Free Will

That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense actually. Thank you.

I don't agree with that. People have spoken out against racism, slavery, etc against the very accepted view of their society. King spoke out against racism in Washington, Mill argued for women rights. They spoke against what they found to be wrong in their society, and did not force the ideas down anyone's throat. Gradually, more people favoured it.

A subjective reasoning of morality, isolates individual systems from the whole, and ignores parts outside of it. It cannot provide truth, for truth depends on unity of information. Thus, only an objective(which includes inter-subjectivity) view concerns me, and a truely objective view regards the phenomenal existence of everyone and with equal respect. Generally, people sometimes are not careful enough in realizing the reality of another person's phenomenal existence; in other words, sometimes people are too absorbed by their egocentric predicament, and that is perhaps a factor in the variety of moral belief between individuals. In searching for what is right or wrong, a person must wake up to the reality of others, and this requires both rational and empirical thought, which includes the capacity for imagination. You could argue that reality is not real, but to no avail, and to no substance. You could also argue that reality is subjective, I argue that our sense perception of reality is subjective, but the source of that perception, and the object that the perception represent, are real.

There is a reason, why the golden rule existed in the west and also as far east as China. The Golden rule implies the reality of others, having us step out of that egoistic predicament and have a sense of what Josiah Royce called the moral insight. It does not mean that we will reach the same conclusion all the time, but it gives a sound fundamental to begin our search.

Ray, Your confidence is humanity cannot be proven. There have been experiments done at Stanford and Yale where students were segregated into two groups, the leaders and the followers. The leaders were told to apply electric shock to the followers to get the response they demanded, and found that all the leaders applied higher and higher voltages to their victims - even when the followers screamed loudly. This experiment showed that it doesn't matter what their cultureal environment; that all humans are capable of applying inhuman treatment to their peers. They had to stop the experiments, because they concluded that everybody has the capacity to torture others.

Yeah, but do they do it on purpose?

You know it's interesting that you should ask that. On one hand I believe that people do sometimes do things like that on purpose. Maybe out of anger, or resentment. Fear or insecurity. Who knows. But on the other hand I can see many things people do are subconsious. Trained behaviors that come out of the circumstances of their lives. It's hard to separate what's what I think.

Right! No one ever seems to get this concept...

Of course not--why would have egos, and the huge task of killing same--if individuality was not important to our Creator?

I think that the ego insulates us to the point of just not realizing unless somehow we are made to acknowledge how we are affecting another.

That's the secret behind the golden rule: it focuses even the ego upon the ego of another, making it almost impossible to inflict negative upon another (that is, if it is held as a true ordinance in the ego's government of the persona).

Do unto others (who cares about others) as you would have them do unto you (ouch--that's me on the receiving end, suddenly!).

Get a gander at this:

Mind control was also used in domestic covert operations designed
to further the CIA's heady geopolitical ambitions, and during the
Vietnam War period SRI was a hive of covert political subterfuge.
The Symbionese Liberation Army, like the People's Temple, was a
creation of the CIA. The SLA had at its core a clique of black
ex-convicts from Vacaville Prison. Donald DeFreeze, otherwise
known as Cinque, led the SLA. He was formerly an informant for
the LAPDs Criminal Conspiracy Section and the director of
Vacaville's Black Cultural Association (BCA), a covert mind
control unit with funding from the CIA channeled through SRI. The
Menlo Park behavior modification specialists experimented with
psychoactive drugs administered to members of the BCA. Black
prisoners were programmed to murder selected black leaders once
on the outside.

The CIA/SRI zombie killer hit list included Oakland school
superintendent Dr. Marcus Foster, and Panthers Huey Newton and
Bobby Seale, among others. DeFreeze stated that at Vacaville in
1971-72, he was the subject of a CIA mind control experiment. He
described his incarceration on the prisons third floor, where he
was corralled by CIA agents who drugged him and said he would
become the leader of a radical movement and kidnap a wealthy
person. After his escape from Vacaville (an exit door was left
unlocked for him), that's exactly what he did.

EM mind control machines were championed at Stanford University
by Dr. Karl Pribram, director of the Neuropsychology Research
Laboratory: "I certainly could educate a child by putting an
electrode in the lateral hypothalmus and then selecting the
situations at which I stimulate it. In this was I can grossly
change his behavior." Psychology Today feted Pribram as "The
Magellan of Brain Science." He obtained his B.S. and M.D. degrees
at the University of Chicago, and at Stanford University studied
how the brain processes and stores sensory imagery. He is
credited with discovering that mental imaging bears a close
resemblance to hologram projection (the basis for transmitting
images to the craniums of test subjects under the misnomer
"remote viewing?").

The Institute is bonded incestuously to corporate sponsors.
Former SRI Chairman E. Hornsby Wasson, for example, was a
director of several major companies, including Standard Oil of
California, and he went on to become chairman of the Chamber of
Commerce and CEO of Pacific Telephone & Telegraph and Bell
Telephone of Nevada.

The SRI/SAIC psi experiments were supervised at Langley by John
McMahon, second in command under William Casey, succeeding Bobby
Ray Inman, the SAIC director. McMahon has, according to Philip
Agee, the CIA whistle-blowing exile, an affinity for
technological exotics for CIA covert actions. He was recruited by
the Agency after his graduation from Holy Cross College (the alma
mater of CIA contractees Edward Bennett Williams, attorney, and
Robert Maheu, hit man). He is a former director of the Technical
Services Division, deputy director for Operations, and in 1982
McMahon was appointed deputy director of Central Intelligence. He
left the Agency six years later to take the position of president
of the Lockheed Missiles and Space Systems Group. In 1994, he
moved on to Draper Laboratories. He is a director of the Defense
Enterprise Fund and an adviser to congressional committees.

Many of the SRI empaths were mustered from L. Ron Hubbard's
Church of Scientology. Harold Puthoff, the Institute's senior
researcher, was a leading Scientologist. Two remote viewers from
SRI have also held rank in the Church: Ingo Swann, a Class VII
Operating Thetan, a founder of the Scientology Center in Los
Angeles, and the late Pat Price. Puthoff and Targ's lab assistant
was a Scientologist married to a minister of the church. When
Swann joined SRI, he stated openly, "fourteen Clears participated
in the experiments, more than I would suspect." At the time he
denied CIA involvement, but now acknowledges, "it was rather
common knowledge all along who the sponsor was, although in
documents the identity of the Agency was concealed behind the
sobriquet of an east-coast scientist."

The Agency's interest was quite extensive. A number of agents of
the CIA came themselves ultimately to SRI to act as subjects in
remote viewing experiments, as did some members of Congress.

"If you recall," astronaut Edgar Mitchell, another participant in
the experiments, informed radio disinformation broker Art Bell on
April 30, 1996, "back in the early '70s, I did work at SRI with
Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ and Uri Geller, and I was invited
to brief the CIA on our results. George Bush was head of the CIA
at that time. Subsequently, a great deal of psychic work was done
by CIA, and very successfully because the Soviets were doing it
at that time as well -- very successfully."

Mitchell spins a cocoon of mystical yarns as outrageously
far-fetched as any of his SRI cronies. He claims to have traced
the brain's center of ESP to native creativity, a "relationship
that exists in nature, it's responsible for our
inner-experience.... It involves the zero-point field, quantum
physics, mystical experience, parapsychological functioning...."
The ubiquitous "aliens," he insists, are at the heart of the
federal UFO cover-up, visitors from a civilization "a few
million, or even a few billion years older than we are." His book
The Way of the Explorer is chock-a-block with the astronaut's
rambling Shamanic cover stories, supposedly the culmination of 25
years of research on intelligent life in the universe and the
paranormal.

Somewhere in here is the concept of free will.

BTW, CI; you write such long posts.

You know how my mind wanders.

neo, I reduced that article by half.

Thanks; I appreciate your efforts.

A veritable needle-in-a-haystack, I say!

We are automatons.

echi, You are 100 percent correct; we are all controlled by our genes and environment. We can't do any more than the limits of our genes and environment, and environment is mostly learned within the culture in which we live. The majority of us are "automatons."

The majority of us? Why not all of us?

We have that small space of what we can call free will when we make choices between going to college or not, to visit Washington DC or Canada, or to retire in Mexico or the US. When looked at from the world population perspective, that number is very small. Most are hindered by their environment or economics.

THANK YOU CI... Though I must disagree with it being a "small" space. Hehehe....

Why must there be any space, at all?

Well, from my perspective, this planet is very "small."