Predestination, free will, control and the illusion of time.

Q.  Are "predestination", "free will", and "no control" all the same thing?    

G.  There have been many questions about "predestination" lately, including those for  "my" videos "Everything is Predetermined: Einstein and Ramana Maharshi", "You Are Not in Control" and "Intelligent Choice is Impossible".  To address these  excellent questions, there is a new, unrehearsed dialogue w/Rich Doyle "Predestination, control, free will and the illusion of time".

Rich Doyle
Penn State 

Rich was introduced in the blogpost "Obstacles, tactics, misconceptions, delights of nondual awakening" on the video "NonDual Awakening Obstacles, Tactics, Misconceptions".  Rich is a Liberal Arts Research Professor @ Penn State and a prolific and eclectic writer.  His books are "Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants and the Evolution of the Noosphere", "Wetwares" and "On Beyond Living".  His presentation @ "Psychedemia: Integrating Psychedelics In Academia" at Penn last fall was "Ecodelics: Information Technologies for the Mind Beyond Thought".   

  Rich also wrote the Foreword, and was very helpful w/my soon to be published "Dancing Beyond Thought: Bhagavad Gita Verses and Dialogues for Awakening".  

Here is the redacted dialogue from the video:

Rich Doyle.  So has all of cosmic history led up to this dialogue on predestination?

G.  Yes, everything since the Big Bang has conspired to bring us to this point at this time.

R.  Not sure how you came up w/that logic, but maybe we can discuss it a little bit.

G.  If you just look back at your life and consider how many things had to take place  before now to come to this place and time.  If anything out of the millions of things in your past had been different, you wouldn’t be here right now…if your grandma had gotten onto a different bus or had gone to a different party, we wouldn’t be here today.   

What could you take out of the stream of events in the past that wouldn’t matter?   The difficulty is that you don’t know which of those events didn’t matter and how much it changed everything that came after it.

Rich Doyle
Penn State

R.  Right, this is what the time travel science fiction stories get into.  That makes a lot of sense in deconstructing the idea that we are in control.   You can see that there is way too much complexity there to have possibly made a choice where you caused yourself to come into being.  Did you decide when you were going to be born?  When you will die?

You can see that the “I” is an illusion; it’s kind of a mouse/cursor that we use to move through the world.   Maybe in some evolutionary situations it was favored, but it’s not the case that we exert control.   We’re not in control.

But a more subtle philosophical point is that just because we’re not in control doesn’t mean that everything is predestined.  We can imagine scenarios on the continuum between total chaos and total order, where true enough, there’s too much complexity for our “I”, if it existed, to be in control, but how does that play into the idea that everything is predetermined?

G.  It is funny how differently people feel about the three different aspects: predestination, free will and control. 

If you ask “Are you in control of every facet of your life?”, almost nobody will say “yes”.  They’ve all been through natural disasters, car wrecks, etc. , but they will say they’re in control of some things in their lives.  They say they can make some choices.  But that becomes the same thing.  Which of those choices were unimportant?  We just don’t know the implications of our choices.

R.  But that could be the argument against predestination.  The present doesn’t allow us to know what the future is going to be because it’s not determined.

 

G.  Yes, but you can’t step out of the dance.  We assume that we step out of the dance and make a decision.  Then everyone has to wait on me to decide before the dance can go on.  That doesn't happen.

 

R.  We give up individual personal control.  If everyone is one thing, then that includes past, present, and future, then there is no openness in the future, it’s all already happened.

G.  You have your two poles, either completely chaotic or completely ordered.  I don’t have any sense that my life is chaotic.  On the contrary, my life is massively serendipitous.  It’s not just me, everyone can see that their life is serendipitous, filled w/happenings they couldn't even imagine.  There is a lot of obvious “predestination” in our lives.  

Order is obvious to me.  Do I have any ability to change the order myself?  I can’t step out, alone, of this massively interconnected universe and make a different decision from what’s moving through the dance.  We have 7 billion people; if everyone steps out of the dance then we’re in chaos.

R.  Are the only choices total order or total disorder, or is it that what is unfolding is different levels of disorder, that what we have is emergent evolution?  Is it possible that not even the Cosmos itself knows what is going to happen which undermines the sense of predestination?

Higg's Boson

G. It is a question of temporal scale.  If "everything is One thing", if there is a Unified/Universal Field (She), and if the Universal field is the Higgs field and it is “self aware”, which we have no way of knowing, then everything gets explained in quantum mechanics, etc. and predetermination also gets explained.  

She doesn’t have to know far in the future; She is a local as well as a nonlocal entity.  She is learning, moment by moment.  We are not in charge of that but that doesn’t mean there isn’t Something that is all-knowing, that isn’t dancing this picosecond by picosecond.  That’s the part that we can’t step out of.  That’s the part that is predetermined. 

R.  That’s where this experience of Oneness is the major premise of this argument.   If you experience Oneness and synchronicity, then it becomes obvious that everything is unfolding exactly as it should.  Because we can’t know, we believe it can’t be known.  

On whether the Higgs field is self-aware, we can know that in a way it’s self-aware, because we know about it and we are an attribute of that and are not in any possible way separate from it.  Then it’s not a stretch at all to say that it’s self-aware, that’s how we know what it is.  If we can’t be separated from the Higgs field, and we are aware, then of course it has “self-awareness”. 

G.  It is all pervasive.

R.  All pervasive, it manifests matter, and we know that we are conscious.  The fact that it is “self aware” is then something that can be observed empirically by oneself.

     

G.  You mentioned the value of being able to see that everything is one thing.  You can also see that time is an illusion.  You fall out of the sense of time and you only live in “now”.  There is only “now”.  There is never a past or future, it is always “now” again and again and again.  So that changes the speculation about predestination.

Our predestination is “zero” other than the fact that the Field is moving and modifying picosecond by picosecond.  When you get out of the sense of time, then that is much more apparent to you.  The Field is continuously reformatting and changing, picosecond by picosecond.

R.  So this thinking of predestination helps us come up against the fact that the future is itself a kind of fiction, because it relies on our separation from present moment, and if we dwell in present moment, the question of predestination doesn’t even arise, because we just are.

G.  There is no sense of time.  Without a sense of time, the whole idea of predestination doesn’t mean anything.  There’s just “now, now, now” unfolding. 

R.  And the feeling of predestination is “I have always been and I always will be”.

G.  Right, right. 

The blogposts "i get "no free will"intellectually but can't make it real"  and "You say 'we have no free will' and 'we're not in control'...is that experience, science or philosophy?" discuss other aspects of these issues.

Mark Shriver
Penn State
genetic anthropologist

The videos in the "Dialogues on Awakening Beyond Thought" (DOABT) series w/Rich Doyle are produced, directed and co-edited by Mark Shriver, the "off camera" voice.  Mark is a highly-regarded genomic/genetic anthropologist with over 100 publications.   

The other DOABT videos are:


       Why the resistance to having fewer narrative thoughts?

       Functioning w/o thoughts...sex, psychedelics and nonduality

       Psychedelics, sex and/or nondual awakening?

       Making awakening too complicated...pitfalls and barriers

       How much should teachings cost?

      Using dialogue for awakening

      Oneness - What is it?  How does it arise? What does it mean?

     Can inward revolution change sustainability?

     Letting go into the bliss and joy of stillness

     Self-inquiry practices on a busy schedule

     Higher functioning w/o thoughts

    Guilt and shame...are they useful or dysfunctional?

    Dysfunctional evolution of the mind 

   
     If you put (Gary Weber nonduality) in the youTube search box, you will see all of these and related videos.