Thomas Henry Huxley

That my personality is the surest thing I know may be true. But the attempt to conceive what it is leads me into mere verbal subtleties. I have champed up all that chaff about the ego and the non-ego, noumena and phenomena, and all the rest of it, too often not to know that in attempting even to think of these questions, the human intellect flounders at once out of its depth...

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Re Free Will

In reply to an Internet forum post:

Re free will, it is only an illusion when you realise the illusion --that is, you make the illusion real through recognition (reconstructing) of what you thought was one thing as another thing. What stands in contrast to that is participation in the "illusion," wherein it cannot be considered an illusion. That's where free will is real.

I like the analogy of the crescent moon. It hangs in the sky as a crescent --a real crescent --so long as we participate in the illusion that light and dark have presented of what we could, if we give it some thought, see as a partly-lit sphere.

The same thing happens with those pictures of the old/young woman. While you see one --that is, while you participate wholely in one image --the other is suppressed.

Reality to us is a series of images.

Posted by Patty at 10:04 AM

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)