-
It doesn't matter who did what if we just look after everyone; all this futile effort to keep score is misguided and inefficient.
So many problems go away when you realise everybody's on rails
Keeping score might be misguided and inefficient, but we are programmed to do that. To some extent, attempting to be stronger/ smarter/ more original/ funnier / more beautiful than the next person has driven us to evolve, and our culture to expand.
Culture is an ongoing conversation with both the living and the dead. We like to see patterns and continue them, and we can model the future to some extent. But if we didn't believe in individual free will culture would stagnate. And the future definitely doesn't exist, it's just an idea.
William.-
But if we didn't believe in individual free will culture would stagnate. And the future definitely doesn't exist, it's just an idea.
You don't support either of those assertions... The first I doubt, because free will as an illusion is a far harder concept to grasp and integrate than mortality, so the proportion of folks who actually manage that will always be minuscule.
The second is refuted rather inescapably by special relativity; frames of reference certainly exist in which your future is in somebody else's past, strongly implying the future already exists, and that the perception of 'now' is a figment of awareness.
The universe doesn't provide free lunches, but it has some pretty snazzy tricks up its sleeve to balance the books...
Kimmo
Peeps need to suck it up and face the evidence against the fantasy of free will, and reevaluate their ethics in the light of that.
We can stop blaming anyone for anything and just try to aim for better outcomes via cause and effect, stop taking credit for our good luck, including our character traits, and dissolve the concept of authorship; everything is a remix. It doesn't matter who did what if we just look after everyone; all this futile effort to keep score is misguided and inefficient.
So many problems go away when you realise everybody's on rails. Of course, you'll have to spend the rest of your life trying to get your head around that, but reality never promised to be easy to understand.