Free will hasn't died just yet...

Absolutely!!!
This is most most interesting.
I have actually just ordered thee books by Peter Sloterdjik for vacation reading this winter.
But this Rules of the Human Zoo book you mention, has it been translated from German to English yet?
Ushta
Alexander

2009/11/11 Special Kain



I'd like to add that - even though the neurosciences are the hawtest thing at the moment - brain research hasn't proved that we were unable to consciously make decisions. The social neurologization process doesn't make all neuroscience to be true. A free will is only as free as we've managed to grow intellectually and socially. So all the «absolutistic» fuzz about free will is definitely outdated, but the furious opponents are just as hasty. Free will isn't dead, its practical meaning has just changed according to decent and solid research. Please remember that there's also a lot of junk being produced in brain research. The same applied to chaos theory and that dreadful «quantum religion» more than 20 years ago.

What's important now is to look at domestication and selective breeding: how settled communities and their house pets started civilizationism and how this led to people creating people. Civilization and education should be dealt with a little less romantically. Please see Peter Sloterdijk's «Rules of the Human Zoo» for further information. The house metaphor is tremendously important (especially as understood by Plato, Nietzsche and Sloterdijk) when combined with Sloterdijk's auditive metaphors (rather than Greek philosophy's obsession with visual metaphors). This becomes truly interesting when studying «The House of Songs»: it will reveal itself as a metaphor for a truly global and all-inclusive transhumanist society and communicative community. Songs do teach us and connect us to The Others sphereologically, thus inspiring communities.

http://alcor.concordia.ca/~gnosis/vol_vi/sloterdijk.html

The topic is highly interesting and fascinating!!!

Ushta, Dino // strongly believes that contemporary Zoroastrianism must start with John Dewey and Peter Sloterdijk, therefore overcoming both Baruch Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche

--- Special Kain schrieb am Mi, 11.11.2009:


Von: Special Kain
Betreff: [Ushta] Culpability (was: The Concept of Freedom)
An: Ushta@yahoogroups.com
Datum: Mittwoch, 11. November 2009, 11:14



Dear Alexander,

I agree 100%. "Free will" started with culpability: to hold people responsible for their wrongdoings. See John Dewey's essay "Philosophies of Freedom" in "Philosophy and Civilization". Our wills can't be separated from our drives and desires, our social and cultural situation, our parents' situations, education etc.

Freedom of choice can't be separated from education and intellectually stimulating environments. Freedom really starts with intelligence. This is why I consider Dewey to be a proto-Zoroastrian thinker. I just don't think that Zarathushtra knew all that already. It's a choice between good and wrong (Asha vs. Druj), so it's a different kind of culpability.

Ushta,
Dino // now digging deep into Peter Sloterdijk's post-Heideggerian neo-Nietzscheanism