(April 19, 2015 at 8:26 pm)Nestor Wrote: That doesn't negate the fact that every moment proceeding another is also rightly conceived as a series of perhaps billions or trillions of antecedents that led to the current result. In the same way that one must be educated to properly employ words and ideas, so too must one be trained in consideration of the real or apparent good and the real or apparent bad. How you behave, and the decisions you make, will reflect the character produced from repeated exercise in either of the two departments. As a physical process, we are never fully aware of the causes shaping our desires or the principles from and through which our chain of reasoning occurs in conscious deliberation. When a person says, "I chose X," they are correct in describing the situation as such in the context of human experience, but it tells us nothing about the deeper reality underlying ourselves, and this we can only approach by more precise definitions of "I" and "chose" and experimental data of the mechanics actually involved.
What happens when you are presented with a field of data so massive as to be incalculable? I mean, absolutely and hopelessly incalculable?
It seems to me that you have to give up tracking the depths of reality, and rely on symbols and metaphors. If this weren't true, the term "butterfly effect" wouldn't exist. The difference between my position and Rhythm's, I think, is how we see the relationship between symbols and self. To me, the self IS the symbols and metaphors-- all the ideas that make up the world view. To Rhythm, I think, the self is a human animal with a brain, i.e. the self is the body which USES the symbols and metaphors.
