Will comes from within, from inside, and one is always in full control of it. Desires come from without, from outside, and one is not necessarily in control of that. — Samuel Lacrampe

Given that will is about the deliberation (thinking) in concert with desire, those desires figure in to purposeful (and automatic) striving and partially determine what choices one makes, one therefore cannot be in full control of will. Willing deals with motivating factors of which we are not in full control of and at times wish we could be free of. If we are not fully in control of our desires (if we can't inhibit or delay an impulse) then we can't fully be in control of our will.

The instinctual impulse to act in a lock and key fashion developed in evolutionary history long before the module of the neo cortex which functions to inhibit or delay behavior on the basis of reason and preferred future states. The functional power of a neo cortex varies greatly on the basis of a multitude of environmental and inheritable factors by which it develops.

I think you're presenting a prescriptive view. We ought to view (treat) will or intention as something we are fully responsible for(?).

Philosophers dispel and disenchant one second and then they conjure and reenchant the next. Just read a few threads to glean the absurdity that magic isn't anything like what philosophers do, as if philosophy or just being alive has nothing to do with art and the temporary satisfaction of desire.

There is a good Isabella Allende tale where a woman attains power and status by words. From the perspective of the dying culture (the supernaturalism of the displaced native) magic is just a label for what the art of her words accomplish. There is some power retained seeing the new world through the frames of the old one.

One man's 'magic' is another man's engineering. 'Supernatural' is a null word. — Robert Heinlein

Maybe I just like the literary genre of "magical realism" too much though.

If one is forced to do something without their consent, it is called "against their will"; and it is a self-contradiction to say "Their will is changed against their will". — Samuel Lacrampe

The last quoted sentence does make sense in a way because the physical underpinning of whatever is willed at any moment changes. Desires change based on changing circumstance, which may well be against our previous will. There are also competing desires within a person. If you control your will well then it is less likely to change against your will. There are competing wills within a person.

Whatever I will is not what I will because my will arises against me, tortures me. My will makes me suffer as much as it helps to attenuate that suffering.

Going to work everyday is done against my will, but I will myself to work anyway. My present willingness is often changed against my immediately past willingness by ever shifting desires and environmental circumstance.

Unless willing is synonymous with action and less to do what we think we want or intend for a future state.

If this doesn't make sense just ignore me.

we have absolute power over our intentions — Samuel Lacrampe

This is a suspicious claim, unless your saying it is necessary or good to believe it. What is the implication of having absolute power over intention as opposed to conditional power or partial control over our intentions. It's like saying we have absolute power over our will (?).

Now synthesize from Huygens wave theory and Maslow's hiearchy of needs the newly preferred abstract metaprosthetic.

Huygen and Maslow's wave theory of needful boundary breaching.

Don't tell Hanover. He'll unbuckle his belt and start swinging disappointment like the conservative father you never had.

How does one go from being on disability in America to living in some Scandinavian country without dual citizenship? The hurdles for the Scandinavian option are so much more arduous than those in the home country, right? I've the impression that no country really wants to let anyone in who isn't categorically special, useful or rich.

It's about the resentment that folks have for an unfair distribution of traits. The ridiculously good looking are the same as the ridiculously ugly in terms of not having earned their lot (whatever that means). There is the possibility that no lots are really earned as much as casually determined unfoldings of preceding conditions.

See Ressentiment

Nihilism is an outgrowth of ressentiment, which is has its roots in displacement aggression.

There is an anecdote I heard on the radio about the chimp who ripped the face off his keeper. His keeper was giving another chimp cake and this threw him into a violent rage, either from jealousy or envy. Maybe that is like a man's wife having intercourse with another man in front of him.

Imagine a ridiculously beautiful face eating an ridiculously expensive cake on ridiculously cool plates, in a ridiculously fancy house, among ridiculously intelligent friends. We might as well be watching a television commercial. It must be a failure on my part as a human being but seeing such a spectacle makes me bitter, angry and resentful. I'm forever being reminded what I am not and what I don't have that is preferable to what I am and what I do have. I must be part chimp.

Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don't know? — Notes from The Underground, F. Dostoevsky

"Your suns and worlds are not within my ken,
I merely watch the plaguey state of men.
The little god of earth remains the same queer sprite
As on the first day, or in primal light.
His life would be less difficult, poor thing,
Without your gift of heavenly glimmering;
He calls it Reason, using light celestial
Just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.
To me he seems, with deference to Your Grace,
One of those crickets, jumping round the place,
Who takes his flying leaps, with legs so long,
Then falls to grass and chants the same old song;
But, not content with grasses to repose in,
This one will hunt for muck to stick his nose in.” — Faust by Goethe

Suppose we believe that being alive is good in most circumstances.

As it goes with natural selection, there are very few ways of being alive than there are ways of being dead.

The same maybe true of being good (ie. there are fewer ways of being good than bad) but what is good is relative to the needs and wants of those who benefit from goodness. Again, what is good? Says who?

Are planets with life on them better than planets with no life on them?
Is it good that we exist at all?
Is it good that I don't have malaria (do you care)? Parasites will eat.


This is just like Borges library of unintelligible books (a library of all possible random combinations of letters in an arbitrary format). There are more books in that library than there are atoms in the entire universe (this is mindblowing). Such quantities make finding intelligible books vanishingly small. Good books are intelligible books but they might as well not exist the way the library is organized (randomly).

Maybe sometimes what is "good" is achieved by a collective lie. The good is relative to subjective and communal perspectives.

It is good that the USD value of my bank account is currently real (or effective) in terms of what I can buy, despite the fact that the processes that conserve (and erode) it's purchasing power may be violent and exploitative from a certain point of view. What if the value of my bank account depended upon a bunch of insane and globally immoral expectations?

I will conserve myself at the expense of others. We will cooperatively conserve ourselves at the expense of others.

Lying is a means to achieve certain ends, just as pursuing delusion (fantasy) and conspicuous consumption is a means to anesthetize and distract ourselves from the angst and absurdity of life.

Emile Bin's Hamadryad

***

Hans Rudi Giger's art amplifies disgust and terror of technology as a projected onto the natural world. Might as well be a riff on the theme in Bin's Hamadryad.

Praxis' testosterone went down when he lost the status conferred by having the accepted answer. Now he is seeking to displace his aggression to recoup the loss.

He is on his way to kill Alyona Ivanovna, that rent seeking wallstreet bitch. Good riddance... but maybe we should ring the police to save us the nightmare that is a Dostoevsky length novel.

Their thinking is no different than the kind of savage theology practiced by Muslim fundamentalists -- cutting off the hands of thieves, killing women for shaming the family, or throwing homosexuals off the roofs of buildings. — BitterCrank

Just read a passage from Robert Sapolsky's new book, Behave, about honor cultures of today evolving out of the savagery of pastoralism (possibly the early American frontier).

"What constitutes an honor killing? Someone does something considered to tarnish the reputation of the family. A family member then kills the despoiler, often publicly, thereby regaining face."

***

In the rare instances of men being subject to honor killings, the typical cause is homosexuality. "

— Robert Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Worldwide, monotheism is relatively rare; to the extent that it does occur, it is disproportionately likely among desert pastoralists (while rain forest dwellers are atypically likely to be polytheistic). This makes sense. Deserts teach tough, singular things, a world reduced to simple, desiccated furnace-blasted basics that are approached with deep fatalism. " Iam the Lord your God" and "there is but one god and his name is Allah" and "there will be no gods before me" -- dictates like these proliferate... — R. Sapolsky, Behave

The effectiveness of re-tooling or exploiting belief to make money is just a fact of human behavior (innovation satisfying basic needs, doing what works for you).

Evangelicals historically probably had to sell other stuff beside their bibles to make a living. It's that guy who has bibles on one half of his coat and pornography on the other. An apt illustration of human nature (of the entrepreneur) if there ever was one.

Haber process (nitrogen fixation) behind the combustion engine.

about half of the nitrogen atoms in the body of an average person living in a developed country once passed through a chemical plant and participated in the nitrogen-to-ammonia Haber-Bosch reaction. Perhaps no other human invention has had a more dramatic impact on Earth than Haber-Bosch chemistry. — Steven K. Ritter

Article: https://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/86/8633cover3box2.html

Legumes (see crop rotation) and lightning are the pre-industrial nitrogen fixers.

Just inflate the operating metaphor of propagation without poetic shame.

Every act is an act of bearing children (replication of acts). To be is to propagate the world with its own features. This is suggestive of memetic theory.

Not procreating in this metaphorical sense is impossible unless you're dead. I suppose this is more an idea of inescapable karmic recurrence.

An efficient use and a more equal distribution of very basic local resources.

Two old farts next door not farming their farmland, mowing because people mow.

40,000 gallon aesthetic pond (water in the drain) I maintain, using potable city and county water.

Absurd... Water + Land = Sandwich Trees

Trump believes in faux gilded stuff, Russian autocrats and Alex Jones narratives. I don't know enough about domestic and international problems, history, et cetera... to have a worthwhile opinion on the matter of his merits.

He reminds me of a wanna-be mob boss, aspiring to be Putin like, a patriarchal conservative monarch of the plutocratic elite. Anecdotes about his character are seldom flattering.

It's funny how it's okay (unstoppable) that currency can pass all boundaries and limits for the process of wealth accumulation but people cannot.

The most distant end of the future is supposed to be timeless with regard to a high state entropy.

There is a flavor of non-linear time in the experience of recurrent phenomena. The coffee I'm drinking this morning is the same as the coffee I drank yesterday morning. The learned patterns by which I navigate the world recur, just like every tomorrow will have a 7:00 am (with the Sun at it's seasonal point). We can time stamp a peculiar set of relations relative to another periodic phenomenon but I might soon forget.

Everything that matters, that remembers itself, that persists in-itself, is enabled by recurrence in contrast with change. As the poet, William Blake, said two minutes ago: "Eternity is in love with the productions of time."

The body that I inhabit today is by some measures the same as it was yesterday but different by some other measures. You can and can't step in the same river twice, depending upon whether it is (provisionally) the same river you're stepping in.

As you will notice, we have, at this forum, a few people whose referentless angry-noises are a reminder of our grunt-animal evolutionary heritage. — Ossipoff

Oaaarghhhh! Oahooooooo...Ohhhhweeeee!

Flee from this place. These decadent armchair windbags will be your downfall (or consummate marriage).

"There is no inktellectual exercise that is not ultimately useless."

This is a variant of a Borges quote shelved somewhere in his universal library.

I have a recurrent day dream about medical students reading tattooed instructions on how to fashion a magical fetish from my bones, something like the One Ring or a Horcrux by which my imaginary soul continues to wreak its ineffectuality and nonsense in the world.

“Ancient Spirits of Evil, transform this decayed form to Mumm-ra, the ever-living!”
~Mumra

Mircea Eliade's work might be worth exploring. He tries to articulate the difference between our modern linear conception of time and mythic (cyclic) time and the resulting existential attitudes evoked.

Mythic time is a play or performance of world structuring/ordering myth, a recurrence of sacred forms and that which is of tradition or by necessity valued. The profane in his scheme is akin to chaos or the ignored possibilities of new ways of being and doing, that which doesn't enter into the mythic reproduction (or actual cyclic return, like 7:00 am every morning, the sun rising every morning, revolving habits, et cetera.

Eliade believed that mythic time protected our forebears from the anxiety of an unknown and uncontrolled future full of contingency which we as moderns now have to live with. A belief in eternal return attenuates the modern fear of death. Though the myth of Buddhism represents this anxiety of time again with eternal return. We're now anxious of sufferings of an eternal return in this veil of illusions.

Leading up to that, the person is already in Timelessness, not expecting, wanting or knowing of the existence of anything else. — Ossipoff

We're hinting here at the psychological value of eternity and timelessness as an experience rather than an unknowableness (Nothing) that exists between experience.

This moment here (now!) is the fleeting moment (eternity) before death.

I want one of them to walk away from the fight and disappoint those who would be disappointed by it.

I'm rooting for whoever is a disappointment or a spontaneous pacifist.

Displacement aggression is such a relief. I have to displace the pissing off by pissing off something else.

This is the premise of a short story by J.L Borges, The Secret Miracle.
Hladik spends a paralyzed year of time (a suspended moment of subjective time) before a firing squad with which he is able to finish a work of fiction (in his head) before he is killed.

Jacobs Ladder (film) is another, where the protagonist is living a second hallucinatory dream life at the moment of death.

There is also the Strange Life of Ivan Osokin (by Ouspensky) where a man gets the chance at reliving his life with the intention to change its direction but is oddly is unable to do so. Things play out exactly as they had before despite the knowledge he has about it. So in a way he is just a passive observer (ie. suspended in time) to what has already occurred.

Then there is Groundhog Day (film) which deals with the eternal recurrence of a single day. So while the protagonist can learn and benefit from the passage of time he is somewhat cell bound but also liberated by the phenomena of recurrence.

There is Nietzsche's idea Eternal Recurrence but perhaps there is another thread for that. What use did N. think this thought experiment had, I'm not sure? What insight can be gained from these fictional scenarios and though experiments?

You can ask what happens in these fictional scenarios or how they relate to our actual experience with time and knowledge that we are going to die. We're a bit special with regard to the awareness of our own mortality and our the culturally contemporary impressed fears about death. Could it be otherwise? Is it otherwise for other people?

As I mentioned at the other topic where this came up the other day, "It is what it is", is a meaningless truism, conveying no information, saying nothing. — Ossipoff

"It is what it is" is but a shadow, a poor truism
That appears and is judged upon this forum
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by a mind, full of banal cogitations,
Signifying nothing.

~Michillam Shakessipoff

If your other hobbie (career) is sourced in some kind of exploitation (ex. selling over priced diamonds or commemorative coins on QVC, sex trafficking, selling poison) and you feel guilty about this then you may want to attenuate this guilt by charity. Then you can give the charity back to those you are unfairly exploiting as a consolation for the inescapable violence of being.

Just remember, every vinyl disc requires a virginal sacrifice to the Sun to come into being. They call them blood vinyl in my culture. Willing sacrificial virgins are a dime a dozen though, so you've nothing to worry about.

That reminds me: people who say cliche lines right out of a book in response to negative situations. Bonus points if you just opened up to them or asked them for personal advice. — Chany

Yeah, well, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Duh.

Your reply is insufficient but it is what it is. It could've been other than what it was.

Everything happens for a reason. Say what you will about it, but it is what it is.

Don't forget about divisions of Eros as conveyed in personified deities.

Pothos (Sehnsucht), desire for the dead or missing, a lack, the unobtainable, the past.

Pothosophy (wandering the necropolis or desert in search of life, wandering the vale of illusion in search for truth or wisdom which is never satisfying, never ceasing, never a sufficient substitute for unmet needs, like other kinds of love)

I guess the following is just about affective realism...

Perhaps the Pieta was associated with warmth in Cavacava's memory because it was inside a warmer place (inside rather than outside). If the Pieta was luminous for viewing it might further strengthen the the association, especially if the background was much darker, the way an experience of a fire place does in winter.

The coldness of death (the effects of winter exposure) juxtaposed with the memory of a mother's love (warmth of a caressing body). Mary is inside, grieving (not hysterically since she is quite silent, stoic) over a corpse (which is quite fresh, sterile and pure like the marble it's made out of). Mary is the hearth (source of warmth and light). Mary is a good ma (not an uncaring selfish vindictive bitch who is suffering from Munchausen by proxy syndrome) .

The light attenuates the subtle universal anxiety of darkness, the warmth attenuates the uncomfortable cold, the marble does not stink of death, et cetera.

But at the moment, there is no tea, and therefore no pleasure. The pleasure that has not yet happened cannot be the cause of its own production. It can only then be the pain of thirst. — unenlightened

Likely you're lacking a bit here. Dopamine peaks at a much higher level to get you to make tea than when you're actually drinking it. Desire/anticipation is pleasurable(?) or motivating. Apparently worn out amphetamine users get high before the drug enters their system by anticipation and a conditioned reward circuit.

Is there a contemporary theory about sublimation (Freud's idea) that works or is relevant to explaining motivation? Hunger, sexual or social desire, status seeking, and pain avoidance could all be very fundamental to what moves us to do anything.

We play games where the pathway of reward is intelligible (we know what folks expect from us in this setting). The dopaminergic reward system helps to habituate patterns of conduct that help us satisfy instinctual needs in a socially acceptable way.

The variable reward (ratio) schedule of the forum might explain why folks here are attracted to come back. There must be a dopaminergic reward in worthy types of positive feedback relative to the expectations or needs of the poster.

Isn't it a kind of category error. Sure brainwaves may indicate thought, but they are not thoughts, they are brain waves. — Nils Loc

I'm not sure what the significance is of category error.

In those articles it appears that interoceptive or exteroceptive status (ie. whether or not you are hungry or horny, suffering, cold, hot etcetera) heavily influences value appraisal and what you read or project into an aesthetic construct or object at any time.

Scientific American: The Neuroscience of Beauty

NYT: A Small Part of the Brain and Its Profound Effects

It's not hard to imagine the state of being and existential conditions in which one would die or kill for a cause.

There are some crazy historical scenarios of ritual suicide and sacrifice. Indian kings cutting off parts of their body in front of everyone, Native Americans joyfully (?) being killed by their captors, Japanese sticking a knife in their gut in a public display of Seppuku, wives being burned alive with deceased husbands (Sati), Mayan ball game winners partaking in voluntary sacrifice, a sacrifice to the cornerstone of the city state, entire servant retinues being killed and interred with the a king...

I think we fear death too much in our Western culture.

Scientific American: Fear, Death and Politics: What Your Mortality Has to Do with the Upcoming Election

Mortality Salience (wikipedia)

Terror Management Theory (Wikipedia)

It seems that being reminded of death brings about a negative effect, enhancing the sense of your own importance and the importance of your own culture and group whatever it may be based on as opposed to 'others'. — eddiedean

Why not just characterize this as a "positive" effect, especially in rare cases where an existential threat (terror) is imminent like war. The amplification on "self-esteem" by MS would make sense as an evolutionary adaptation, priming the brain in facilitating action, decision-making and movement to avoid death.

Some ideas that could work into your absurdly beautiful and tragic narrations:

Sublimation -- An indirect or learned means to fulfill desire. Putting desire to work for you, or the effects of limits placed on desire.

Sehnsucht -- Unfulfilled desire which no attempt quite satisfies, whether we undertake philosophical or poetic means or not to try to fulfill that desire. A desire for something dead or passed, nostalgia for the most beautiful time, the 1st of times, for God, for the ideal, et cetera.

Dopaminergic Reward System-- Greed is good. Every time around you have to transcend the base rate to maintain addiction. Without dopamine beauty isn't what it is. Beauty helps you to bootstrap (lure you) out or into situations with the promise of reward.

Maya (Veil of Illusion) -- Beauty Incarnate beyond which Nothing Exists. Endless sublimations, sehnsuchts and dopamine hits that go on and on until death. Symbolizing the whole in a nutshell (or in a part) by sheer force of illusion.