What We Can’t Help But Teach Our Children

Carl

New comment to an old post I just read for the first time.

Carl. I believe in your idea of no-free-will in the sense of our self-conscious fooling itself about it making all of the decisions.

But this is not the Free Will that is knocked out by the "hard" determinism of today's science.

Quantum Mechanics is a deterministic theory. (Probabalistic, but deterministic.)

And. if consciousness arises from deterministic physical processes in the brain, there is no way you can have any free will. They are not opposites. They are just logically incompatible. What ideas even the brain stem initiates, are just epiphenomenal and don't make a difference to what has already been determined to happen.

So, if there is no free will even at the level of the brain stem, what are we to do with this idea that we can change ourselves by studying the Tao? LOL.


(QM does point to something that might break this view, but that's enough of my undergrad Philosophy of Science mash-up for now

Carl

Among other things, parents wish they could teach their children the wisdom they’ve acquired over the years. Some say parents do, but I say fundamentally not so. Indeed, the world would be much different by now if wisdom was teachable. The wisdom we gain in life comes from learning from our mistakes. In other words, as the Tao Te Ching puts it, [chref=36]if you would have a thing laid aside, you must first set it up[/chref].

Alas, one ‘teaching’ we can’t help but pass on to our children are the ghosts of our fear and insecurity. Naturally, this makes perfect sense from an evolutionary point of view. Animals that raise their young pass on some sense of what is fearful in their environment. The major difference between us and other animals is that we also pass on our ‘ghosts’. The ghosts are those uniquely human fears and insecurity rooted in our psychology.

Thus, at best I would say that the only wisdom we can hope to pass on to our children is the absence of past ghosts – any of those psychological fears we set up and laid aside over time. In so doing, we avoid passing on what might psychologically cripple our offspring. There in we see the advantage of either (1) being raised by older parents or (2) having many emotionally mature (wiser) elders intimately involved in a child’s life. The latter was a de facto reality of ancestral tribal life. The former may become a de facto reality in the future. Perhaps we’ve been in a transition between the two for the past 10,000 years or so. :shock: