MORE DISCUSSIONS FROM THE PANTHEISM WEBSITE

Okay, Paul, it's 3 am and I woke up thinking about this (damn, I hate this part of thinking), and I got this much. Are you saying that if my unconscious processes make the decisions, then, technically, "I" am making the decisions even if the decisions are unconscious decisions?

Okay, I got that, but then I moved to the problem of determinism. Do I make decisions or does the environment make me make my decisions? Then I had to ask if my choices are "either/or decisions" in that the environment offers my "synaptic self" (LeDeux?) choices that my unconscious processes select from among? Or are my decisions merely "reactions" to the environment and, thus, not free at all?

Then I was really splitting hairs, lying there in the dark. How about this? Those choices that are determined by my genetic makeup are my "free" choices because they lie within me? Any choices made by environmentally influenced distortions of my synaptic self are choices "determined" by forces outside myself and, thus, not free?

But, now, I think, as I wrote the last sentence, probably determined by that last sentence, "My genes are handed to me by my parents. I have no choice in that so even my "genetic choices" (for the sake of expression) are predetermined!"

I just thought also that I'm trying to dethrone reason from its mighty high perch in human affairs. Perhaps, it's rationality I'm quibbling with. And in the term "reason" I don't include the methodology of science because science is tightly linked to the world outside the self whereas all these rational arguments we are having involve the arrangement and rearrangement of words and definitions in order to explain to the unconscious what it's doing and to try and get other beings to see and agree with our inner selves, with our conscious selves.