r/determinism

I mean, other than the whole being made of meat thing.

If everything is predetermined, how can God judge us on our actions?

Ive been curious about this so lmk your thoughts

Ciao ragazzi, la cosa che mi turba di più di aver letto il determinismo è che prima di leggerlo io non pensavo che davvero qualcuno avesse messo o potesse mettere in dubbio il libero arbitrio.

Non l'avevo proprio messo in conto.

consciousness can bind many different signals into a single interpretation and then mistake the coherence of that interpretation for evidence that the interpretation describes reality itself. If reality were fundamentally one signal without meaningful differences—without interruptions, contrasts, irregularities, or events that could be experienced as disruptions of rhythm—then error itself would become difficult to explain.

A mind could simply reproduce what was already present. Mistakes become possible precisely because consciousness must creatively organize differences that do not arrive with their meaning already attached. Perception has to distinguish, memory has to relate, emotion has to prioritize, prediction has to anticipate, and thought has to construct relationships among signals that may support several possible interpretations.

Creativity therefore becomes inseparable from both intelligence and error. The same capacity that allows consciousness to discover a relationship that was never previously recognized also allows it to invent a relationship that reality does not support. A constellation demonstrates the problem beautifully: the stars are real, but the lines connecting them into a recognizable figure are contributed by the observer.

Consciousness performs a comparable operation whenever it turns separate events into destiny, fluctuations into rhythm, differences into polarity, internal states into external correspondence, or coincidence into meaningful causation. The mistake is not necessarily in perceiving the individual signals; it can occur in the creative relationship consciousness binds between them.

From the perspective of the Third Eye, this makes disruption especially important. A disruption is not necessarily reality violating an underlying rhythm. It may instead be new information exposing the limitations of the rhythm consciousness previously believed it had discovered. The unexpected event, contradiction, uncomfortable sensation, or failed prediction introduces a difference that the existing organization cannot easily absorb. Consciousness then has two possibilities: force the difference back into its previous pattern or become creative enough to reorganize the pattern itself.
This gives creativity an unusual relationship with truth. Creativity does not mean freely inventing whatever explanation feels best. Its highest form may be the willingness to undo a previously successful explanation when reality supplies a difference that the explanation cannot accommodate.

The Third Eye therefore treats contradiction not as an enemy of coherence but as one of the conditions through which deeper coherence becomes possible. A perfectly repetitive universe would require almost no interpretive creativity; a changing and differentiated reality continually requires consciousness to decide what belongs together, what should remain separate, and when yesterday’s pattern should be abandoned.

Free will consequently appears at the boundary between repetition and creative reorganization. If consciousness automatically binds every new experience according to what it already believes, the past continually determines the meaning of the present. But when consciousness recognizes that even something that feels physically or intellectually true may represent a constructed relationship, another possibility emerges: it can question the binding itself. The freest mind is therefore not the mind that has finally discovered an unbreakable rhythm. It is the mind creative enough to recognize when reality has given it a reason to break one.

The seven Hermetic laws may therefore reveal something important about how minds organize reality without being universal laws of reality at all.

Just a couple of minutes back I had no idea that my throat would play up and I would be coughing at that particular juncture in my speech. Did I know in advance? I didn't. But it happened. You yawn, you cough, you sneeze, you breathe, you ingest food and you find it digested. Do you know how things are happening in the digestive tract, you don't know that. But it's just happening.

Similarly, decision-making. We feel we are deciding matters, but whether you go back to the classic Vedant or you return to modern science, even that which we call our conscious decisions are actually just chemical games being played out in form of thoughts and emotions.

We love to say “I thought this” or “I felt this”. The thing is, there is just the thought and just the feeling. There is no thinker, no feeler. There is just something happening in a biological, chemical way within. And mistakenly, you start taking ownership or credit for it. You start saying “Oh, I felt this way.” Did you choose to feel that way? No, it was just chance and we all are actually puppets.

How many of you choose your thoughts? Well, thoughts come and thoughts decide your choices, right? When you have to make a choice, it is the thought that is the chooser but did you choose your thought in the first place?

Somebody comes to you with some idea or some topic and you say “Let me think over it.” At that moment, do you know what you are going to think about the matter? No. Thought is largely autonomous. And thought has no capacity to see where it is coming from. Because thought has no capacity to see where it's coming from, we mistakenly believe that the thought is coming from someplace called the “I”. No, the thought is not coming from a place called the “I”, the thought is simply coming from hormones, chemicals.

That's where the thought is coming from. So, we all indeed are puppets. Whatsoever is happening in life is just a chemical game. That sounds quite depressing, right?

Acharya Prashant

\*Velleman supposedly refers to the causal theory of action.