The no free-will bus campaign is going international! Featuring, “There’s probably no free-will, now stop worrying, as if you had a choice.” advertised on the side of buses.

It’s one thing to listen to music, like what you hear, and even love it, but it another thing to play and to be played. You know you have crossed over when everyday natural sounds are now melodic, rhythmic, and beating in your head. You heart keeps in step, your tongue counts the beats, and your mind…the needle on the record. You hear music everywhere you go. You become the vibrations, and they move you in a way that makes you want to move them back with the same passion and intensity that they moved you with. Your ears have evolved into megaphones that can hear a wave length tremble. But it seems your equipment is never good enough to capture that audio crispness that plays over and over in your head. You are on the tip and as the record passes beneath you, you put your fingers down and let its smoothness glide by. You’ve gone beyond the b-side, and the music did this, these sounds created you, they produced you to produce them, to reinvent them, to keep the record spinning. Just as a producer produces sounds into music, the sound of music produced the producer. So you wonder for a moment, who is producing who here? But you know, this is how the record spins.

When asked, “what is your favorite color?” My response could be no less than…

I do not have a favorite color per say, I value them equally. It is their differences and contrast to each other that allows their color to be differentiated from any other color, and thus these differences allow one color to compliment or distinguish another. It is in this sense that they are dependent on each other to be recognized and discriminated against for one being more beautiful then another. Which I cannot allow myself to do since I recognize the importance of them all and how their relationship to each other determines each colors unique beauty.

And if you must absolutely insist that i discriminate one color over the next, I currently would lean toward the tones of a café brown espresso accented by hints of creamy latte swirls below dashes of cinnamon spice.

I am a cynic in the sense that I think that people intrinsically have underlying selfish motives whether they be conscious or unconscious. I have doubts in pure altruism, meaning that I think that most if not all acts have a selfish motive. While some acts may have been acted on in the interest of another, I doubt that those acts do not also have a selfish motive. To me, this can even be the “good” feeling you get from helping another. People will argue that when they perform such an act (which they call an “altruistic” act), they were only concerned about the others well-being. Yet, these same people have high regards for performing altruistic acts, and they get a high from attempting to do so. To me, this is yet another selfish motive that renders the act altruistic-less or at least not purely or only altruistic.

At minimum, we all have an underlying instinct for survival. We are instinctively motivated by this to preserve our own well-being. This primitive instinct seems to be at the heart of most of our selfish acts. Arguments will come up with examples like how a soldier in war might throw himself upon a grenade to save his platoon. How I see it is that this soldier was conditioned to believe that doing so is the right thing to do, and so he does so, because of the feeling he gets from doing the right thing.

I think that “selfishness” has an undeserved bad reputation and so called “altruistic” acts are held in an unwarranted high regard. I’m not trying to take credit away from anyone for anything like that, it is just my observation.

We are temporary beings subject to the laws of the universe and we are raised and shaped to have the mentality that we can “have it your way” when in reality we cannot. We are determined by a chain of cause and effects, and when things don’t go how we think they “ought” to, then we are discontented. Our longing for comfort and survival go so far as to the point we disillusion ourselves to believe there are such things as ghosts\spirits that live on after our physical bodies die, that there is a god that we will meet after death, etc… There is no evidence of such things and it only reflect mans instinct and longing for survival.

The only way to be content is to accept that we are transient beings in a chaotic violent universe. We are made of recyclable material that will be recycled again, and our consciousness will not follow. If we accept this, we know our term is the only term we have, and the closest thing to an objective purpose that there is, is simply to survive. The universe has no commitment to make us happy. Happiness is drug that too many are addicted to. We can only be content with how things are, not how we think things ought to be.

The very determinism you deny ironically determined you to deny it.

Laws and penalties are in place to condition us to act a certain way, if one doesn’t act that certain way anyways because other conditions have determined them not to, then they are determined to face the penalties. Them having to face the penalties is designed to reinforce and strengthen the stimuli to increase the conditioning effectiveness of these laws for others. When a person is found guilty, they are guilty of breaking a law in which they had no choice but to break (no free-will). The real failure is on the deterrence systems part as the conditions set in place didn’t work. However, even the systems failure was determined, so it can’t be blamed either. However, the result is that when the law punishes someone, the person being punished is just collateral damage in a cause that has a greater agenda then just the individual.

Take one who has murdered another. In a deterministic environment, the murderer didn’t choose to think those thoughts nor choose to act on them. The thoughts were determined by the conditions of his environment, and the determined thoughts determined his actions. “He” is just the product of his biology’s reaction to his accumulated experiences with his environment. We can’t blame him for being determined to that course. What we are in effect doing with laws and consequences is conditioning people to behave in a way we have deemed appropriate. If they act against the conditions we’ve set forth anyways, we know that there were conditions greater then the ones we’ve put in place that caused that individual to behave the way they did. By making them faces the consequences we strengthen the effect of the conditions we’ve put in place as it serves as a model for others and that individual for future incidents. But was he really to blame, probably not.

This is how laws function from a determinist point of view. However, as you can see in court, People are held responsible for their actions as though they had free-will, as if they had a choice. Some people are thought to be bad people, while others are thought to be good or ordinary people who simply carried out “bad” actions. Carry out too many “bad” or “very bad” actions (”bad” as determined by society) and you may be considered a entirely “bad person.” Because, you are thought to of had control, had free will to choose to be good or bad.

Where from a deterministic point of view, there are no good or bad people or good or bad actions, just actions and reactions, no value. Just as your being came to exist as determined by the conditions of the environment, your action are determined by the conditions of the environment. Everything moved by cause and effect. Not by some mysterious, uninfluenced, uncaused, personally controlled free-will.

Determinism doesn’t give a squat about the meaning of something. It simply acknowledges that the motion of events\actions are due to a perpetual cause and effect relationship.

Those who think there is free-will on the other hand, they claim they have control and choices, that they are free from causality, and have control to work towards some seemingly meaningful purpose. It seems more meaningful to the individual specifically when they think they have control. So among other motives, I think that people are attached to the illusion of free-will because they are also attached to wanting to be able to create their own meaning, or have control of finding some sort of meaning or purpose to their lives.

I hear so often, those that believe they have free will, when faced with the deterministic viewpoint, they often respond, “what would be the point of that?” or “what’s the point if I don’t have control” So you see, ones search and drive towards meaning and purpose, is a primary motivation for people to want to believe they have free will. This is one of the many reasons why I am skeptical to believe that we have free will, people have ulterior motives to want to believe they have free will.

I often hear people speaking of how they want to be able to reach their “full” potential, as if they were currently operating at some lesser capacity. How I see it is, we are always operating at our full capacity because we only have one potential. Given the nature of causality, the engine of our deterministic environment, ones actions are determined by the conditions of the environment. There are no choices or options, only illusions of choices. There is only one path, one potential. Out of all the seemingly alternative paths or choices we think we see, we are determined by the conditions to only go down one. The other seemingly alternative paths or choices that we did not go down were not really options at all, only further conditions that contributed to determining the path we did take. To speak of “full” potential is to suggest there could have been alternate paths, and choices. But there are not. So, we are always operating at our full potential.

The paradox of perfection is that imperfection is perfect.

The determination of what one feels is “better” is based on one defining a direction of ultimate completeness or “perfected” state of that in which one is trying to better. So betterment must recognize an idealized perfected state in order to determine one is in fact going in the direction of improvement.

But these improvements are just mans idea of how things “ought” to be. If you take man’s discrimination of things out of the picture, is everything not perfect? Everything is as it is, with or without man, despite man’s opinion(s) of it.

Let’s say a tornado rips through your city and destroys it, and so you’d rather it “ought” not of done so. It made a big mess, people died, etc… Your idea of the city being a “mess” is based on how you think the city “ought” to be and look. Because you think the city is no longer how you think it “ought” to be, then you conclude it is now a mess which is by your standards, imperfect. And the tornado caused this imperfection. But this is all based on your perspective of you think things “ought” to be.

When people think that things “ought” to be different then they are, they label the current state of these things as imperfect. When defining perfection, we have to leave man’s idea’s of how things “ought” to be out of the picture or else we run into relativeness and perspectives.

If we just look at how things are without our discrimination of these things, without our opinions of them, and cease to place value on them, then perhaps we can see that the snowflake falls perfectly in place. Or it just simply falls in place, neither perfectly nor imperfectly.