Do you have free will? No. Have you ever decided to decide something? Our "will" comes from an unobservable place.
But the real question, are we deterministic superdominoes six billion (or however many) years old? ALSO NO. You have four leverage points as a consciousness piloting a meat mecha.
>Free won't
Have you ever been in a situation where your mind thought of a joke and you said to yourself, "This is not the time"? That's a function of your prefrontal cortex, and I call it "free won't". Your uncontrollable will makes suggestions all the time but you can turn them down. You have veto power in the moment... unless you've had too much to drink, or were born a nigger. This is all you have when you're "on the spot" in the moment.
>Free speech
The words you choose, especially the less common ones, have a neurolinguistic feedback principle at work. Word choice affects the emotional qualities of present and retold experiences. Using the power of free won't, you can catch yourself phrasing things poorly, stop yourself, and rephrase them to be more in tune with your desired state of consciousness. I used to speak aloud the new phrasing, counting five repetitions with my fingers.
>Free association
This is intentional use of Pavlovian responses. You can reward yourself for finishing a run, or put on cologne for sexy times with the missus (and later, apply it when you want her to be horny), or you can meditate on a feeling while your hand makes a peculiar shape, or whatever. It's abusing heuristic association like a built-in cheat code. It works on others, and training your self is no different from training an other.
>Free mind
Your brain knows that whatever you've been doing (whether happy or sad) has kept you alive so far. So by default, it seeks out "more of the same". Angry people subconsciously seek out situations that anger them, and reasons to be angry in neutral situations. You can watch this effect in real time on the highway. So how do we change what our brain is autoseeking? Well you can't change "more of", so you have to change "the same". What you want is more of a different same.
Thing is, your brain can't really tell the difference between real past experience and virtual (imagined) past experience, and there's no difference emotionally - there are no "virtual feelings" in daydreams. Your behavior in daydreams becomes part of your reference pool for habitual situations and actions. Daydreaming daily about certain kinds of situations and your kinds of responses to those situations will help reprogram your "uncontrollable" will and your subconscious attraction to certain situations.
They did an old study where participants were tested on their basketball free throw abilities. Then the participants were split in three groups. One group did nothing. Another went to a hoop and shot 20 free throws a day. The final group sat in a comfy chair and imagined shooting 20 free throws a day. A month later they were tested again. Who improved most?
Obviously, the people who sat in a comfy chair and preloaded extra memories of successful free throws. It wasn't even close. This is the mundane side of "the law of attraction".
There's a whole extra thing for those who've unlocked their spiritual oddness, this is just the materialistic side. I'm not going to sit here and explain how consciousness can pre-observe future phenomena and collapse the superposition of possibility into definable and experiencable forms; I already did my effortpoast today.
But the real question, are we deterministic superdominoes six billion (or however many) years old? ALSO NO. You have four leverage points as a consciousness piloting a meat mecha.
>Free won't
Have you ever been in a situation where your mind thought of a joke and you said to yourself, "This is not the time"? That's a function of your prefrontal cortex, and I call it "free won't". Your uncontrollable will makes suggestions all the time but you can turn them down. You have veto power in the moment... unless you've had too much to drink, or were born a nigger. This is all you have when you're "on the spot" in the moment.
>Free speech
The words you choose, especially the less common ones, have a neurolinguistic feedback principle at work. Word choice affects the emotional qualities of present and retold experiences. Using the power of free won't, you can catch yourself phrasing things poorly, stop yourself, and rephrase them to be more in tune with your desired state of consciousness. I used to speak aloud the new phrasing, counting five repetitions with my fingers.
>Free association
This is intentional use of Pavlovian responses. You can reward yourself for finishing a run, or put on cologne for sexy times with the missus (and later, apply it when you want her to be horny), or you can meditate on a feeling while your hand makes a peculiar shape, or whatever. It's abusing heuristic association like a built-in cheat code. It works on others, and training your self is no different from training an other.
>Free mind
Your brain knows that whatever you've been doing (whether happy or sad) has kept you alive so far. So by default, it seeks out "more of the same". Angry people subconsciously seek out situations that anger them, and reasons to be angry in neutral situations. You can watch this effect in real time on the highway. So how do we change what our brain is autoseeking? Well you can't change "more of", so you have to change "the same". What you want is more of a different same.
Thing is, your brain can't really tell the difference between real past experience and virtual (imagined) past experience, and there's no difference emotionally - there are no "virtual feelings" in daydreams. Your behavior in daydreams becomes part of your reference pool for habitual situations and actions. Daydreaming daily about certain kinds of situations and your kinds of responses to those situations will help reprogram your "uncontrollable" will and your subconscious attraction to certain situations.
They did an old study where participants were tested on their basketball free throw abilities. Then the participants were split in three groups. One group did nothing. Another went to a hoop and shot 20 free throws a day. The final group sat in a comfy chair and imagined shooting 20 free throws a day. A month later they were tested again. Who improved most?
Obviously, the people who sat in a comfy chair and preloaded extra memories of successful free throws. It wasn't even close. This is the mundane side of "the law of attraction".
There's a whole extra thing for those who've unlocked their spiritual oddness, this is just the materialistic side. I'm not going to sit here and explain how consciousness can pre-observe future phenomena and collapse the superposition of possibility into definable and experiencable forms; I already did my effortpoast today.
Then nothing else matters.
If you don't start with the assumption of free will, then nothing else matters. You're just a bag of dust.
> Your brain knows
Your brain "knows" nothing. The idea of "knowledge" is beyond the natural realm. We've spent umpteen billion dollars trying to replicate what the brain does only to find it does nothing. There is no secret superalgorithm buried in the seemingly infinite number of neurons and their connections. Not even idealized representations of what might be going on inside the brain can even approach even the smallest bit of "knowledge".
The only plausible reality is something like this. Something that DesCartes figured out a long time ago and it seems every generation needs to learn again.
"I think therefore I am". In other words, the ONLY thing you know that exists is your thinking self. This thinking self exists independent of all other things. It is, in very much reality, co-eternal with God, occupying the same sort of realm of existence that God exists within, separated from reality or the material universe or whatever other flim-flam ideas that the jews have told you is science.
From that first though immediately comes the second though: God exists and knows everything, and I exist to learn everything from him.
One way or the other, without free will, we are nothing more than robots. We, our thinking selves, must exist outside of nature or the material universe, and this body that our conscious and thinking selves inhabit is not much more than clothing made of flesh.
The brain is nothing. It does something, for sure, but it certainly isn't thinking and it certainly isn't "knowing". For all we know, and trust me, we have studied this thing inside and out, it seems to be an interface between our thinking selves and our body, a very complicated control panel of sorts, where magical interactions from the supernatural realm can be made into reality.