Free-Will

Parasitism requires a twofold deception of Free-Will.

First, the Parasite must conceal his own methods of draining a host of its energies.  He must pretend to have no Free-Will, that he too is one of the victims.  Then he can spread denial of Free-Will within the victim population, and subsequently blend into it, because he "practices what he preaches".  He has no free-will (a self-imposed lie).  And his victims have no free-will.  Because neither have free-will, the Parasitical method can continue unabated and undisrupted.  His ideology is blended into both predator and prey.  Only his actions expose him, which he can easily deny.  "Your eyes deceive you."

A Parasite will never advocate for Free-Will so as to imply that inferior choices have negative consequences.  Because this would inevitably lead to exposing himself.  If it is an inferior choice to trust a Parasite, who seeks to drain you, then it would at least be an inferior choice to continue denying one's Free-Will as complicit in the predation.  The victim would need to cope with such an inferior choice through blatant logical contradictions and hypocrisies, "Yes I'm a victim...but I chose to be a victim."

Denial of Free-Will is the simpler method.

Convincing the victim that s/he 'chose' the inferior choice, but must be Proud of choosing, is slightly more complex.


Abrahamism chooses the second strategy. Humans have Free-Will because "God said so", and only because God exists and 'imposed' it on humans. Free-Will is then contingent on God, not on any conceivable human action, event, choice, or particular example of willpower. And if God is negated, denied, doubted, or removed in any form, then so too goes Free-Will. This puts Secularists in a bind. How do the Secularists account for Free-Will? If anybody's paid attention to philosophical discourse in the last two decades...they don't. They don't account for Free-Will. And most of the "Secular Humanists" rationalize in the same manner as Abrahamics, use Sam Harris as an example. There is no Secular defense of "Free-Will" as-if Humans were capable of individual...let alone collective moral accounting for general responsibility.

It becomes political.

State Authorities and "Representatives" are accountable...to a degree, by which they can be bribed, bought-off, persuaded, and threatened by angry mobs and Marxist anarchists. And that is the limit of their "Free-Will". Free-Will as conditioned by the State.

Free-Will requires some ingredients:

1) general intelligence and memory
2) imagination to select an unrealized outcome out of many possibilities
3) evaluation of options according to their probability
4) execution of one selection and loyalty to its unintended/negative consequences
___complexity___
5) self-consciousness to identify 'self' as "making the choice" in the third-person
6) loyalty to a failed premise, choosing wrongly, "owning" a failure
7) ability to revise failed premises, is a failed choice worth trying again or not
resisting disassociation, the mind has a tendency to 'suppress' embarrassments/failures
9) objectivity, disfavoring preference between failed or successful choices

I believe as complexity increases (corresponding with increasing intelligence/IQ/self-consciousness), the more a mind must disassociate from positive choice preferences. In other words, Confirmation Bias diminishes and becomes suppressed, as a choice can have 'equally' positive or negative circumstances. Many choices in life are very difficult...where to live, how to live, whom to live with, which mates to pursue, which to reject, etc. In these difficult choices, it's tempting, and irresistible to most humans, to favor biases toward oneself or one's group and disfavor those against. This leads to many psychoses and neuroses, pathological thinking, irrational thought.

Because a negative possibility toward oneself, is Unflattering. It's embarrassing, to even contemplate a "negative" choice. But until the consequences come to fruition, how can the possibilities be known? Here is a problem with general cognition. Most of humanity are bogged-down by the mere prospect of any imagined difficulty. Thus, for the masses, unless a choice is 'guaranteed', it cannot be trusted. This is why the masses favor what is intrinsically-popular, the choices that 'work' for most people, most of the time, path-of-least-resistance.

Thus it is not "their" choice. It is the choice of everybody else. The choice is not "owned" by them, the individuals.

This is the difference of ownership of Choice among Free-Will. People do not necessarily understand a Free-Will that chooses other than what is popular at the time, outside of fads, outside of contemporary, postmodern culture, outside what is "socially acceptable" or politically correct.

What could Free-Will possibly mean then, except to "Choose" what is already chosen by the majority-rule, Democratically?

This is the 'Secular' version of Free-Will, which differs against the outline above...by making another's choice, into your choice. You did not "choose". You followed somebody else's choice.

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Whether it be an absolute god, or circumstances, or totalitarian order, the average mind seeks something or someone to accuse and unload his personal responsibilities.
Anything to achieve absolution.

The idea that this world, as it is, is the only possible world, is another duplicitous method of justifying the absence of agency by judging from the position of after-the-fact.
So, from the position of 'now,' the past is already determined, so this is the consequence of what has been determined.
But, as it was being determined - in the present- this reality, as it is, was not inevitable.

In fact, all life, all willful organisms, participated in what was being determined, along with non-life, non-willful energies.
Life differing from non-life by its ability to choose the path-of-more-resistance, rather than a-path-of-least-resistance, like a river flowing down a mountainside, or a stone rolling down a cliff.
Life can choose to move up the mountainside....and climb up the cliff.

I reject the idea that a will can only be free if it is liberated from need, for need and suffering, is the experience of existence, and the idea of a will existing by not existing, is absurd.
It is, perhaps, why Schopenhauer located Will outside causality (space/time - existence) and declared it as the only Will that was absolutely free.
If the criterion for existing is to not exist, then no god could meet it.
This is clear in the descriptions of Abraham's one-wod, because his very need to create makes his will unfree, according to this standard.

Any concept can be similarly rejected, by defining it in ways that would make anything in existence antithetical to the defined.

The paradox of using binary methods to represent fluctuating patterns, in a cosmos where order is not absolute, can and is misused to comfort oneself, enabling the mind to attain completion where none exists; even at the cost of one's freedom.

Self-denial justifying Self-rerpession
Rejecting the will's freedom attempts to deny an unconscious wish, explaining its unfulfillment by accusing the will of impotence so as to conceal its cowardice.
A method that must have developed as man became increasingly dependent on others, necessitating self-denial, so as to prevent challenging what is required for preserving access to pleasure.
A man would rather admit he is a slave than consciously acknowledge the reasons preventing him from becoming a master.

Sam Harris is free to disagree with Daniel Dennett, which tells you everything you need to know. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Most animals, manimals are akin to ants, that is to say they are on autopilot.

There is potentially a super-aware entity making conscious, deliberate choices behind the scenes.

The Three-Body Problem [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Autonomous (@Seanrothmans) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Mind/Body.

Ego = lucid part of the mind. The part that identifies with 'I'.
But most of consciousness is subconscious and automated.
This doesn't mean it cannot judge and learn.

The body learns by repeating an action that resulted in positive feedback.
Addiction/Obsession is based on this.