I Seem to Have Lost My Mind.

Free Will is the ability to have your own thoughts and then act upon them (make them a reality). Seems simple enough. Clearly, we all have it, right? Acting is pretty easy and self-explanatory, so clearly we can act. The much harder question is do you have your own thoughts? This seems obvious at first glance, but it is far from. Let’s play a little game. Let’s assume it is possible to influence your behavior. Advertising has proven results of modifying human behavior and getting people to desire products they otherwise would not buy. It is measurable and indisputably true. Now, that means that people are acting (expression their will). If their actions are changed by advertising then it is clear their thoughts have been changed as well. So, the fact is you can change someone's thought and the expression of them. This is very well known at the upper levels of power.

Now let's expand our game a little bit. Instead of just creating a demand for purchases. Is it possible to use the same techniques used in advertising to change the way people think about other things? Politicians do polls all the time, they test wording and phrasing to see what has the most impact on changing minds into supporting them or agreeing with their agenda. Now are these messages laden with facts? Or are they emotional charged? Emotions ARE the subconscious, it only functions on an emotional level. Emotions drive our behavior and motivate our thinking. We think about what we are passionate about. Logic is the counterbalance of emotion, the conscious mind is the balance of the unconscious mind. Now when you use emotional charge messages you are attempting to bypass the logical/conscious mind and put the message straight into the unconscious mind. When this happens our subconscious guides the conscious mind to the message and we believe that the idea was our own. This is how emotionally charge messages/news/etc. influence our behavior.

Now let's expand out a little further. When we are children we are constantly bombarded with such messages that shape our minds, and we don’t have the logical defenses to defend from messages that are not beneficial to us and are designed to condition the way we think and therefore act. We are not taught the ways to defend against having our thoughts manipulated by external messages. Are we supposed to believe this is a slight oversight? Or an intentional denial of extremely valuable information? The latter seems much more likely, but the implications are staggering, but that is a story for another day. Philosophy is not taught to the masses, and those that study it are not taught the bigger picture and underlying implications of it. These are needed to be able to defend your mind from the many forms of attack upon it, and why it is the most closely guarded secret there is, for it is what is required to gain/keep free will.

Now lets back up a bit, and look at the opposite side of the same coin. Logic, as strange as it sounds, is another way to attack the mind. Logic without the intuition of the subconscious is another very good way to change thoughts, this time through manipulation of the conscious mind. Logically, you can convince people that really does not exist and everything is a construct (which is also very much present in current culture). Without a good intuition to shut down such things it is easy to get sucked in by the logic… Computer power increases over time, at some point in the future we will be able to have a computer fast enough to model the entire world (reality) we are currently living in, therefore it is highly unlikely we are not a construct of some super computer somewhere and not in “base reality”. Straightforward logic, without intuition it is easy to get sucked in by this meme. But with intuition, it is ridiculous and leads you to think further of the problem. If you have any infinite anywhere in the system there is no amount of computational power that will be able to reproduce the reality. Furthermore it assumes that there is no asymptotic limit that we can continue to approach without ever achieving, then multiplying this limit times all available energy available to power such a machine gives you a limit of possible computational power, and even if there is no infinite in the universe, the amount of power required to reproduce the complexity present would far exceed the the sources available. Further computers are limited to the level of the input, and will NEVER be able to surpass the inputs they receive, it is a contradiction to think that they could, as computers are fundamentally computational devices, they take input and give an output based on a set of rules, and the rules and input are limited to those setting the rules and giving the input. Without good intuition, you will follow the initial logic and come to the conclusion you are meant to have, and many people fall hook line and sinker into these logical traps because they shut down their intuition.

Balance is the key to free will and it requires a broad range of knowledge of these tricks to defend against them and to keep your free will. Most will never get to the point that they have free will and will continue to be locked in their 6 sided mental prison (and defend it with every ounce of strength they have).

Thanks for reading :)

Oz

Image: Flickr user thegeekshallinherittheearth