23-23 This and the next 4 installments are the hottest Bible I've heard in many years. Many gaps in my knowledge were filled in; many old questions answered.

The Harvard Classics were a bit beyond my reach and interest.

Another is "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" by Jerry Mander. Still another. I was a big Arthur Koestler fan before "The Thirteenth Tribe" came out. Still am.

"God's Smuggler" by Brother Andrew. I read it in 1983.

I agree. I have his main book, and it is almost identical to my theory on free will. I came to the same conclusions he has about "will power," but from a different direction. I came up with the same main idea he has, except he has applied it to real life in a brilliant way. I only really applied my theory to laboratory neuroscience research, and barely touched on the practical uses in everyday living, while this seems to be his main focus. Yes, James Clear is onto something very hot and useful.

I simply heard it casually in conversation, and from too many sources to remember, and for many years.

Thanks, Ham, for recognizing it for what it was intended to be, just a discussion.

It is my understanding that the country of Belize has no copyright treaty with the USA.

Both Dennett and Patricia Churchland were PhD philosophers of high rank, and they sought tutoring from top scientists. For instance, Patricia Churchland had an office in the Salk Institute very close to Francis Crick's office. He tutored her in Physics. Dennett and Churchland are unique in their field of Philosophy, in that they insist on augmenting their philosophical approaches to line up with modern laboratory findings on the brain.

No. The field has exploded with activity in all directions since the 1990s, and I haven't even tried to follow them. I do think they reject the classical definition of free will (as do I), and they pretty much have hunches about some PRACTICAL feeling of free will, but very few zero in on free will. They have thousands of options for specializing in some field less "airy" than free will. The scientists among my old contacts all want numbers; numbers in the laboratory and numbers in the the theories. I chose to zero in on free will when I saw the 3 hints VPW gave us, plus lots of Biblical cues on the limits of human consciousness, plus lots of hints that Daniel Dennett offered. My theory doesn't predict numbers, as a scientific theory would. My theory is for the mental economy of all those interested in understanding the brain. My minimalist approach makes it easier to mentally juggle the concepts of a self and a will.

Thanks Rocky. I am a big fan of Sabine Hossenfelder. My "theory" is not really science research, but fits more in the category of the Philosophy of Science. I talk about changing the definition of "free will" in a radical way, and I offer a new set of attitudes, even some Biblical ones, on consciousness in general. One entire chapter of my book is devoted to Philosopher Daniel Dennett two books on free will, as being the inspiration of my ideas. In that talk, I mention a lot of science, but it's really in the "philosophy of science" end of brain science that my work is situated. I had a longtime close friend, with a PhD in Philosophy and a full professorship, guide me in my ideas and in my presentations over a span of about 8 years. So my free will theory is actually on the fringe of being legitimate research in the philosophy of brain science. I'm still in touch with a few of those brain scientists I knew back in the 1990s. Both they and I are big fans of Thomas Kuhn, pretty much a founder of the field of Philosophy of Science. I had the privilege of meeting him at Princeton, circa 1969.

It is a juvenile expression of hate.