Mike

That link needs some fixing. I am aware of the tort impediments. One thought is to have people write the ECNs who are not employed by TWI.

I don't remember what happened to that thread, but because you have mentioned it several times I will check it out. I know for sure I was not deceitful. I have been up front and honest about everything here. WHAT deceit do you mean?

Don't you think it takes a backbone to face all the criticism I get here? Backbones I am familiar with. But duplicitous? That doesn't make any sense. Googled: Duplicitous is used to describe someone who intentionally misleads people, especially by saying different things to different people or acting in different ways at different times. And how am I a tool of deception? I am focused only on the good we got in PFAL.

Wasn't R.R. in charge at the time of the RnR? I think a lot has changed since then. I hear a consensus in TWI folks that Rosalie was way too slow at changing things, and that the new management is different.

I do not get this ??? Why would starting my own thread be any different? Was not this thread "my own" in a sense? Wasn't the NT Canon also? I don't get the backbone part at all. For the canon thread and now the free will one I have been very much on topic, and it was you folks that were always straying. Could you explain this better? How will me starting my own thread change anything?

When I led excellors sessions, it was definitely fear that needed to be dealt with the most, even with Intermediate Class grads.

This is an area I think is a legitimate beef against TWI. I have not followed the details of this, because it never applied to me, but I can see from a distance that TWI got it all wrong on debt and a few other financial things. This issue is one that I think they are changing on, or already have changed some. But I am not happy with simple change that lacks formal documentation. There are two issues I think TWI needs to get in order with printed policy declarations. I brought up the idea of ECNs here. That stands for Engineering Change Notice, and all high tech companies use them. An ECN is a document that is well distributed within the company. It contains a complete description of the OLD WAY of doing things, and then the NEW WAY of doing things. I want to see TWI write ECNs for the (1) debt policies and for the (2) old wine-skins policies. Maybe I can get some help here at GSC in writing up "proposed" ECNs for these two areas. What help I need is the documentation of the OLD WAY of doing things. It must be in print and/or tape, but the old way of doing things needs to be summarized and enough detail kept to totally nail it.

Everybody missed a lot of what my theory is all about. I can tell from the errors in the criticisms. I am clearly talking about biological freedoms and restrictions, and I see it being missed.

You missed my point about WHAT KIND of restricted freedom should thought of as being good. I was talking about BIOLOGICAL freedom restrictions being good, and installed by God, by His design. You were talking about freedoms artificially restricted by man and his laws and customs. That is a totally different topic, and one where I would agree with you on almost every point. But biological freedoms are different. We are biologically restricted from vertical motion with the muscles we have and gravity the way it is. But that's a good thing for survival. The number of ways we can lose our car keys increases exponentially if you consider the vertical dimension. Survival could be threatened in the sense that parents could lose their babies more easily in 3D space, compared to 2D. Digestion and circulation problems can occur without gravity, as well as other medical complications that astronauts face. I gave an example of an employee that can't be trusted due to too much spontaneous thought and behavior, and not enough dialed into the needs of the employer. Too much freedom of thought would be disastrous. Another benefit of restricted biological freedoms is we can form a GOOD HABIT and keep it intact. We moan and groan about how difficult bad habits are to break, and that is a biological restriction that is not so good, until you consider how useful good habits are. The survival benefits of freedom of thought can diminish at a certain point, and this must be considered in a theory of the brain. Thinking through the survival benefits of some biological restrictions to freedom is new, and we live in a culture that completely rejects it. I think it is just a bad habit on your part to automatically reject the idea of limited biological freedom providing survival benefits. Giving new ideas at least a couple of days before summary rejection is a good habit to develop.

Well, I finished posting my whole book, so I feel finished here on this thread. Certainly didn't get the detailed discussion I was hoping for, though. I thought if the topic was far enough from PFAL you folks could stomach it, but that aint the case, I can see. The NT Canon thread was also far from the beaten PFAL path, but the Bottom-Up approach was never given a chance either. Maybe someday we can come back to these 2 topics. */*/*/*/* Maybe there will be some interesting news as the New TWI evolves. I've seen many good changes and signs of more to come.

I'm the ONLY one posting lately on "Determinism and the illusion of Free Will."

LoL

Are you calling Nathan_Jr a troll now ??? I don't think so, but you're the so called troll expert. Doncha know I gotta stand up for Nathan_Jr, because he started this thread just for me.

It is not tongues being taught. What is taught are the scriptural soothings of fear people have about the manifestations. Once the fear is gone, Got has no impediment doing His part in the guidance.

If all you trolls here are acting outside the limits of your free will and it was determinism that FORCED you all to derail the topic.... then all is forgiven. Let's talk about it.

Good. I feel vindicated on the troll charge.

No, you stop with the "Stop with the poor ole me syndrome" syndrome. How THAT for a Pee Wee Herman comeback line? It is not poor old me, it is simply a case that I cannot satisfy posters by going down every alley they present me. I just don't have the time nor the desire. The reason I am so distracting is not due to my intentions, it is due to my statements SERIOUSLY CHALLENGING the desire here to paint ALMOST everything about PFAL as bad and evil, and I stand firmly against that, and my stand is TOO MUCH for everyone, it challenges them TOO MUCH, and they get all distracted all by their own over desires to nullify my POTENT challenges.

I think. Let me double check. YES 9 sessions, at 2 hours each DETERMINES the outcome at 18 hours, plus coffee time.

How would you suggest I change that? Please don't forget that I get a massive number of aggressive and nasty comments to respond to. Many are a waste of time for everyone; many slip through the cracks due the sheer volume; and a small number of things I just dont think I am competent to handle. I have done things like limit myself to a small number of threads. Trolls don't do that.

$100 is the charge/donation. I am currently taking it, PFAL-T, and find it pretty good. Yes, grads of the old PFAL'68 class have to pay again. I registered a very mild but firm local protest about this, and it was taken in well. I now am slowly writing it up for HQ consumption along with other things related to the "Green Card Guarantee" of eternal access to the class. I have seen a small number of other minor things in the class that could be improved, but it is a fast, and overall well done presentation. It is only 19 hours compared to 36, and only 9 sessions, instead of 12. It moves very fast, and I lovingly dubbed it "PFAL Speed Dating."

It was no secret that we flubbed things at times. The way I handled it in Excellors Sessions was to emphasize FORGIVENESS. What are you doing wearing that SNL Church Lady costume? Halloween was last week!

NO, I am not a troll. I have genuine things to say. I also listen some. But as for your speculations: all wrong. (ex-way corps, TWI-clergy, LCM) Ask Pawtucket. We met in San Diego around 2006ish at pamsandieg's house, and he gave me a GSC T-shirt. */*/*/*/* I am not totally counter to the main grain at GSC. My message is that IN SPITE of many things going wrong at TWI, there was SOME good worth preserving. Most here want to proclaim "TWI and PFAL = all bad" I dare to challenge that with "TWI some bad, some extreme good" I agree that there were very bad things that need to be sorted out. I am actively doing that elsewhere. Here I am the MINORITY voice that it wasn't 100% bad. Is that a sin at GSC? to say it wasn't ALL bad?

Speaking of switching, when I used to run Excellors' Sessions the idea of fluency, both in S.I.T. and in T.I.P. , was often uppermost in peoples' minds, and not just new students to the Intermediate Class. I could see troubled faces on grads as well in Excellors' Sessions when "genuineness" and fluency came up in the form of questions from them. I too had these same questions, at times, so this drove me to find answers. "Switching" was one technique I found that comforts and helps. I mean switching from five senses to spiritual was sometimes easier. There were different names given to this technique, like "training wheels" and I thought of a water skiing way of phrasing it: switching from two skiis to one, as opposed to starting off with one ski, slalom. Here is how it works. I think there is a remnant of this in the Earl Burton class... not sure. We can start out interpretation of tongues or prophecy with a 5-senses canned phrase like "I am the lord thy God, who..." and then smoothly SWITCH over to whatever comes to mind. It this is done with an attitude of love towards the hearers, then the spiritual switch works. The idea I would convey to the students was that we can forgive ourselves for not getting it 100% perfect, and just rejoice LIKE GOD DOES that we got a few words RIGHT. Those of you who are parents know what it is like, what God feels like, when you saw your kids learn to speak. You were TOTALLY forgiving of gibberish, just to get a few genuine syllables of communication in there. The Father SEEKETH such willing babies who are willing to speak to Him and for Him. We can forgive ourselves for faking it at the beginning as we lovingly switch into genuine speaking for God. Ditto for fluency in S.I.T. For those exercises I would give everyone a letter from the alphabet to "launch" into SIT with training wheels. The things that would be taught in Excellors' Sessions was getting over fears and blasting away with God, doing what He want as laid out in those 3 chapters in 1 Corinthians, especially Chapter 13. The worship manifestations are always to be done in love, or it is a total waste of time.

NO. This that I describe has NO SPIRITUAL component. It is the simple case of a body and soul man. People have been trying to spiritualize free will for 1,000 years and it has completely confused the issue so bad that Neuroscientists are poised to reject it altogether. The new kind of weak free will I am proposing will fit with Neuroscience.

The classic definition of free will, or Libertarian Free Will (LibFW), has it being instantaneous in time, and over-ruling the laws of physics. Often implied with this LibFW is thoroughness. It is often imagined as effortless, never failing, never needing improvements, requiring no physical energy, and not requiring intelligent maneuvering. LibFW looks pretty cosmic to this old hippie! By contrast, minFW offers a very, very small amount of freedom, and comes it at a very high price! It’s not freedom WHEN you want it; because you must wait for it. It also takes energy and clever maneuvering in order to work. It fails often. Not a metaphysical bargain by a long shot, but that’s Biology for you! The freedom in minFW comes in our being able to self-adjust our synapses, so that we are better robots the NEXT time we need to perform a repeating task. But that self-adjustment is difficult, and not guaranteed. It takes good DNA and good teachers, and energy, and applied smarts. It also takes repetition, and clever settings of our human rudders and sails, like the sailboat’s. So, minFW is not at all the glamorous kind freedom most FW theorists and poets want, which is on the spot and immediate, and with a lot of other metaphysical things. LibFW can be made to sound beautiful, but that’s not the type of freedom that is really needed in everyday life for survival. We need to be looking for our BioFW, and not some imagined medieval idea. I have slowly come to view immediate LibFW as more of an excessive lust, and that it falls squarely into the category of religion, philosophy, or poetry. It just doesn’t seem to have any real value as an everyday tool for real life. In fact, it can even be detrimental to survival! Who would want to hire a worker who was known for her wild unpredictable behavior on the job, when highly constrained behavior within well-defined limits is what is needed of her? By contrast, minFW is NOT the ability to suddenly make a “free” move out-of-the-blue, but only to gradually and carefully nudge one’s life course in a desired direction, using determinism in the process. This mechanism is, again, similar to how a sailboat operates. It is highly constrained freedom within well-defined limits. So minFW is not cosmic, not perfect, not effortless, but it DOES have a chance at being biological. This minFW is merely a partial freedom from some undesirable MACRO PATTERNS of the micro determinism. It’s a “route to freedom” for things that matter and that are important, like being independent of some “other wills,” and even gaining freedom from some previous versions of ourselves. These are macro patterns. Micro-determinism is unimportant to us in everyday life. Effective macro patterns of determinism must be used to overcome other macro patterns that are undesirable. */*/*/*/* I see LibFW as over-hyping the simple Biology of the human brain engaged in decision making. But it’s not only in free will theory that things get OVER-HYPED these days, IMO. The general phenomenon of human consciousness as a whole has acquired an undeserved metaphysical and grandiose reputation over the past one thousand years. This acquisition went unchecked, until modern neuroscience started looking seriously at the brain. It is humbling for us to be reduced down to mere atoms and mere biology, but it is also realistic. I think a long, long time ago intellectuals started worshiping their own brains a little too much. It happens. In developing Philosophy, they wrote into the human mind all sorts of perfections and beauty that are not really there. This started in medieval religion, but by Descartes time it was being secularized, and made to sound scientific. Thus, the human mind was over-exalted, and for a long time, until recently when the tools were invented (MRI and CAT scanning) that could scientifically analyze it. It is nice to have a mind, but it is not the glorified “knower” that we poetically sometimes want it to be. It is humbling to think that our mind is made of dirt. This is the essence of the title to Francis Crick’s last book, “The Astonishing Hypothesis.” It is astonishing to think that our wonderful consciousness, qualia, and free will are MERE MECHANISMS. */*/*/*/* I think consciousness, qualia, free will, and subjective first-hand experience have all been over glorified in previous centuries by religion and philosophy, but science is now just getting around to dealing with this problem. */*/*/*/* There is some consolation for all this harsh minimal-ness. There is a hidden BENEFIT to having less than total freedom, on the spot, to act or decide. I think, as a culture, going over-board with the ideology of human freedom can sometimes become confusing in issues where freedom needs to come up in practical ways. The idea that too much freedom can be bad or unsafe is too often automatically rejected. But in theorizing about the mechanisms of the brain, it’s good to remember that too much spontaneous freedom of thought can be VERY bad. Bad in a practical, everyday sense, that is. Lots of freedom sounds great for artists, but for survival IS cosmic freedom useful? We live in a culture with great abundance, compared to most civilizations that came before us. We don’t think through enough about how FW and consciousness must work under much more austere circumstances. But even logically, shouldn’t a totally “free” thought or action be viewed as dangerous to the thinker? To me it sounds like a great way to lose my place in a complicated set of thoughts. I want solid, immovable markers in my mind as I explore complicated ideas. A thought, totally uninfluenced and guided by any past experience, may be poetically attractive at first, but WHO’S TO SAY there can be any practical, everyday-life benefit to such a type of freedom? Entropy would predict the opposite! */*/* I figure that when we walk into a situation, we behave exactly as our synapses dictate, and it’s a totally robotic response in real-time. We bring with us all the synapses of our growing up AND any character-building synapse adjustments we PREVIOUSLY engaged in. This way, as we develop our real time robotic responses more and more, eventually we can gradually become a primary agent responsible for our robotic responses. This only happens to the degree that we successfully operate minFW over a long period of time. This is the emergence of a genuine “self.” */*/*/*/* The main idea in everyday FW, the everyday YEARNING for free will that everyone has, is to possess the ability to steer one’s life better, and to be able to make better decisions. */*/*/*/* So far in my Dennett text travels, page 184 in his “Elbow Room” is the clearest expression of Dennett’s vision on FW: “What we want when we want free will is the power to decide our courses of action, and to decide them wisely, in the light of our expectations and desires. We want to be in control of ourselves, and not under the control of others. We want to be agents, capable of initiating, and taking responsibility for, projects and deeds. All this is ours, I have tried to show, as a natural product of our biological endowment, extended and enhanced by our initiation into society. We want, moreover, to have enough elbow room in the world so that when we exercise these powers, it is not always a matter of settling for the only desperate course of action that has a chance of fulfilling our desires.” Earlier on page 60 he says: “…we can plan in the light of our expectations, and take steps to prevent, avoid, preempt, avert, harness, exploit, or accommodate ourselves to those circumstances.” Dennett’s focus is on the future conforming to expectations or desires, and not the immediate performance that Libertarian FW focuses on. By contrast, minFW is NOT the ability to suddenly make a “free” move out-of-the-blue, but to gradually and carefully nudge one’s life course in a desired direction, using determinism in the process. This mechanism is, again, similar to how a sailboat operates. It is highly constrained freedom within well-defined limits. */*/*/*/* So minFW is not cosmic, not perfect, not effortless, but it DOES have a chance at being biological. */*/*/*/* I hope this general principle and its specific application in minFW helps people live better lives, to gain control and act almost as free as Libertarian Free Will promises. If minFW is developed like a strong muscle it can look, for all practical purposes, just like what we feel LibFW is, and our BioFW should be. What I have shown, so far in this chapter, is that there is a type of deterministic freedom available to levers, and to sailboats. It seems very likely this can extend to lots of other material objects. Then lastly I assume it can extend to the brain. The key at this last step is to identify what those freedoms can be and what is the deterministic mechanism that brings them about. I feel that the mechanism described in Chapter 2 does these last two things in a general sense. The task of Neuroscience is to show how brain cells do them in a specific sense. */*/*/*/* The bottom line is we HAVE free will, but it is like a muscle and needs a lot of exercise to function well.