Sorry to break it to you but you are 110% a product of everything that you have absolutely no control over.
From the first cell that was you, which contained a genetic you didn't choose, to everything you have been exposed to in your life from what your mom ate, did and went through during her pregnancy, to everything you have been exposed to as a baby when you were a sponge who basically did nothing but absorbing information and developing according to the stimuli you were fed. This created a tangent which became your intelligence and personality, which guided every reaction you had to everything you encountered up to now, every new thing you encounter adding to who you are.
You truly have absolutely no power over who you are. This is all an illusion of control.
and this kind of reasoning is why we have 40 year old virgins.
ReplyDelete"It's not my fault!, my genetics and environment made me like this!"
whether its free will or the illusion of free will, we need to beleive in it lest our ideologies cause us to not take responsibility for our actions and wind up as a homeless bum
That implies that you have the power to change what you believe in... but you don't.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you think you do, any "willful" change of belief is only a reaction to something that provoked you to think that you should change what you believe in and what you end up turning your belief to as a result, is a result of things, ideas, beliefs, events, occurrences that happened before. So you really don't get to choose what you think and believe and you also cannot choose to change your belief.
If for example you decided to change your belief right now to prove that you have the power and free will to change your belief, you are fooled : what made you want to change your believe is reading this and the need to prove that you have free will, because it's a defense mechanism to what would otherwise probably throw you in a pit of despair.
And what made you come across this is that you follow my blog, and the reason why you follow my blog is [...] and the how you came across my blog is [...] and the reason you could come across my blog is because I have come across something somewhere that made me want to get into this, which made me create this blog... and so on... and I haven't even begun to elaborate on what brought me to post this. We could go back like this, all the way to minus infinite. Everything is a chain of cause/consequences, the consequence being our reactions to something... and we don't get to choose our reactions, our reactions are the result of a logical addition of everything that we came across before in our life, which factor the result.
So still, in the example of the 40 years old virgin, if he believes that it's not his fault, it's things, events, occurrences in his life that brought him there, not him who decided to go there.
You can't take responsibility in your actions when you really see that you only reacted to all the input you had, with the input you had previously and that it's that input (or lack of, which you also do NOT control) that made you take a wrong turn. We are logical beings and as much as people may not like this, we DO function like computers.
So your 40 years old virgin is not a 40 years old virgin because he does not take responsibility of his choices, he is a 40 years old virgin because he is a 40 years old virgin. His personality, which he did not choose, his environment, the people he encountered, the situations he has been in, etc, made him a 40 years old virgin. Maybe he's a shy guy? And what made him shy? Maybe how people acted with him when he was young, which destroyed his self confidence (or he never really built one), which makes him sink in fear every time he comes across a woman?
ReplyDeleteCan he take responsibility of his failure? Can he hold himself responsible of the fear his has, of the psychological blockages he has or whatever? No he can't. He did not put them there, things in his life happened that required his brain to put them there to protect him.
If the guy is a wreck, he did not choose it and can't fucking help it. Because for him to be able to not become a wreck, he would have to somehow know what it is not to be a wreck and that's pretty much impossible, because if he knew, he wouldn't be a wreck.
He only REACTED.
Your example is not good at all.
Only if you can find an action that has no explanation can you tell that it's an act of free will... but everything has an explanation, everything has a reason, so there is no free will.
There is even a double standard going on.
ReplyDeleteSometimes people are asked, "If you could go back in time and change something in your life, what would it be?", then often people answer "I would not change anything, because it made me who I am today."
So it's okay when these people are proud and content of who they are, to give all the credit to what they experienced and went through, but when people fail miserably and wish they were otherwise, they should take the responsibility for it?