Will and freedom

I agree, I agree, I agree!!!
Where did you get your SMART brain from?
The will is not the problem, it never was. Every body has a will (or rather a multitude of wills). And wills are fascinating in themselves. Because what is the life we hold so sacred if not the wills involved?
The creative problem is rather what we mean with "freedom".
As I see things, there is really no freedom involved in the immediate act since we act as we are programmed to act at a given moment. This is also Zarathushtra's point with the all-important ORDER of thoughts, words and then actions last. The focus is on the THOUGHTS because only there and then can we adjust ourselves to prepare ourselves for the coming actions.
But, and this is the important but, acts of the future are an entirely different thing.
Our identity is intertwined with the choices we make towards how we should react in the future. This is where a "freedom" appears, the freedom to choose between different "programs on how to act". For example: Reading an emergency plan when we enter an airplane we decide then and there how we should act SHOULD en emergency occur. Once the emergency does happen, we act as we had planned to act.
It is this TIME perspective which I find unique in Zoroastrian ethics.
But the normal religious freedom FROM something is unnecessary here. There is no judge beside the internal judge in ourselves (our superego, as Freud would have it) involved. Not as far as I can see. Rather, Zoroastrian ethics is to UNITE superego and ego and make them one as much as possible.
Please correct me if you find me wrong. Or if you want to dig deeper into the issue.
Ushta
Alexander

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2008/9/23 Special Kain

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Dear Alexander,

I'm quite familiar with the distinction between philosophies of Being and philosophies of Becoming, since I'm not new to the history of philosophy and have always been fascinated with the philosophers and schools of thought concerned with Becoming rather than Being. :-)
The question I'm interested in is not if there is any free will as an abstract absolute at all, shining brightly in a transcendental sky, but whether it's a will free from something or free to do / towards something. Bearing this in mind most claims and teachings concerned with the old distinction between free will and fate / determinism seem completely obsolete.
Thus, free will doesn't exist from the beginning. There's a deliberating learning process towards increasing independence, there's the ability to learn and apply the things we learn to our future thoughts, words and deeds, there's trained self-control.
Some postmodernists think of themselves as the smartest thinkers on Earth, but Peirce was a lot smarter almost 100 years before them!

Kind regards, Dino