Consciousness and the will.

Consciousness and the will.

I'm a believer that things we experience mentally can't exist without something already existing physically. Consciousness is an experience that takes place when chemicals and physical actions in the brain interact due to physical phenomena outside the body. All conscious experience is tied to some physical experience and I have a hard time believing that things can come from something non-physical. Obviously there was a time before all that existed there was perhaps nothing and through creation or big bang or whatever there started something, but I'm not one to try and argue where things began, but rather that once objects are set in motion we become part of a chain of events so complex that even what we become conscious of isn't necessarily our ability to will anything into action, but to watch ourselves being propelled through time by events prior to our existence and within our existence prior to the moment that events occur. If we could create something from nothing, we could essentially will things to change around us physically with our bodies because of our thoughts, but our thoughts are actually created by physical events we don't have control over. The physical events in the mind exist due to millions of years of events that happened before us and allow us to think in ways that the past has allowed us to. The social events in our lives from the time we were born shape us to be certain kinds of people within our environments. We can adapt to new environments, but we adapt based ..xperience in old environments that we can use or have to substitute in the new environment. We see stories of people who mange to change and become better people within their society, but I don't see this coming about by itself, and instead see natural forces that unseen within us and social forces that act upon us and pushing us in the direction desired. If we value the forces we compliment them and move in their direction. If we reject them there is equal and opposite reactions that push us away from groups, and if we reject even larger institutions we are reacted against with jail or prison. Things that are a priori are those things given to us by nature that we have innately due to the past before we existed, and things a posteriori are created by actions within our own lives. Energy and matter are interchangeable and what we don't see is still under the influence of something at a molecular level that is in constant flux. The only way we might possibly change our actions is through the actions of others around us. We don't see who we are and what our flaws are till others in our environment can point out the sources of potential past experiences that caused us to be who we are, and from that point we can alter a path we're based on new information. When our thoughts collide with the thoughts of others based on their experiences we change course. Otherwise we compliment one another and remain the same in certain aspects. Life is so complex that it becomes more important to know how to do things than to know about things in general. To "know that" can easily be achieved through reading several books on how the world works to the best of our knowledge, but to "know that" is worthless if it isn't applicable to our personal interactions. To "know how" is far more important and we can only get this through experience by acting out life in the physical with our bodies. We could have numerous books that tell us what the color red looks like and have never seen the color red. It's not till we see the color red that we have a new ability, which is to understand the experience of the color red and recognize it from this point on in time. The flaw I see in the lives of many is their ability to "know that" is much more prevalent than being in some kind of constant action. Even if were poor and had nowhere to be jobless, it would be more fulfilling to walk endless all day if this is the only thing we know how to do that comes to mind till a new action can come to mind. To think and to act is a constant cycle and those who live in the abstract all day don't act enough, while those who act all the time without thought are hiding from themselves what they don't want to think about.

The historicity of self is always in action even when we think we are acting on our free will. All choices are based on the historicity of self like the roots of a tree that we don't see on the surface of the ground reaching down to the water reserves below the surface of memory. We are just a time and place in society and history that has caused us to land where we are, and this place we are isn't created by our actions, but are effects of things that have already placed us here. Any actions we create are really effects acting out the past. We might not be robots, billiard balls, or a rock rolling down a hill, and have features that aren't like these things, but even in our unique human state we are powerless in our illusion of free will. We don't really have control of our lives, but it's the ability to think we have control that gives us comfort. The stories that exist in the backs of our minds from prior incidents are the stories that tell us how to live. If we look back at our lives the only things that stand out are the events that are the most emotional events. If we think of an old relationship most of it will seem like a blur, but the incidents that we do remember are only those that were either full of hate or love. We remember all of our worst fights and romantic moments with a person. We don't remember the meals we had together unless those meals were centered on emotionally intense events. We don't touch the hot stove out of habit, because we felt its warmth and had some situation prior where the heat caused us pain, and we don't think consciously of this whenever we get near something that looks like it could be hot. We already know through habit not to go where it looks like it might hurt us. The hot stove on one hand is the same for everyone who grew up around a stove, but our experiences with people are all unique to an extent. In one situation we could have a person who only has good feeling experiences with dating and on the other we could have someone who only has bad experiences and this is why we all have different pictures in our heads of what it means to date and the purpose of dating. Most people likely have a combination of these. These stories get recorded into our memories and we treat them as fact. These are emotionally intense experiences because we're in a new place in life that we're unsure of so we're more conscious at these moments to record information. This same information gets resurfaced when a new incident that reminds us of the old incident comes into play, and without even knowing it we start to act out as is we're in the old context and situation.

Even when we are conscious of something it's only because we care about something and the only reason we care about something is because it relates to some other thing or things we care about in the subconscious driving it. Once again I come back to the carpenter nailing planks together in the garage and the act of nailing these planks together involves a hammer, nail, and planks, but we don't really see these things. We're focused on the bigger picture of how what we're doing will look like when the work is done, or dreaming about something else while in the process of doing this. When we're engaged in events we don't recognize the objects that are interactive in our experience in the conscious, because all these objects we figured out on a level we are comfortable with or mastered prior to this experience. When we were young we pick up a hammer for the first time and analyzed it. We don't stare at the hammer anymore when using it, because to do so would take us from the engagement of its action in a greater picture, and create a new engagement in staring at the hammer. What feels like a choice is really done under a feeling of necessity, because past events have already convinced us that nailing the planks together was important to do for some reason, and we're just acting out the causes that brought us to do so. When we cheer in a stadium with a crowd all the people are objects we're engaged with and we don't see ourselves anymore than we see the hammer while nailing planks. We are focused on the bigger picture of the game taking place at the center of the cheering and don't focus on how we are playing a role in this interaction. Life is really a totality and fusion of objects and equipment that are part of greater tasks and actions that is the only conscious focus of our lives, and the reason we are conscious of something is because we have emotional feelings driving the actions that make them seem important. If we didn't care about something we wouldn't do it. If the head flew off the hammer while nailing this becomes a new emotional experience because it stalls the prior emotional engagement where we have to pursue a new hammer as a task to engage in before coming back to the greater task we emotionally desire as important. When people ask us who we are or to tell them about ourselves we tell them what we do or what we engage in as a way of saying who were are, because we are nothing more than our experiences of action or the sum of causes that creates the effect that we claim to be as a person. Just like we don't become conscious of the hammer till something is wrong with it in a situation that it is part of a greater function, we as an object existing in the midst of others don't become conscious of our own actions till something appears wrong with us by others pointing it out to us, or even in relation to our own past when comparing what we think we should be in a situation relative to others in the present. The will to do something in the abstract versus the will to perform something in real life always end up being different, and we have to keep readjusting the abstract of what we think is possible with every new experience. This is why it seems pointless to try making plans far into the future. We can abstract a basic skeleton of the direction we think we'd like to be based ..xperience, but self-bureaucratization seems to be our best action to creating things we've already found to be stable as a vehicle that can move us toward other things that might feel good too.

The historicity of self is compiled by all our social experiences put into action by the greater task of life itself. We can't really value life unless we are focused on greater tasks compiled of many simple tasks. To only focus on simple tasks is live for the sake of living or to live for what nature gave us the ability to desire and nothing more. Nature gave us a capacity to strive for consumption because we spent so long in scarcity of it that we were always in modes of production. The desire for consumption was to maintain the greater task of striving for life in itself, which was the greatest gift given by nature and at the same time is taken from us by nature too. When we created civilization we ended up with surplus consumption. Consumption that is more than needed for production and isn't invested elsewhere in life ends up being destruction, and the things from nature that sustained life end up being self destructive in civilization after a while. To over indulge in food, sleep, sex, and drugs is the become stagnant only to act them out for the sake of living in itself, which was only a gift in nature, because we had to constantly strive for life and it was special to do so. Now we have what was once production of seeking out consumption as an act of living, so all production was construction toward maintaining action while consumption was stagnation before acting once again. Once consumption needs are stable in our lives we find there is no longer a struggle to seek it out in order to produce. This causes nature to reverse inward on itself. Without a struggle to consume we lose our feeling of control, and the only control we have left to fall back on is the kind nature planted in us. This is why we feel bored and depressed a lot in civilization. In order to take away our feeling of boredom and depression we latch onto natural instincts of consumption because it's the only thing that give us a feeling of production. Otherwise our bodies wouldn't be in any form of action. We tend to seek out food, sleep, sex, and drugs to give us a feeling of production in our lives. Consumption is longer the key to life but ends up becoming self-destruction due to its surplus and our lack of ideas for production. Instead of struggling to produce all the time to consume just enough to live, we consume all the time in hopes of producing something out of our lives. When we find we can't produce anything we just consume again in order to have feelings of control over life. Since the goal of all production at one time was to struggle to live and the value of living was based around seeking consumption, so the only way to value life in a world where we consume in order to hope for a potential to produce is to value death. Death in the big picture is the greatest task achieved by all of us in life, because it's the end of all life in itself, and if we focus our lives the fact we're going to die each day we'll act out life for greater things than living in itself. It's not till we embrace death with the same value we embrace every other emotional burst in our lives with purpose that we can eventually find things of value in life to act on. Once we love death the way we love the stories of life we will seek cultural control instead of natural control. If we looked in the mirror with thoughts of today could be the day I die, we'd begin to live each day different. If we can embrace death with the same emotion as a relationship or the desire for a new toy, we can finally begin to question what we want in the larger picture when pursuing tasks in life.