Advocating the Devil VI
I Am
Did ‘I’ decide to write this? Did ‘you’ decide to read it?
Are we able to make choices, or is what we do determined by circumstances completely out of our control?
Did either of us will our actions, or are we puppets of forces we don’t control or understand?
In asking these questions, we are inquiring into the nature of both our being and reality at large. It requires us to look at the relationship between mind and body, the concept of causation and the process behind the evolution of ‘things’. To discuss free will and volition, we must work out what we believe we are, what life is and how it got here.
What am ‘I’? What do I mean by ‘I’? Am ‘I’ a mind? A brain? Both? Neither?
Who is pulling the strings? Is there even a who?
In searching for what is true, my skepticism has led me to constrain our knowledge to pragmatic truths that we believe and embody, in so far as they produce the results we desire and expect. Thus, we are much more able to determine what is false by observing how we were wrong, than to be sure of the accuracy of any of our current theories. The scientific method is one of the most effective ways to develop useful models of reality, although we also do it naturally by acting in the world, paying attention to the results, and forming beliefs about what happened.
However, we enter into the domain of speculation and belief when we discuss the implications of our models and construct theories about the nature of reality. I ask the reader to bear with me as I clarify my thinking, as the topics I am attempting to cover in this chapter are hard to scope, as so many threads are pulled upon opening the ‘Pandora’s box’ of our own being. I am forced to weave in commentary by a larger selection of thinkers, as their thoughts become relevant to the discussion, and will keep pausing to define any unfamiliar terms of importance. I will try to outline the polarized ontologies we’ve alluded to thus far in more detail, in search for a place I seem to rest my flag.
The founder of modern philosophy, Renee Descartes, set out to take skeptical inquiry to the extreme in order to try and find what he can be sure of, which resulted in his cogito, ergo sum — I think, therefore I am. Descartes philosophy was one of dualism, in which he granted two substances: matter and mind. In his view, the physical properties of matter are characterized by extension in space, while thinking and experiences constituted the mental properties of the mind. The ‘thinking thing’ was the rational soul inside of an otherwise machine-like body it inhabited, as he accepted the views of the physicalist paradigm in which matter resides. In fact, this soul was seated in the pineal gland in our brain and is that which gives us free will over the mechanical body.
There are many problems with this view, although it is a good place for us to start in recognizing the hard problem of consciousness. If one accepts a physicalist paradigm, they are left with the tough question of explaining why any physical state is conscious at all.
Why is it like something ‘to be’ certain physical systems?
Why are qualities and feelings experienced by a ‘subject’, if things are merely physical arrangements?
These questions are important to solve the mind-body problem and physicalists have taken an alternative approach to Descartes, in rejecting dualism in favor of a belief that physical properties completely determine mental ones. There is another issue tightly intertwined with this belief, that has to be addressed in order to accept it, which is the issue of causality itself. I have to bring Hume back into the discussion, as he took empiricism to its ultimate conclusion in his skepticism of our ability to infer the causation of events.
Hume recognized that we believe that ‘A causes B’, only because we have observed B associated with or follow A over the observation of events in our past experience. However, we must assume the future will resemble the past in order to trust these observations, which can only again be justified by an appeal to our past experience — which is a prime instance of circular logic. Thus, we can only experience correlations and any student of statistics knows that correlation does not imply causation, as an unidentified C could be the true cause of both A and B. At best, our notion of causation simply points to the sequential ordering of things — with physicalists using this as evidence that physical events and chemical states in the brain either occur prior to or in association with any event that we could consider freely chosen by our mind. Before addressing the problems with this, let’s return to the nature of consciousness to try and tease out the insufficiency of the physicalist paradigm in the face of it.
Descartes’ conception of consciousness has been criticized by the physicalists, as it positioned the mind as independent from the body, in that it is immaterial and lacking spatial extension. The physicalists point out that damages to the brain causes material differences in the experience of the ‘thinker’ and that mental properties cannot be observed without embodiment. Further, there is no single seat in the body in which the soul could be situated, as what makes us what we are is distributed throughout it.
The new atheist philosopher Dan Dennett has argued that many of his fellow physicalists still hold remnants of Cartesian dualism in their theories of mind, and set out in his book, Consciousness Explained, to answer the hard problem in a materialist way. He took issue with what he called the “Cartesian theater” which is a supposed place in the brain in which a ‘ghost in the machine’ is experiencing sense data and making choices. He instead put forth his “multiple drafts” model of consciousness, in which conscious experience is likened to a virtual machine, in which multiple drafts of information processing happen in sequence and parallel over many parts of the brain, giving the illusion of a continuous experiencer, even though there are only distributed physical reactions underlying the phenomena.
In this view there is no difference between the consciousness of a human and that of a supposed zombie or sufficiently complex computer, as each are examples of the same physical processes at work, as consciousness is nothing different than its effects on our behavior. Dennett somehow maintains a compatabilist view on free will, as he believes that we can redefine the term to still hold us accountable for our actions. He says that the choices we make start from indeterminate options, even if it is determinate in what we will select once they are presented. He claims that since there were other options available, we should still hold people responsible for their actions, as it could result in better actions in the future.
Of course, Dennett hasn’t really addressed the real problems. In his model, he has simply explained the phenomena of conscious awareness and qualia away, as he would have to introduce a stream of ‘Cartesian theaters’ of experiences to account for consciousness in his view. I don’t think it should be that controversial to accept a version of his model with that tweak, as it is clear that our consciousness is shaped by our whole brain (and body), and isn’t only output at one spot. It is also true that physical damage to the brain and body affects the quality of the experiences one has, although it is impossible to tell whether that should imply the body is the ‘generator’ of consciousness (it), a ‘receiver’ and ‘transmitter’ of it, or perhaps even its product.
I have invoked “it”, because even Dennett can’t deny that, at bottom, your experience is all you can be sure of — which is the continuous ‘happening’ in which all our observations are induced from. This is an adjusted version of Descartes dictum, claiming something more like ‘I am experiencing’ — whether or not it is ‘one’ experiencer or ‘many’ experiences that makes up what ‘I’ am. In fact, this view aligns well with our concept of ‘sub-personalities’ discussed previously, as our Self is many paradoxical drives integrated into a personality framework — which is our frame of reference in the world and is always undergoing an adaptive process through experiencing and learning.
It is safe to say that Dennett has explained both of the important problems away, as multiple drafts do not successfully describe how physical objects can have experiences and his compatabilist perspective misses the point on our ability to choose. His fellow new atheist philosopher Sam Harris has taken him to task for his view on free will and holds a more consistent deterministic view in my opinion, as implied by the physicalist paradigm. He states that you can add any level of randomness you want, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that choices could not have been otherwise, as all physical events that occurred prior led to the conditions that caused the precise action that was taken. He even argues subjectively, saying that if we observe our own experience, we can’t claim to choose any of the thoughts that we think or the decisions we make, as they instead appear from the unknown and are ‘selected’ on grounds we can’t authentically explain. He grants a true mystery to consciousness and accepts the hard problem, although he is inclined to believe that what we call conscious experience emerges from some level of complex information processing in physical systems.
A true physicalist must hold some version of this belief if they maintain determinism and its corollary — reductionism — in that the simplest particles of matter bounce off each other over time, forming random patterns that cause more complex forms to emerge. In this view, conscious awareness is an emergent property, occurring at some level of processing complexity in the brain, although still completely determined by the physical processes of the neurons underlying it. Some go further and believe that consciousness is epiphenomenal — an accidental byproduct of information processing, similar to the exhaust produced by a car. Additionally, we know of nothing more singularly complex in the universe than a human being, which seems to render it plausible for consciousness to emerge at a certain level of complex information processing.
The main problem is — where do we draw the boundary on complexity in a system that is interwoven with its world? Living beings are open systems, exchanging energy with the environment through things like nourishment and dispelling heat, leaving no clear boundary between their physical matter and the matter that makes up the Earth. Thus, there are systems more complex than a human if we draw the line in the right place. Earth is an open system in which all its ‘parts’ interact in complex ways, does that mean the Earth has emergent experiences? The universe has the informational complexity of every human being — in fact all matter and energy — permeating through it, should that suggest the universe is conscious? Perhaps this is how God manifests through a canvas of possibility...or would one counter that experience can only emerge in biological life, or only in specific types of complex forms? This is where this view becomes muddled and contradictory. I cannot see a way that we can account for subjective experiences (qualia) through physicalist terms, without redefining the way we look at the potential inherent in ‘physical’ objects.
The theoretical physicist and leading figure in quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger, also held that qualia are not physical, stating that things like “the sensation of color cannot be accounted for by the physicist’s objective picture of light-waves.” He couldn’t foresee a way in which it could be accounted for, even if a fuller knowledge of all the nervous processes in the retina, optical nerve bundles and brain were discovered. This is because subjective qualia do not form simple one-to-one correspondences with stimuli, as there is “no nervous process whose objective description includes the characteristic ‘yellow color’ or ‘sweet taste’”. For example, the sensation of yellow can be produced by light of a wavelength near 590 nm OR by mixing red (wavelength 760 nm) with green light (at 535 nm) — an arbitrary proportion you could only know through experiencing the colors themselves. Thus, he concludes that there is no mere quantitative connection between the “physical, objective characteristics of the waves” and the qualia experienced.
Schrödinger has other relevant thoughts in his What is Life?: With Mind and Matter, proposing that living matter feeds on “negative entropy” or “order”, by harvesting energy from its surroundings to sustain life. The living being works against the state of entropy and decay that characterizes ‘inert’ (isolated) systems, which always approach an equilibrium of maximum entropy — a state that can be cautiously likened to the most possible chaos (disorder). Life acts with “intention” — as even simple bacteria move with “purpose” toward sources of heat and nutrition. He sees the “‘stream of order’” that organism’s can “concentrate” on themselves as an “astonishing gift”, allowing them to escape “the decay into atomic chaos” through “drinking orderliness from a suitable environment”. He claimed that life achieves this by capturing and storing “information”, in which an ordered system can pass down its code from generation to generation to proliferate “order from order”.
Life emerged from chaos and feeds on orderly forms to maintain structure and continuity, although it ultimately returns back to the formless potential from which it came.
In reducing life to matter, physicalists maintain that the living and inert only differ in degree, and that there is no special ‘stuff’ that makes something alive. They hold a similar view on conscious experience itself, which allows them reduce it to the blind interaction of material particles. I believe these distinctions are a problem of language, as I would grant that all differences are differences in degree on some level of comparison, and that differences in kind are introduced to differentiate phenomena along a dimension of comparison in which it becomes practical to use another category for. On one level of analysis, everything is composed of differences in degree that can be measured by innumerable quantities, on another level, everything is a difference in kind, qualitatively unique from everything else.
I don’t think it’s too controversial to state we tend to intuitively conceive life and consciousness as different in kind from ‘inanimate’ objects, with a clear utility in distinguishing between the living and non-living. I don’t think that prevents us from granting that both kinds are made of the same ‘stuff’ of reality, whatever that might be. It does mean that we have to contend with calling that ‘stuff’ merely dead, inert and physical matter, as there is clearly more potential locked inside of that ‘stuff’, enabling the realms of experiences and qualities. Although the physicalists deny dualism, I believe they subtly insert it into their worldview by pitting experiences as illusion and giving physicality the ultimate reality. Further, I don’t think we need to add another special substance to account for consciousness, although it appears we need to integrate concepts like soul or spirit into our conception of matter to have a holistic (nondual) view of its aspects.
I believe Bergson attempted this and was widely criticized for his concept of the “Élan vital”, or ‘vital impetus’, which he proposed might underly the self-organization and development of organisms, both individually and through the process of evolution. He saw this process as creative, characterized by spontaneous morphogenesis of beings towards more types of experiences and roles. This creative process seems to drive living systems to work against both determinacy and entropy, as they increase in complexity and depth. They become more free, or determined by their own will , and more resilient to threat and volatility. This process of becoming that underlies life results in a divergence of approaches, namely through polarized tendencies like intellect and instinct, which explain the many forms and strategies employed by the plants and animals in the niches they carve out.
His view was controversial and seen as a type of vitalism — a theory that suggest life to require a principle distinct from purely physical or chemical forces. I don’t see why his view can simply be integrated with the physical and chemical, to describe the ‘impulse’ behind the process of becoming itself, and not as some new substance added on. However, physicalist biologists like Dawkins view organisms as mere “survival machines”, which are programmed by their genes to help them last long enough to pass on their genetic information to their kin. Thus, evolution is largely seen as a Darwinian battle for survival of the fittest, which is arbitrarily determined through a blind process, in which varying environmental factors continually set-up random conditions, that happen to be better or worse for organisms with particular strategies. The organisms that survive do so because they were fortunate enough to randomly mutate and conserve a structure that happened to prove successful in this iteration of nature’s environment.
However, I believe his concept of the ‘vital impetus’ emerged to propose an alternative to this view, and wasn’t necessarily meant to create a different substance or force. It instead demonstrates how the evolution of life could be guided by an actively creative principle that is inherent in the ‘stuff’ or ‘matter’ itself, as opposed to mere blind variation and selection by the environment. Perhaps, in a paradoxical environment where, on the one hand, the future resembles the past in many instances, and on the other, a continual chaos can shift conditions both gradually and suddenly, the best strategy is to maintain a somewhat conservative plan (with habits that have worked), while also creatively iterating, to be better prepared for how the environment might shift. I would add that successful beings seems to tend towards resilience and/or anti-fragility — being able to gain from the novelty and disorder that persists in nature. A move towards either of these is not what I would call a merely blind direction, as they regard withstanding or purposefully experimenting to get better at dealing with what one didn’t expect or understand.
Further, Bergson thought that our consciousness was closely tied with our intuitive perception that occurs in “duration” — or the lived flow of experiencing time. He criticized the intellect’s tendency to look at the past as a series of static snapshots, like a flip book creating an illusion of movement. Rather, the time we experience is a continuous flow of transformation that always interpenetrates the next moment. Each moment is a novel occurrence that bleeds into the next, different from any that has previously arisen and isn’t fully captured by the space traversed by the hand of a clock. Without distinct ‘parts’ bouncing into each other and causing one another, he saw free will as the pure mobility that characterizes every instant of experience: constrained by the past and confronted with the possibilities of the future, although spontaneously able to act during the moment it “endures”.
We should recall here that I agree with Hume in finding our intuition of causation to be grounded on the sequential ordering of things and we have been implicitly questioning why we should believe the determined state of the universe to be caused at some arbitrarily earlier time. It seems that events could be pulled forward by the future (fatalism) in just as much likelihood as they are pushed by the past (determinism). John Dewey agreed with this nondual sentiment in his pragmatic Experience and Nature, criticizing both fatalism and determinism, since:
“Both isolate an event from the history in which it belongs and in which it has its character. Both make a factitiously isolated position in a temporal order a mark of true reality, one theory selecting initial place and the other final place. But in fact causality is another name for the sequential order itself; and since this is an order of a history having a beginning and end, there is nothing more absurd than setting causality over against either initiation or finality.”
I simply can’t see why we should give sole determination to the earliest part of the temporal chain, might not that which emerged create further emergent realities?
Might not the effect be implied in the cause and the cause ‘chosen’ because of the effect?
For example, did I write this piece because my previous travels pushed my fingers to the keyboard, or was I pulled forward by the dream of fleshing out my philosophy in a book? It seems to me that neither is provable or a complete view of the truth, as they remove the moment to moment importance of each decision and place it in some other time.
However, choices are informed by both past occurrences and future possibilities, although neither actually make the decision during the moment of action in which it occurs, as they instead constrain the landscape to the potential paths that could be taken.
We can ask some more questions at this point that get to the root of this issue:
Does the acorn causes the tree? Does the egg cause the chicken? Or are they both forms emerging from the same creative process, which always permeate and tend to transcend its current state?
Do the smallest and earliest things cause and determine the more complex and later developed, or do all things unfold through an evolving direction?
The English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead developed a speculative metaphysics that could offer a solution, being influenced greatly by Bergson, James and Dewey. In his magnum opus, Process and Reality, he proposed an ontology of becoming, in which the entities that constitute reality are seen as more like processes than material objects. This perspective is reflected in the thought of several philosophers throughout history, like the legendary Lao Tzu and Heraclitus, whom I referenced early in chapter I. His “philosophy of organism” views reality as constituted by “occasions of experience” that continually flow, “arising and perishing” through space and time (challenging Bergson’s idea that duration is pure temporal succession). These “actual entities” form a nexus with each other, as processes that interpenetrate throughout their ‘lived’ duration and constitute the fundamental units of reality. The other primary “category of existence” is the “eternal objects”, which are the pure potentials that could, in principle, describe something that actually exists. We utilize “abstractions” as conceptual entities to understand what is actual and eternal, as they are derived from and founded upon these concrete things — although never quite the same and merely representative of them.
Thus, his ontology dispels of the mind-body problem, since both the mental and material aspects are seen as abstractions from one and the same concrete occasion of experience — nondualism at its finest. It seems obvious that both the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ language games we can use to describe ourselves aren’t the full truth, as both are abstracted from the “actual entity” that we experience — which is outside of our grasp and grounds the intuition of both paradigms. Of course, the brain is part of the body and both are abstractions of the persistent physical objects kind, while the mind and consciousness are also abstracted, attempting to describe the act of experiencing and willing itself. Further, viewing consciousness as a stream of overlapping events is similar on the surface to Dennett’s multiple drafts model, although it goes against reductionism by incorporating the material processes with a continuum of experiences which simply cannot be understood with the same conceptual frame.
I don’t subscribe to the reductionistic view, as I don’t think you can understand something through only analyzing its components in some simple manner. In trying to reduce consciousness and experience to physical states, there is an implicit belief that the whole is no more than the sum of its parts. I believe honest inquirers into complex systems know that you can’t understand a system through a myopic view of its components, as their interactions and relationships bring something new into being, through their synthesis into something more complex. Thus, in not thinking we could understand things at only the most granular level, I am supporting a type of holism, similar to several of the integrative thinkers whose shoulders I’ve stood on thus far.
The philosopher Ken Wilber inherited this same tradition and helped popularize the term “holon” — an entity which is simultaneously a whole and a part. He was influenced by Whitehead, describing actual entities as holons which creatively emerge through the process underlying the evolution of the universe (which is similarly likened to an organism). He uses the Pythagorean term “Kosmos” to denote the true reality, which is more inclusive than the purely physical cosmos, by incorporating the field of experience into the canvas of possibility as well. In a Brief History of Everything, he writes:
“The continuous process of self-transcendence produces discontinuities, leaps, creative jumps. So there are both discontinuities in evolution — mind cannot be reduced to life, and life cannot be reduced to matter; and there are continuities — the common patterns that evolution takes in all these domains. And in that sense, yes, the Kosmos hangs together, unified by a single process. It is a uni-verse, one song.”
The atom is both a whole — composed of protons, neutrons and electrons — as well as a part of a molecule, and so on and so forth with every other entity that exists. He also saw holons as evolving towards more depth, continually incorporating simpler holons that have more span (i.e. atoms are more numerous than molecules, molecules are more complex than and subsume atoms):
“Evolution has a direction, yes, a principle of order out of chaos as it is commonly phrased. In other words, a drive toward greater depth. Chance is defeated, depth emerges — the intrinsic value of the Kosmos increases with each unfolding.”
The paradigms that have been outlined so far are no doubt incommensurable, offering flavors of ontology that imply conflicting conceptions of what we are. I have made the case that you can’t prove a worldview so speculative, and that we instead rely on a leap of faith, in resorting to our gut feeling of what seems more probable. We need implicit assumptions when acting in the world and are forced to update them when faced with how they are wrong. Thus, ask yourself the below questions while I do, which restate those we raised earlier:
Are we machines, completely determined by the puppet strings of the physical environment, only appearing to have the ability to choose?
Or are we beings that can act and transform the world in which we are embedded, bearing responsibility for that which we bring forth?
Is the universe more like a physical mechanism that, by chance, is unwinding deterministically, like clockwork towards its end?
Or is reality like an organic process, evolving probabilistically through the interplay of creativity, potential and habit?
One paradigm views everything as blind, with determined laws emerging from random interactions. Each thing is pushed forward by that which proceeded it, infinitely subject to inertia and causality. There is no need to assume there is will or purpose, as that introduces something ‘spooky’ to the cold truth of reality. The determined patterns of nature emerge by chance and arrange into physical objects, which happen to interact and cause future ones. Assumptions outside of this must be wishful and superstitious, as they have to introduce ‘supernatural’ causes to the natural world.
Alternatively, each actual entity could be an evolving process, embedded in its own moment of time in which it acts. This occasion of experience is influenced by prior ones, but also causally influential on all that follow it through time. In fact, this world view sees the occasion of experience as constituted by the process of reacting to others— a probabilistic process that couldn’t be determined until the moment of action— rendering free will as essential and built into the universe. The limitations of the game would be there so that the possibilities for playing could be opened up — as you can’t make plays in a game that doesn’t have rules that constrain it. A chaos from which new forms emerge is in union with an ordering process, that both conserves habitual patterns and brings forth creatives ones from potential.
It is probably apparent that I have now been inclined towards something like the latter view, although I have previously been in the camp that took the former as more probable. I originally defaulted to what I perceived to be the most scientifically accepted, ‘simple’ and rational view, in wanting to believe the most convincing evidence. However, I didn’t feel fully convinced and continued to seek what I was leaving out, with it soon becoming apparent to me that all rational deduction is grounded on ‘gut feelings’ in which one already has faith in. These intuitions renders certain views more believable than another to you, which aren’t completely in your grasp, as they also grip you. As I surveyed the landscape of experience, I have become gripped by beliefs that resonate with me on a more intuitive level than those I held previously.
‘I’ seem to be a pattern that has emerged from the universe, an endpoint of the process of creation that has brought form to potential. Rather, ‘I’ continually evolve through this process, never quite fully defined by my current physical state, as ‘I’ am to a great degree still made of potential. As Watts so elegantly put it: ‘I’ am an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks up and explores itself. We were brought forth from the universe, in a similar way to which the universe transforms from that which comes from us. We are one strand of the process underlying the evolution of everything, and there is nothing that separates us from that web or its continual spinning. Thus, in a sense, ‘I’ am the creation of and expression of this entire damn thing, whatever we believe the game to be.
I don’t resonate with Harris’ opinion that we subjectively experience no free will. Sure, we are thrown into a certain set of circumstances, and are increasingly constrained by our past. Sure, we are only presented with certain possibilities, both in thought and action, which aren’t entirely in our control, and could very well have a large degree of randomness to them. However, I can’t find a way to deny Heidegger’s observation that we inherently care and feel the responsibility for our choices in the now, even after recognizing the influence of past habits and the constraint of the potential available to me.
My suspicion on free will is along Bergon’s lines, in that it is the implicit intuition of most human beings. I believe you would only come to Harris’ view through a great deal of philosophical assumption and rationalization. I don’t think this means I have to support dualism either, as it is clear to me that whatever the world is made of includes experience and action. I simply can’t believe that whatever ‘I’ am, lacks the ability to choose anything. Schrödinger took this belief for granted as well:
“I think that I — I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’ — am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature.”
I don’t believe I can get out so easily by saying that ‘I’ don’t exist, and am instead a conglomeration of drafts and physical processes, that have no conscious direction or ability to will. While there is truth there in a sense — as all of the physical cells that make up my body change through time—it doesn’t mean there is no continuity to the process of experiencing and acting that I find myself in. The recycling of my cells might be another way of saying that I have gone through continuous transformations, a series of deaths-and-rebirths to become who ‘I’ currently am — and am still becoming. We aren’t just the wave, we are the wave and the ocean.
Am I really a programmed machine, with only an illusion that I can pursue the potential in my soul?
Or am I the puppet and the strings, with a purpose worth pursuing and a true say in my process of becoming?
As expected, both viewpoints have their bitter pill. In one there is no meaning to anything, although we are all free of ultimate responsibility and are but victims of circumstance. In the other, everything is meaningful, but we are ultimately responsible for the way we act in the world. It does seem to be better in the game of life, to believe and act as if you reap what you sew — and to assume that your decisions affect the ultimate course of your life. It seems to be the spirit behind following the ‘Golden Rule’ and reaching towards the Kingdom of God, or seeking Enlightenment and Nirvana with good Karma and a noble path, or through many of the other religious Ways that highlight responsibility and sacrifice. It seems to be a better strategy even in the blind, Darwinian survival of the fittest game that the physicalists describe, as you can’t even put a lack of belief in free will into practice, in a game you are forced to play.
Acting on faith that you could strive upwards and unlock your potential is an experiment, that can only be validated through one’s own experience. I believe there is good reason to see ourselves as better when we learn from error and grow positively through the iterations of ourselves we go through. Taking responsibility and making sacrifices are not only pragmatic, but necessary to make oneself valuable in the world. Learning through ‘trial and error’ is the death and rebirth of the personality we use to guide us, which requires us to consistently let pieces of ourselves go in pursuit of a better Way.
I have faith that we have the ability to tap more of our potential and play this game, as not merely victims of circumstance and randomness. Although the demon of doubt is never fully extinguished, one can always assume to have the choice to direct life towards a better aim, and act with the hope of bringing it forth…
