Reduced Libertarianism and the Effects of the Other on Free Will

I've been thinking a lot about the claims of libertarian free will that one can choose to do what one wants when they want to. Although this view of human freedom appeals to me, I don't think we're able to do as it claims. First, I believe our bodies automatically do things we are hardly aware of and choose to do on a constant basis--breathe, digest, and so forth. If I concentrate on the action, I can stop breathing and defacating, but overall I do not think I consciously make a decision to breathe each time. Besides this, there are many habits that we form that may originally have been established through free will, but afterwards lack decision. For instance, I lick my tongue and say "ahh" (sounds dirty, but it isn't), after taking a gulp of any drink, but I don't consciously make this decision. These sorts of habits seem to make it more difficult to apply one's free will. The same would occur with addictions. I'm not quite sure what the difference is between a habit and an addiction, but I will have to think about it. It seems that a habit is an unconscious action one is familiar with doing, while an addiction arises in the forefront of one's mind and one struggles with its occurrence, but one is also familiar with doing it. Hence, it seems we're only able to choose what we concentrate on. Next, life is full of distractions that demand our attention and our thoughts. This could refer to television broadcasts, media, conversations and relationship with others and so forth. It seems that many of the decisions and choices that we make are often given by our interactions with the Other. This could involve one person's ability to consider and think of the salvific mission of Jesus Christ, what ethics are and how we should treat others, what is appropriate for one to eat, and so forth. Now, we do have the opportunity to turn down the others. But they seem to construct what decisions we will make in our lives. If different others in our lives than those we experience, we might have very different characters and lives. Of course, without any world or others, we could not make any decisions at all. So it seems that the more we know and experience the more decisions we are able to make, and what are able to be more free in choosing them also. Moses says something like this in Moses 1, that after experiencing what he does with Jehovah, he thinks about things he never before had supposed. Perhaps God is greatly and growingly free because he experiences and knows much and more and more than others. Of course, the veil then is seen as hugely distorting our original agency, giving a bit of a clean slate as Locke (the empiricist) said. Anyway, those are my thoughts. And I think therefore that knowledge and free will have a larger connection than we give them connection and libertarianism claims are a little too great. I promote more of a reduced libertarianism.

Udderly wasted

D&C 2:3 - Why will the world be utterly wasted at the coming of the Lord without the keys of Elijah? I've read the explanation in Doctrines of Salvation but I don't really remember it. Where is the causal relationship between the powers that Elijah brings and the non-wastage of the world?

D&C 3:1-2 - These verses suggest that God's infrustrationialism is because he doesn't walk in crooked paths. So...does he follow laws so perfectly that noone can stop him? This transfers the power of God over to the laws, doesn't it?

(Funny sidenote: "his paths are straight and his course is one eternal round")

Verse 4 seems to return the power to God. If a man incurs the vengeance of a just God, God is not just a judge in a preset law situation but the dispenser of the law itself. Ooch. Sure we can say he's both but that's like saying nothing at all.

Ok, in verses 5 and 6 it becomes apparent that God is talking to people with which he has entered into a specific contract/covenant, making the whole situation easier. When one is in a contractual situation the other party is given rights both as an originator and executor.

Verse 20: "be glorified through faith in his name, and that through their repentance they might be saved". VERY interesting. Most places in the scriptures it talks of exaltation (glorified) coming through repentance and sanctification and salvation (saved) through faith. This one gives them the other way! Weirdness.

Job rants

So is anyone else sick of this crap you see in job posts and interviews?

1. Every post seems to have these "power" adjectives to define who they want for their position. They're always using words like "dynamic," "synergy," and "charismatic." What the heck does dynamic mean? Do they even know what they want? They've really got to stop quoting terms from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I think Covey's book has become the business Bible from Hell. They try to quote all these fancy terms and I don't think they know what they're talking about.

2. What's with all of the umbrella companies? Why is every office of theirs composed of about 50 people all around the age of 23? They always have this policy of whoever joins the company has to start from the ground up regardless of their background. And then they mask their company's work; they call it "marketing" or "advertising," when it's all door-to-door canvassing of office supplies like Quill. They respond to your e-mails a 1000 times faster than any other company because they want to milk you. Dang multi-level marketing crap.

3. Why is they always want you to have 1-2 years experience for an entry level job? Isn't the point of an entry level job to give you 1-2 years of experience? It's like trying to apply at a college as a Freshman, and for them to list as a requirement to be a Junior. No schooling required in one phrase, but have some schooling being said in the next.

4. What's with getting a job with a temp agency that pays you 13/hour? You work for that company and they say if you weren't with the agency they'd pay you 18. They say you should have looked on Craig's List, but when you look there, no one's offering it!

Wrath?

Doctrine and Covenants 1:9 - "to the day when the wrath of God shall be poured out upon the wicked without measure"

This seems like awful strong language to me. Where does this idea of wrath and fury fit into mormon doctrine of our God? How is this constructive in the god-making process that God is engaged in? It seems like God is a bit pissy, frankly. Why is he so blasted angry? Why does he choose to use anabashed rage to vent his obviously powerful emotion? (kiss it, most unmoved mover!)

Perhaps it's merely a figure of speech to bring us to repentance. This raises huge issues. God is scaring us into being good? Wha..? Maybe it's just the millenarianism of the early saints peeking through in what Jospeh wrote. But we are to see this chapter as the word of the Lord, yes? Is there some type of prophetic quotational liberty at work?

The footnote takes us to Revelation 18:6 - "Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works;"

Why is the Lord doubling it? Does everything get magnified? Are we blessed more and cursed more in the next life for our current choices and actions? Although the idea of greater blessing seems tempting, how is it fair in a more universal sense? Is "she" being rewarded double because she rewarded the saints double or is it a general rule of thumb for the Lord's recompense?

In D&C 1:3 it seems to suggest that the sorrow the sinners feel is the open declaration of their sin, showing their corruption to the world and destroying any facade they've so carefully developed. Is this the "wrath of God"? Seems a ill-advised metaphor, they don't really connect in my mind.

Verses 13-16: What's with the "my way or the highway" attitude? Is the Lord so stuck on His plan that he can't allow others to choose alternatively? One cannot argue that the cursing is simply a natural consequence of the sin as the Lord seems to go to great lengths describing the fact that he is very active in dishing out the pain. A regular pain-train. The celestial punisher. These are not passive punishments that are unavoidable. The Lord is giving a smackdown. Why does he need to do that? It seems to imply weak character.

Verse 17: Total 180. All of a sudden it's a "calamity that shall come upon the earth", a very passive construction. It suggests that the Lord is simply trying to protect his children from the imminent and unavoidable destruction. However, he very emphatically declared that he's the one doing the punishing. Now he steps in a delivers? Weird setup for a growing process...

Pornography, Villiers, and Levinas

So while reading Villiers de I'Isle-Adam's Tomorrow's Eve (a late 1870s work), I came upon the realization that electronic pornography through the Internet has created Hadaly already and broken down Levinas' concept of the Other. The story is about a Lord Ewald, who has fallen in love with an Alicia Clary, a woman who looks nearly identical to the Venus d'Milo. However, she is a heartless and cruel, empty woman, and so Ewald wants to commit suicide. He struggles with what he projects upon her (what he wants her to be according to the look of her outward appearance and what she really is). He visits Thomas Edison (the famous inventor), who he had donated lots of money to when Edison started his work. He explains his predicament to Edison and his intents to kill himself, but Edison urges him to quit his designs and join with him to solve his problem through the creation of the perfect woman, Hadaly. Villiers' Hadaly is the first idea of the "android," which would lady be spun off in films like Metropolis, or TV Shows with Data in Star Trek or in Battlestar Galactica. She is a woman made of completely artifical materials, but made to reflect humanity (another man made in a man's image).

When Ewald doubts his ability to fall in love with the android, Edison scoffs at his resistance (man seems to have this silly idea about being more virtuous by respecting the "real deal"). He says the following:

"You have declared... that the creature whom you love, and who for you is the sole REALITY, is by no means the one who is momentarily embodied in this transient human figure, but a creature of your desire. That is what does not exist in her, much more, you know it doesn't exist there. For you're not a dupe--neither of the woman nor of yourself. You deliberately close your eyes, those of your understanding, you deliberately stifle the voice of your conscience, in order to be able to find in this mistress of yours only the phantom of your desire. For you at least, her true personality is nothing but the Illusion planted in your entire being by the power of her beauty. This Illusion is the one thing that you struggle against all odds to REVIVE in the presence of your beloved, in spite of the frightful, deadly, withering nullity of the real Alicia.

What you love is this shadow alone; it's for the shadow that you want to die. That and that alone is what you recognize as unconditionally REAL. In short, it's this objectified projection of your own soul that you call on, you perceive, that you CREATE in your living woman, and which is nothing but your own soul reduplicated in her. Yes, this is your love; and, as you see, it is nothing but a continual and ever-fruitless attempt at redemption."

In these lines, we see the reduction of the other to the self. And Edison continues on to explaining how now Ewald can truly project his soul upon an Illusion (Hadaly) and get results: "You will see then how the Alicia of your desires will become tangible, concentrated, animated in this Shade... And then you will judge in your own intimate conscience whether this auxilary Creature-Phantom which leads you back to love of life doesn't really merit the name of HUMAN more than that living specter whose sorry so-called "reality" was able to inspire you with anything but the desire of death."

Later, Edison explains to Ewald the new and "better" relationship he will have with Hadaly: "Well, now, with the future Alicia, the real one, the Alicia of your soul, you will no longer have to endure these sterile and bitter frustrations. The word that comes will always be the expected word; and its beauty will depend entirely on your own suggestive powers! Her 'consciousness' will no longer be the negation of yours, but rather will become whatever spiritual affinity your own melancholy suggests to you. You will be able to evoke in her the radiant presence of your own, your individual passion, without having to worry, this time, that she gives the lie to your dream! Her words will never deceive your delicately nurtured knows how to make them. At the very least, you will never experience here that fear of being misunderstood which haunts you with the living woman; you will simply have to pay attention to the intervals between the words she speaks. In time, it may become superfluous for you to articulate anything! Her words will reply to your thoughts, to your silences."

Now, there's definitely something scary about this reduction of the Other, and the lack of interruption Hadaly can give Ewald. She is simply soul of his soul, mind of his mind. It's even more disturbing that she has rings on her fingers, which Ewald can twist and make her do and think things. One causes her to return to a black coffin and rest, which he can lock with a key.

So I began to think how sick it would be for people to have Hadalies, when I came to the horrific realization that many do in many ways through the Internet and pornography. People look into women's faces, hear their voices, but they actually never really see them, look into their eyes, or hear them speak. These images and videos, and 3-Dimensional virtual realities have no souls. They are only a reflection of the viewers: they see more of themselves in the faces of someone else. The computer buttons give commands, and the mouseclicks move the porn stars to other stances. These shades are shaped out of the image of the viewer's mind: they give them thoughts and feelings. But like with Hadaly, they can shut them up, turn them off, bury them back in the coffin, and cause them to re-emerge whenever they please. But it's hard to see how Ewald or the viewers could not begin to apply their relationships with the shades to real human beings. Levinas felt that the human face brought about ethical demands like not killing and so forth. However, what about online? What about digital media? Where the face no longer has a soul, but the viewer's. Does the 2-D screen, and it's lack of 3-Dimensionality allow us to demoralize ethics in humanity? Does the human face there say "rape me" instead of don't kill me? Does the distorted ethics of virtual reality bounce back on reality and cause us to produce shades of the others, and reduce them to the self? Just some thoughts. There may be many Hadalies. After all, 60% of the 600 million websites are pornographic.

It reminds me of a quote by a pornviewer in the book Pornified: "I don’t see how any male who likes porn can think actual sex is better, at least if it involves all the crap that comes with having a real live female in your life."

Egad!

Ever have those moments where you realize that you're not terribly good at anything and significantly less interesting and amusing than you thought? When everything you are doing seems terribly silly and you're not even doing them well? It's somewhat like Heidegger's anxiety, and I got loads of it!

bleh.

Oddly enough...

Funny thing happened today. I finally realized why certain people in the past have decided that enforced celibacy and/or becoming a eunuch could possibly be considered more than sheer lunacy. Formerly I scoffed at the idea, with no idea how anyone in their right mind could even think about it. Well, I think I get it now.

I was sitting in a student philosophy conference and I found myself distracted by a certain good-looking female in the class. I am really quite annoyed that I am unable to control my mind in that regard and that it distracts me from something I love and find important. Later, as I sit on my computer writing a very interesting and impending paper on the philosophy of food I wander off into thought about some girl. Why? Why is it so impossible to keep away from that topic. Right then I thought: "Gee, I wish I could just get rid of these thoughts altogether so I can focus on Philosophy". Go ahead, follow that line. Where does it lead? I suppose if you felt strongly enough you would find a way to repress the desire. Hence, castration, eunuchs, celibacy, etc...

So these people actually had a good reason. It still seems an incredibly drastic measure to me, but if you really, really wanted to focus maybe it would work?