Free Will Is Real
This is one of my greatest philosophical discoveries, yet no one seems interested. The academic philosophers have squeezed all the empirical content out of “Free Will”. Neither the credo of scientism nor the credo of Christianity allow free will. According to the Christians, at least the fundamentalists and evangelicals, god plans everything, and is responsible for everything, good or bad. According to scientism, everything is due to cause or chance, atoms and the void. This is the view of rationalists since Democritus, who is still lauded by contemporary academic scientists.
Let us do a little Aristotelian analysis of science. I say that science should be whatever is established by scientific method (pure logic), that makes no assumptions about the topic being studied. The discoveries of the forbidden sciences are just as valid as the academic sciences, and will be ignored at peril to the future of our civilization. Academics cannot ignore the reductionist credo of the religion of science if they want to keep their position. I doubt if there are any rebels in their ranks anyway. When a scientist begins his talk with “We are stardust,” you know he or she cannot distinguish assumptions from discoveries.
Likewise, I would say that Christianity ought to be whatever was said by Jesus in The Gospel of Thomas, discovered in the Egyptian desert in 1945. This document was written in the common language of Egypt roughly 2000 years ago, called Coptic. It has never been edited, copied or translated (until now), something that cannot be said about the New Testament, continually edited and re-interpreted, beginning with Saul of Tarsus, who created a new religion based on the basic ideas of Judaism, such as the value of sacrifice. Christ’s Passion was the sacrifice to save us from sin, an idea not found in the actual sayings of Jesus. That was only one of several transformations of Christianity. Let us consign all gods and religions to the scrapheap of mythology. We know from the forbidden sciences that they are all false and evil. Take the notions of heaven and hell. The idea that we could be consigned to a particular place or condition for eternity gives me an almost claustrophic feeling. Eternity never ends. Consider how utterly bored you would be after a trillion years. Or a trillion trillion years. You would be no closer to the end. There is no end to eternity. It would take a really evil god to consign human spirits to such a condition. Fortunately, we find no evidence of gods or demigods like Christ (nor angels, demons, heavens or hells) in the empirical research of the forbidden sciences. Breath a sigh of relief.
Common sense shows us that there is an obvious difference between the animate and the inanimate. Machines will never take the initiative to start themselves up. They will never make decisions about what actions to take. When Hollywood wants to show us AI, instead they show us animacy. Herbie the Love Bug starts up on its own and goes where it will, irregardless of the inputs from the driver. We all know that is impossible for machines. Yet it is common to all forms of life, including bacteria, vegetation and perhaps even viruses. Animacy consists in initiative, choice, and purpose. That is what we unconsciously mean by “Free Will.” The professional scientists have never explained this difference, known to everyone by everyday experience.
Arnold Toynbee, the great historian, adds another dimension to the concept of free will. He searches for patterns of challenge-and-response in history, not patterns of cause-and-effect. And he finds quite a few, whereas no one has ever established the cause of any historical event. There have been many attempts, but someone will always come along and pose a counter-example. There are patterns of challenges, undergone by most civilizations, such as an “Enlightenment”, when the old gods and myths are thrown out and replaced (at least temporarily) with something new. “Renaissance” is a common pattern of challenge, and has its good and bad qualities. For instance, the artistic Renaissance in the West destroyed the beautiful art, music and architecture of the Gothic period. There was a brief period of illumination, when this seemed like a good idea, but it degenerated into a stale imitation of classical Greek arts, and then petered out altogether, leaving us with empty boxes.
The responses to common challenges also have patterns. It can be creative or just a retry of old and failed strategies.
Challenges and responses have a connection. The responses are not random, nor are they predictable. They are an attempt to meet the challenge.
BTW, civilizations might be considered a new species of life. Like other species, they have a specific and builtin lifetime, which is 3000 to 3500 years. This requires recognizing that the Greco-Roman civilization had 3 phases: Mycenean, Greco-Roman, and Byzantine. All phases of the same civilization. We are too close to them to see the similarities and commonalities.
The forbidden sciences include Ufology, Psi Research, Utopian Analysis, Toynbeean History and Empirical Metaphysics. “Utopian Analysis” may also be called “The Science of Civilization.” “Empirical Metaphysics” may also be called “The Science of Spirituality.”
They are “forbidden,” not included in the textbooks or the courses of universities, because they violate the credo of the religion of science. They do not reduce to causality, chance, nor to the atoms and the void. So get rid of this religion and this credo that all professional scientists must follow or lose their positions in the universities. This is the chief stumbling block in the further development of our civilization.
C. G. Jung and William James are the cofounders of the science of spirituality. James discovered that the only religious experience which is reproducible, i.e., found in all cultures, whatever their religion, consists in the mystical experiences. These all have 4 qualities. They are ecstatic. There is illumination, i.e., the feeling of being filled and surrounded by light of a certain color. Cosmic Consciousness is associated with the colors of fire, for instance. There is Noesis, the direct apprehension of a truth, like recognizing a face. Lastly, the lessons of a mystical state have an air of paradox in the language of the workaday world.
It was C. G. Jung who discovered the other language, the one that is the same for all humans, all the way back to Cro-Magnons. It is impossible to make a dictionary of symbols, but it is possible to make a dictionary of symbolic elements. A symbol can be considered the combination of several symbolic elements, even if the combination would be impossible in nature. Symbolism, in this Jungian sense, is the language of spirituality and mysticism. It may take years to master.
There have only been about two dozen philosophers in the history of the Western Civilizations over a period of 2500 years. I am the only one alive at this time. If I have helped bring the Forbidden Sciences out of the shadows and made them a vital part of our Civilization, then my success is complete. There will be no need for any additional philosophers. I am the last, the only, and the greatest of all philosophers. I just wish I were a better writer!
~~~Dr. H.