Before I start, yes this blog post is long. I could split it up but I feel that each topic combines with the next and I wrote it all down anyway. It is also a bit chaotic at times and I do not feel like editing it. I hope this blog post resonates with you. Enjoy!

Do you know what a mecha is? It is those japanese robots that humans pilot. Typically seen as a genre in Japan. Kind of like transformers except human controlled.

You are the pilot controlling the mecha in your mind. You have a few levers in front of you. The mecha in turn controls your mind.

You as a limited will have two choices in three categories with two external influences along with a personality. The limited will which is you. The choice of autonomy vs conformity. The categories of faith, mercy and self discipline. Then there are two external influences which are logic and emotion. There is the internal influence aka personality which is the result of an accumulation of experiences and possibly genes.

This is the concept of limited will. When contrasted with free will, free will assumes a few things. One, it assumes that will exists in contrast to determinism. Two, it assumes that the will of humans is free to do as it wills and not bound by anything.

I would like to argue for limited will but prior to that I would like to get deeper into free will. There are a few key concepts to understand in order to tackle free will. One is will. The second is determinism. The third is cause and effect. I am sure there are others though I will leave off here. Of course the discourse around free will mostly has to do with moral responsibility though I will not get into that. I would like to give a fresh perspective into free will.

What is will? What is consciousness? Well this is not a modern scientific perspective. I do not like modern scientific perspectives into consciousness. Whether calling consciousness an illusion or quantum physics based construct. When it comes to consciousness, there is a need to differentiate inputs, processing, and outputs. Each system has some of these three parts in different amounts. A keyboard observes key presses as inputs. A cpu processes inputs into outputs. A screen gets inputs and gives outputs. Animals are similar. They sense stimuli with sensory organs. They process this information in their brain. Then they use motor neurons in order to turn these processed sensory signals into outputs.

Humans are a bit different. I believe that we have a consciousness. I would prefer to differentiate this from awareness.

In order to explain this better I would like to get into terminology. So there are three steps of manipulation: input, transforming, and output. Then there are the levels of awareness of manipulation: algorithmic, intelligent, conscious. So in the matter of manipulation, a being at the level of algorithmic would simply trace the path from input to output. Based on the algorithm, certain paths would be followed. These being in my opinion cannot be called aware. They would record, process, and display. That is the limit to their manipulation. Then there are intelligent manipulators that have attention towards observation of input, probabilistic weighted transformation matrix, and behavioral learning based on the behaviorism model. Finally there are conscious manipulators that are aware of their thoughts, have an identity and have will.

I will get into more detail on conscious manipulators. First thinking. Thinking itself is actually like foresight. Unlike AI which is a black box, we humans can think before we behave. In other words we can behave in a simulation in our head and receive feedback on which we think more about. We can see the future outcome of behavior and adapt based on this. Of course not everyone uses this skill. So our thoughts are built on top of other thoughts. Also it should be noted that AI chain of thought is not thought. It is merely splitting a goal into smaller pieces. So a thought experiment would be: if you know the future will the future change? While humans can not literally see the future, this makes humans very random as they can simulate reality before it happens.

An experiment to test this would be throwing. Get some throwing objects like a frisbee, basketball, american football, and volleyball. Then have two or more groups and have one play something else before being randomly tasked with a random throwing object. Then for the other group have them be told in advance which one they will throw and compare the distance thrown. The theory is that the mind simulates the throw and muscles involved prior to throwing it. It simulates the weight and other variables. Tell another group to consciously think about how they will throw it in relation to another group that is told what they will throw but plays something else in the meantime.

Then identity. A sense of self. Sensing the identity of others, aka empathy. Identity is not simply personality. It is someone’s sense of self. It is a fundamental part of human nature and of a conscious manipulator. This is also not just your memories. It can be reduced to the fact that you exist. It is a marker of uniqueness. And each conscious mind carries this. It is what differentiates humans from animals and other beings. And is the reason why dehumanizing and apathy towards humans is so dangerous. It is removing the identity of humans in a way.

Finally will. The ability of a higher level conscious manipulator to exert willpower into the environment, even if just their mind. Like identity, will is fundamental. Will is a part of the human mind. Or maybe soul. But I will continue with calling it the mind. Will is the identity’s ability to pressure itself to choose. Typically, determinists use cause and effect to further their arguments. And it is a very powerful argument. Especially in physics. But the issue emerges when attempting to bring physics to the brain. Is the human mind driven in physics? I would argue no, partly. The brain, yes, is controlled by physics. But also influenced by the mind. They influence each other. Now the controversial part of this argument is that the human will is supernatural and therefore can affect physics. In other words, willpower can manipulate physics. This might be too controversial to some readers, entering the lands of fantasy. After all energy cannot be created nor destroyed and energy requires the laws of physics to change motion. My counter to this is quantum, basically that will power may operate at such small scales that measuring it becomes impossible. I do not really need to make up an answer though. I do not really need quantum shenanigans anyway to further my point. And that willpower can manipulate nature is my major argument that a lot of my points stand on and that allows me to say that will is outside nature making it outside the bounds of cause of effect. I will later clarify my argument with autonomy and conformity to argue that people can choose predestination, or free will. In other words, limited will.

In this mecha that your will operates, you have limited controls. Three to be exact. Faith, mercy and self discipline. But before that you have a choice. Whether or not to control the mecha or not. A choice that is ultimately yours. This I call autonomy vs conformity. A choice on whether or not to use your will. To choose or to go with the flow. Your self consciously makes a decision to exert its will. Or decides not to. Here are some ways to describe autonomy. One method is to contrast it with freedom. Freedom vs safety and autonomy vs conformity. Autonomy is something you choose, freedom is something others choose for you. Like the example of a prison where they can take your freedom but not your autonomy. Autonomy can give hope. But conformity is just sad. In an attempt to fit in and adapt people always conform. Conformity in a way hides the near infinite potential of autonomy. From not feeling free to express yourself to shutting off your ability to think and speak due to adapting to boredom. Conformity is an abstract concept. This means that it is difficult to study. It is used to explain phenomena like autism, Stockholm syndrome, and herd mentality. It is caused by an attempt to adapt to an internal or external environment by altering yourself and depending on how deep you alter your mental mecha the more dangerous this can be.

Basically autonomy is the range of your will. Conformity is a self imposed limit on autonomy. So you use your autonomy in order to limit your autonomy.

Now I would like to simplify will by splitting its areas of influence into three. Faith, which is what you believe in and how much. Mercy, which is how righteous you are and at what. Self-discipline, which is the amount of effort you put in and into what.

Basically this mecha of yours has three control panels that you can use to operate said mecha. The idea is to simplify the conscious world. If you simplify the conscious world into these three plains, things start to make more sense. Another word for these categories is source of motivation. There are three ways to motivate oneself: by believing in it, by doing the right thing, and simply pushing yourself. I personally do not like seeing these categories as mere sources of motivation. I would argue that these categories are closer to areas of human will. I feel the need to complicate this. Faith is not just belief. It is obsessive delusion. A better term might be conviction. It is the degree to which you believe in something. Even if you do not know it to be true. Especially if you cannot logically prove it, that makes faith even stronger. In contrast with blind faith which is delusion without admitting it is delusion, true faith would involve knowing delusion and still believing in it anyway. It is not closing off other beliefs but seeing other beliefs but still choosing your belief system. So true faith requires you to admit that you can be wrong but to still believe in it anyway. This saves people from apathy and righteous indignation as well which is why I like this approach.

Mercy is not just righteousness. It is selective empathy and apathy. It is who you can empathize with and who you cannot. It is who you humanize and who you dehumanize and who you demonize and who you neglect. Unlike faith which is subjective, mercy is more objective based on my view of morality. Which I will quickly explain. I would argue that justice requires apathy therefore justice cannot be mercy. I also claim that hurting anyone for apathy reason no matter how justified it is, it is mere justification. I do not claim whether or not the justification is accurate or justified. Just that in an idealistic world, you should not justify apathy. In the trolley problem you have already become the victim in saving 5 lives while killing one or letting 5 die and saving one. I see that as an excuse, at that point the one who would be responsible is the one who maliciously tied them to the trolley and all the people who did not think and just conformed to complacency. Complacency is also a heavy term I use in morality. The idea is that out of all the people in the world, out of all the people who worked on trolleys, no one thought to stop this from happening. If this never happened before, I doubt it. Complacency comes from conformity and laziness. This does not mean that conformity, complacency, laziness makes people responsible, just do not be complacent next time. Also the person with the decision to pull the lever is not responsible either. In this specific example they are also a victim. A victim that should not carry the guilt. So according to this empathy version of morality, people who stop seeing other people as people, or see friends and family as more human than other humans are using selective empathy. It is not a bad thing, but it is a bad thing. I wrote an essay on this in the past, how comedy can harm people. But I will move on by just stating that human will can select the targets of empathy and apathy and to what degree.

Then there is self discipline. What is it to discipline oneself? What comes to my mind when I think of self discipline is discipline. To hurt someone to discipline them and get what you want. That is my fault since that is the way I disciplined myself. To push myself to do things I wanted to do I hurt myself. Which is sad. But getting back to self discipline, self discipline should not be gotten through self harm. Through pain, sweat and blood. Well not self inflicted pain sweat and blood. But because of my experiences with self discipline, I myself do not know how to use it. The basic idea is that you control yourself. You make yourself do things that you want to do but do not want to do. Maybe you know that you need to and therefore you want to do it, but are lazy and think that it takes too long and so on and so forth. It is fighting excuses and doing things. I see self discipline as one mindedness. Or simple mindedness. Not something the intellectuals can do. And while I am insulting the people who are able to do such, it does not make the effort they put in any less impressive. To other simple minded individuals. Ok I will stop insulting people but I just have trouble with pushing myself. Maybe I adapted and conformed in order to not be able to push myself. Even when I put myself through pain I still could not make myself do things. One thing about will is that you can conform and close off these categories. And I believe that I closed off the category of effort and struggle. In return I am much better at creativity and philosophy so I am happy with it, but classes are tough. I would rather write this blog than get into the real world. But that is just self defeating thoughts, me conforming to my new reality by saying that I cannot do it. But I just need the key in order to lift this conformity and release my autonomy in self discipline and so my will can push myself more effectively.

This blog post is getting pretty long. I will finish this off. Logic and emotion is pretty long. Personality is more simple and short.

There are two ways of seeing logic and emotion. The first is the typical way of seeing them. Logic is rational and reasonable. Emotion is irrational and spontaneous. I do not like this approach and I will explain why.

While I call them external influences, they are still within your mind. Basically logic becomes truth if it resonates with your emotions. I prefer the term feelings though.

Logic vs feelings. Logic is word based. Logic has three roles. To justify events. To rationalize feelings. To resonate with feelings. Logic itself means nothing. It is merely sophistry. Wordplay. Logic can be used to justify events, typically behaviors. You make up some words in order to explain why this or that happened. It is also used in justifying apathy. Explaining why you should dehumanize someone. I see justification as mostly bad. Then there is rationalizing. Rationalizing feelings is when you make up some words to make your feelings make sense. In hopes that your feelings fit the logic of a wider system. This does not work, without the third role which is resonance and the most important part of feelings. Resonance is what proves that feelings are what control people and not logic. People can lie to themselves and it may resonate with them. But people do not act out of logic. They act out of feelings. And feelings do not have to make sense. You can rationalize feelings to make sense in your own bubble. If it works, great. If not then you need to redo your logic to fit your feelings. Feelings are truth, not words. Feelings are internal senses. Let me give you an example. Let us say that you are hungry. How do you tell? Because you physically feel the grumbling and hunger. That tells you that you are hungry and therefore the word hunger resonates with you. A more abstract example is melancholia. How do you tell you have melancholia? Well, you try to describe your feelings but if you do not know the word melancholia and the feelings associated with it, it will be difficult to describe. The simplest description I have for melancholia is wanting to cry but not being able to. If you are able to resonate with such a description then congrats. But it depends on whether or not my words resonate with your feelings. If you do not despite having melancholia then I just did not play with the words well enough. Maybe I should have added words or removed them. By feelings vs logic, what controls your mind is feelings. From top to bottom there is your will in a mecha that influences the mind which is a storm of feelings. These feelings can only be affected by logic and only when the logic resonates with it.

Basically logic is the method we use to make sense of the feelings in the mind through resonance. Justification hopes to resonate with the audience while rationalizing hopes to resonate with the self.

In the past I used to care about logic a lot, as I was a firm believer in logic. What I now know is that in politics and everything else, everyone believes that they are logical. And they are logical, just based on their ideology. So I cannot blame them. There is a lot of logic in the world. Another important part of differentiating logic and feeling is that rationalizing is not the truth even if it resonated with you. Feelings are feelings, not words. And who knows what a feeling even means. Introspection is the way to go. The logic behind justification is that people play with words in order to justify something. I do not like that. So I prefer listening to feelings, there is no right or wrong. Which is what I prefer anyway.

So finally we have personality. I will keep this short. Basically I believe personality to be based on experiences that embed themselves within you whether or not you remember. I call this an accumulation of experiences, or cascading of experiences. Genes may also influence it but I believe experiences to have a greater impact. I would say that personality is more so past traits than future disposition. You can attempt to assume future behavior but I see that as a flawed approach. It is better to understand what events caused such a personality and conformity within the personality than guess future behaviors based on such a personality. I would say that the result of personality is because someone conforms and twists themselves to adapt to their surroundings. I would also separate identity and personality. Identity is simply the unique self while personality is the traits that the self chose in the past and most likely conformed to.

The reason I am writing all of this is simple. It is that we as mankind have will. And we can change the world with this will. And to change the world we need to have the appropriate foundation that permits that. An ideology that believes in the innate potential of mankind to do great things. That is my goal. To build an all encompassing ideology that permits human potential, so that no one falls through the cracks. Faith may be delusion, but only as long as one believes in it. The amazing thing about faith is that without it, there is no purpose. Science only came into existence with the help of faith. When contrasted with personified polytheistic gods, monotheism provides a perfected base for science. What I mean is that if someone believes that lighting is due to a certain god hating a certain mortal or mortals then how can someone investigate lightning? If you believe that every effect has a perfect cause and investigate it then do you get closer to the truth. And monotheism provides this perfection. Modern science however has gone astray, and I would like to figure out a foundation upon which a better society can be built. One delusion at a time.

Basically I have said before that logic is useless. And that is true, logic is simply make believe. But once you add true faith to it, logic changes into the foundation of a belief system and that changes things.