What makes you think it's so far fetched? Genuinely curious as to your reasoning, even if you have no choice in the matter
Is free will more far fetched than existing in the first place? Or having self-awareness?
What's your
subjective feeling on this?
Gurdjieff said humans were not born with free will but could acquire it.
First of all, this has always been hard for me to put into words. Its more of a generalisation i get from seeing the world the way i do (if that makes sense).
I see existence as merely the sum of our sensory input. No two persons have the same universe, but we all share a common understanding on some level.. the sky is up... gravity pulls us down... green is that color that i call the grass...etc.
Further, all of our sense are merely wave analysis. Basically, our brains are wave analyzers, with memory being the stored wave patterns and interactions. This is highly abstract, and prolly pretty poorly described at this point... i just had a vodka-and-salad lunch.
But I start there because i think this world view shows the myriad of influences in our decision making. If our world, our universe, from the time we are born is a summation of the waves that we perceive, then any decisions, conclusions, or consequences we "create" are merely the response to those perceptions. Further, the criteria we use to make these "decisions" are also the results of these perceptions.
So, while we think that we are making a decision, we are merely acting on programming that has been compiling since we were born... since we first exited the womb. To say that decisions are made from free will is ignoring the programming that has been taking place from the moment your existence began. Your values, your prorities, your tastes... these are decided FOR you, not BY you.
Consciousness, to me, is a big accident. Brains evolved as they helped humans -or apes- survive or procreate better. At some point, the brain became self-aware, and from then on out it was a downhill slide away from awareness of our universe into awareness of ourselves. As these first aware beings looked at their hands with renewed fascination, and then their reflections in the water... they 'discovered' the concept of identity. And, this, i think, is the real creation of the concept of "free will".
Now, one thing thats always troubled and interested me..... how did this consciousness come to be? How, in the evolution of the brain, did it make the leap from reactions and learned behavior to conscious contemplation? Or did it? Did our reactions and learned behavior jsut become so complex that it
seemed like contemplation.
Im rambling now, so Ill stop there.
One other concept that i want to throw out there with respect to this discussion is Jung's theory of the universal consciousness....... but i cant comment on it right now, and this is way too long.