Mike

LoL I am completely in the dark on this. sorry Maybe you should start a thread on it?

I can see the Topic Police scratching their heads on this one: "Is it it Doctrinal or About the Way???"

I never heard of this topic or anything like it, until there was a thread on it a few months ago. I don't think I even read that thread. but I see comments about it once in a while.

So are you going to start that thread on free will or not? You can see my theory that way. I'd rather discuss those ideas.

No. Intellectually, I admit to being a Rogue Scholar. Besides, it sounds real good to say that fast, in a noisy tavern. Moral high ground, no. I am a Romans 7b kinda guy, and thankful for 8a. I marvel at the open doors I had for all kinds of inside information in the science world, and also in TWI. I was extremely influenced by constantly moving around from light spots to other light spots, and avoiding all the dark spots... like the Corps. Being on HQ staff without any Corps responsibilities gave me unique opportunities to see how the corporation worked from the inside. I preferred working the material on the field, though, so I moved on from HQ to California. I waited 11 years to go out wow, and it was a good year with a good family. So, my dodging the hot spots and the trouble areas in the ministry gave me lots of unique learning experiences. In short, I was blessed with tons of data that can help me and others, so I feel it my duty to pass it on. I want to share it and not stuff it down anyone's throats. When I am severely challenged at that attempt to share (and I always am), then I must shift from a simple sharing mode to a more aggressive, confident mode. The reason I can spot things the other grads have forgotten or that they never got in the first go around, is because I was in a fellowship that did nothing but study the collaterals from 1998 to 2018. We had a full 20 years to try and master the PFAL writings, and we did a pretty good job. That was a pretty unique PFAL review. I learned some things that most grads missed in that time, and I feel it my duty to confidently present it.

No. Not familiar with him.

Actually, pizza was bought for the group with one of the member's McArthur Award money.

Are you tempting me to name drop?

They allowed me to function in it as if I were a grad student. I wrote papers and critiques. They even let me present my mirror riddle solution there. It was a real education for me, and I met a lot of scientists famous in brain studies.

Show me how interested in the topic you are by starting it and fielding other posters' ideas. I have worked this idea very seriously. Start a serious thread on it, and I can contribute to it seriously. I know no one is literally scared of me. You know what I meant. I'd rather see a free will thread with other people's ideas, and not just mine.

Missed it by THIS much! (Maxwell Smart)

LoL. So far I have 6 chapters written, and chapter 4 is a full admission on from whom I stole my ideas.

If you start it, then people wont be scared away from it with my name at the beginning. You could put your thoughts on it, invite others to do the same, and then when they had their say, I could join the thread. And then I could hypotize the audience out of their free will, and call them back to PFAL whether they like it or not. Or maybe I'll give up on the hippo-gnosis part. It never works here.

I haven't finished the NT Canon yet. That might be fun, airing my free will theory here. It wont be so much a beta test, though, as the canon was. I've been beta testing my free will theory for years in various science discussion groups.

I think the feeling of free will is legitimate, and we can expect others to have it also. But I also think that determinism limits that freedom at times.

That is pretty obvious, even though I often do try to give you straight answers. But as time goes by and more data comes in, the seeds I plant may take root. In addition to not believing a word I write, you don't really read or understand them all. But as time goes by ...

Yes! I totally agree. Free will does not always work, and it can be very weak at times. Lots of factors that we can never see in another person's life. I see free will like it is a muscle, and often a weak or uncoordinated one.

Yes, but I don't get into any Bible stuff. My theory is for science workers. I use 3 PFAL ideas, though to guide my mechanism searching and fiddling. One is that you can't control what thoughts occur to your mind (determinism) but you can control which thoughts lodge there. Another is that it is bad for people to lose control over their mechanics of speech when SIT. The third is that a natural man can believe Rom 10:9 with his free will, so that means free will is NOT spiritual. If human digestion can be explained by science, then so can human free will. ...in principle, at least. One of the issues to straighten out is HOW FREE is free will, or what are it's limits. Traditionally way too much freedom has been assumed by free will advocates. I am advocating a minimal, weak form of free will.

I think no matter what thinking I do, most posters here are committed to treating me as much lower than an under dog. There is no way I will be an "equal" here, so why try? I can drop the armor and discuss things at times with one civil person, meanwhile another poster (or 3) will be sneaking up behind me with an overdog attack on my words to the civil person. " Sharing information, however, occurs among equals" is a nice goal. I can only try to reach it in spurts.

BTW, I in my science theory on "limited" free will, I use 3 ideas from PFAL on free will that are in the non-suck category. Just thinking of the Topic Police being ready to pounce.

I tried a whole new approach 10 years ago, where I respect determinism 100%, and then work with how much freedom can a deterministic mechanism provide. That sounds contradictory at first, but I found that determinism can yield some freedoms as well as form some prisons. A sailboat exhibits a limited directional freedom from wind direction, yet it it all done with deterministic air molecules and the Bernoulli effect. I am looking for similar mechanisms in the brain that obey determinism, yet also give us some limited freedoms.

I would say that typing out information and posting it, so people can decide for themselves whether they want to read it or not, would be a more civilized way of teaching, than ramming information down their throat would ever be. I think I will stick to the typing teaching method, and avoid the ramming method. Thanks for the tip.

I have posted on this before. In 1991 some interesting doors were opened to me at UCSD Cognitive Sciences Department, where I became a member of a club that met weekly for 2 hours, for 7 years. The purpose of this club was for grad students from all departments to brainstorm their ideas together. The leadership of the club included some of the world's top brain scientists from UCSD, the Salk Institute, and the Scripps Institute. The club also hosted visits from leading brain scientists from around the world, and I was very lucky to have met them all. I worked many ideas with these people back then, in the 1990s, and have stayed in touch with some of them. For almost 10 years I have been researching possible deterministic mechanisms for free will in the brain. Free will is a very difficult topic in science. It is also difficult to see much about it in the Bible. I started working on free will, on and off, about 55 years ago.

They had teachers. It's not like they were on their own.