Rudolph wrote:
From observation of those images, and then this lifetime also, and the actions of those around me I pretty much came to the conclusion that if there is such a thing as free will, almost no one is actually exercising it. On the rare occasions where it might have come about I likened it to choosing an "alternate ending" scene that we see in some DVD/movies. Most watch beginning to end and just accept what comes but for those who bother to make the effort alternative scenarios can be played out.
I am still trying to get a clear concept of what it is that is doing the "watching".
Rudy.
Ouspensky, and a teacher of his, Gurdjieff, (
http://www.gurdjieff.org/) had strong ideas about these issues that are worth a look. In a nutshell, they would say that nearly everyone is walking around asleep in a trance, being totally on auto-pilot. Their books are less favored than they used to be, understandably so in that there is a lot of clutching at metaphors that now sound silly (.... I think there were comparisons of things like personalities to atoms and planets and so on, and other oddities, such as the notion that the moon evolves by eating the souls of men, etc etc), but their idea that most people are totally asleep at the wheel is a muscular wrestler. (This might provide you with some additional context in which to take such dim-witted remarks as may appear in these forums, or anywhere else, by the way).
Dr. Charles Tart, one of the biggest names out there in consciousness research, wrote an entire book about this, called
"Waking Up". Most folks will find his treatment of Ouspenski's and Gurdjieff's ideas about this much more palatable. (
http://www.amazon.com/Waking-Up-Overcom ... 0595196640 .... there is also lots of stuff and interviews with him in the web)
Additionally, you might find the book
"Freedom Evolves" (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Evolves) helpful. There, Dan Dennet argues that free-will evolves as consciousness evolves, and makes a pretty cogent case. He is not popular with this crowd (on these forums) because he insists that consciousness evolves from matter and has no use for any notions of non-physical consciousness, but if his work is read with the understanding that particular forms of consciousness do evolve through increasingly complex structures in matter, you're likely to come away from it with more thoughts to think about the whole issue with (that is, a more facile and complex model-ability about it all).
Happy trails!~
-Montana
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