free will and choice

[Guest guest]

Hello Atagrasin,

 

Other than the fact Benjamin Libet's findings are used in neo-advaita circles

for *spiritual* purposes, they are not a new kind of reduction. It's the same

old physicalistic reduction of psychological phenomena to physical phenomena.

Not different from the monism of the ancient Greeks, or the mechanistic

behaviorism of B.F. Skinner.

 

This reduction can be a helpful tool for those who with issues about guilt, or

about the self as a doer or controller of actions, but it's not too helpful

beyond that.

 

Why not? Because it has not much to say about other things seemingly implied by

thought, (such as physical objects and psychic objects). At the end of Libet's

analysis, one is left with the apparent multiplicity of thoughts, as well as the

subject/object duality. That is, the analysis is silent about this question:

can thoughts appear without THAT to which they appear? If so, then you have

thoughts as well as a background, even though there is no entity thinking the

thoughts.

 

So one must investigate much more deeply. Don't stop!, even though (in non-doer

language), stopping will happen or it won't, just like the writing of this

message happened.

 

You write about the relationship between thoughts and "the thinker," saying that

the thinker is just thoughts. This gives a greater or weightier status to

thoughts than the thinker. So far, not bad. But in advaita, thoughts

themselves are no more real, independent, or substantial, than the thinker.

 

Om!

 

--Greg

 

At 08:42 PM 4/21/02 +0000, atagrasin wrote:

>Hi friends :Remember, choice it's just a word. It cannot describe

>some real, existential "thing",

>"process" for the reasons I have outlined. Choice simply cannot

>occur. There is

>the "thought of choice". That is, You think about choice, but you

>don't choose

>to think. In a similar way, "I' do not think (or choose to think) a

>thought.....the "thought of an "I" thinks itself". The thinker and

>the thought

>are one. Or, to put it another way, there is no thinker of a thought,

>only the

>thought of a thinker. Thought is self-thinking. In other words, it

>just happens.

>It does not grow out of a prior thought to think. The prior thought

>does not

>cause the present one. The past one thinks itself and the present one

>thinks

>itself and the two are unrelated and independent. (until one acheives

>a certain

>level of realisation..and then they take on another quality once more)

>Regards atagrasin

>

>

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>Discussion of Shankara's Advaita Vedanta Philosophy of nonseparablity of Atman

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