Dear LessWrongers
I've been struggling a bit with the idea of fatalism or at least I keep find myself slipping that direction.To be clear the only reason I use the word fatalism is because of it's dictionary definition. I have not allegiance to the concept. Are there powerful arguments to counter fatalism? I've read the sequence about dissolving the question about free will for example, i.e. I understand how the question itself(have I free will?) is incoherent. I.e. free from what?
I also accept that I am a physics and that my cognition and subjective experience are more than adequately accounted for by non mysterious understandings of the evolution of life. However I can't seem to figure out a way of reconciling my current understanding of those ideas with the idea that I'm in control of my future. Maybe I already have the answer and haven't got the corresponding affective/emotional state which is not an unprecedented problem for me.
My biggest fear is that for me to believe that my future is not set that I'm going to take on some irrational silly belief? Can anybody give some useful algo's for thinking about this in a coherent, detached from desire way?
One thing that I've heard is that physics is non-deterministic but I always thought that had to do with the observer. Surely particles were going to do what they were going to do anyway regardless of whether I can determine the reason or not?
Thanks for reading,
Laoch
I wish I could upvote this comment more than once. This is something I've struggled with a lot over the past few months: I know that my opinions/decisions/feelings are probably influenced by these physiological/psychological things more than by my beliefs/worldview/rational arguments, and the best way to gain mental stability would be to do more yoga (since in my experience, this always works). Yet I've had trouble shaking my attachment to philosophical justifications. There's something rather terrifying about methods (yoga, narrative, etc.) that work on the subconscious, because it implies a frightening lack of control over our own lives (at least if one equates the self with the conscious mind). Particularly frightening to me has been the idea that doing yoga or meditation might change my goals, especially since the teachers of these techniques always seem to wrap the techniques in some worldview or other that I may dislike. Therefore, if I really believe in my goals, it is in my interest not to do these things, even though my current state of (lack of) mental health also prevents me from accomplishing my goals. But I do want to be mentally healthy, so I spent months trying to come up with some philosophical justification for doing yoga that I could defend to myself in terms of my current belief system.
Earlier this week, though, some switch flipped in me and I realized that, in my current state of mental health, I was definitely not living my life in accordance with my values (thanks, travel, for shaking me out of fixed thought-patterns!). I did some yoga and immediately felt better. Now I think I'm over this obsession with philosophical justifications, and I'm very happy about it, but damn, it took a long time to get there. The silly thing is that I've been through this internal debate a million times ("seek out philosophical justifications, which probably don't exist in a form that will satisfy my extreme skepticism and ability to deconstruct everything" vs. "trust intuition because it is the only viable option in the absence of philosophical justifications; also, do more yoga"). Someday I'll just settle on the latter and stop getting in arguments with myself.
Also, sorry if this comment is completely off-topic; it's just something I've been thinking about a lot.
Yesterday I was in a church, for a friend's wedding. I was listening to some readings from the Bible, about love (obviously 1 Cor 13) etc. I knew this was cherry-picking from a book that a few hundred pages sooner also describes how non-believers or people who violate some rule should be murdered. But still, the message was ... (read more)