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2Righteous_4God t1_j9ggqi3 wrote

Reply to comment by slithrey in Often mischaracterized as a rather debaucherous, hedonistic philosophy, Epicureanism actually focuses on the removal of pain and anxiety from our lives, and champions a calm ‘philosophy as therapy’ approach in pursuit of life’s highest pleasure: mental tranquility. by philosophybreak

I've started to believe that free will is simply a bad concept. It doesn't even make any sense. Its not that we have or don't have free will, but that it simply is a made up idea that doesn't actually refer to anything real.

The problem is that the self is itself an illusion, and free will is trying to determine if the the main cause of behavior is from within the self or not. Therefor any claim of free will - or no free will - will be completely arbitrary.

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notenoughroomtofitmy t1_j9hcdse wrote

> The problem is that the self is itself an illusion,

As someone who firmly believes in the same notion, it is a pretty wild thing to just assert it as a known fact. Thousands of years have passed debating this very concept, and the roots of consciousness still evade us to this day.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m on the “self is an illusion” team, and being born in the land of the Buddha, we’ve had some interesting variations of this notion. But it isn’t established knowledge. If it were the question of “will” would dissolve away entirely.

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Confident-Broccoli-5 t1_j9k1hdc wrote

>The problem is that the self is itself an illusion

I've found these claims largely come down to how the self is initially conceptualised, someone might say the self is some "inner entity" within experience, upon which someone else may say no it's not, therefore it's declared illusory (similar to how Harris argues for the illusory self). Someone else may simply define self as not a "thing" one has but a "thing" one is, i.e talk of "self" is just talk of the human being I am, not talk of some "self" I own/have. It can largely just come down to linguistics & how we define "self" etc, it's an extremely jumbled topic & can also be conflated with maintenance of personal identity, which is largely a different philosophical discussion. Overall though, I don't see that there is any genuine "problem" of the self, rather just countless linguistic confusions & various moves people make. See here -

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/742/

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slithrey t1_j9oifo5 wrote

Yeah, I agree with this take. The self is just a mental conception that is used by the human animal to set a boundary between what he is directly responsible for and what is the outside world. While the self is a real, definite thing that all humans construct, I think that the illusion comes from the fact that you are not actually separate from your environment, yet it is optimal to operate as if that is the case for survival.

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Confident-Broccoli-5 t1_j9ole9v wrote

>I think that the illusion comes from the fact that you are not actually separate from your environment

It's not clear to me why that should be an illusion, I don't see why individuation can't exist via certain boundary conditions, for example I can't access your mind, you can't access my mind, we're located in different spatial coordinates etc. Unless there's some ultimate "one" solipsistic mind which we are all fragments of, I don't see anything much illusory regarding individuation.

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slithrey t1_j9optln wrote

I personally believe in extended mind theory. I would consider your distance to me the only real thing that prevents your mind from not being accessible to me. But the people around me they go have their own life experience, and then I probe them for their perspective when I require it. Sure I don’t have access to their entire mind, just like I don’t have access to the entire internet (for example, it would be impossible for me to watch every YouTube video) yet I can still answer virtually any question I have through researching via this extended mind. Your personal thoughts like what constitute your identity or your feelings towards a girl aren’t really useful to me, so it’s not so bad if they get filtered before reaching the societal mind. But the people around me I would certainly consider their minds, at least what they are willing to communicate to me, as an accessible part of my own mind. But that muddies the boundaries for my self concept. But my self concept still remains, whether it’s boundaries are muddied or not, I still will use terms like me and I, and that is just a concrete fact that this mental system exists. The illusion is that these boundaries must be set where we have traditionally set them. I am of the opinion I have responsibility to maintain not only my own life, but the life of the people I care about. If my best friend were to die, it would genuinely feel like a part of my own self died; like I lost a piece of my own mind. When I dropped my phone in a lake while kayaking, I lost a part of my mind, many ideas I chose to store on it rather than in my brain or on the internet, and now they’re gone.

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GetPsily t1_j9hsb40 wrote

Also to add, one does not get to choose what their own preferences are, so there cannot be free will. Our preferences come from genetics and knowledge passed down to us from generation to generation /culture. No where is there an individual deciding all these things.

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