Thomas_More
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
She read what I had written and that stirred sarcasm in her, which results from her personality and manner of thought. This MOVED (motive, from motion) her in two or three seconds at most to type the message and send it. No thought STRONGER to her than the one which motivated her action intervened.
Are you saying that one can think and act in accordance with a motive which does not impel you to so think and act?
Where do you think decisions come from? Where a thought or feeling, and hence action, comes from? Do they arise of themselves from nothing, or are they the result of matter in motion both without and within us?
Your brain is a material organ, as are your nerves, your sense organs etc. They receive and act accordingly. Thoughts and feelings are initiated by both external and internal factors. You are not a “spirit” independent of sensation. Your thoughts are materially produced. Cause and effect proceeds in a chain, one thought then producing another just as it was produced. Decisions and “choices” are likewise produced on the basis of a multitude of factors, drawn from your past experiences, your past responses, your manner of thinking, which all together make your personality. You cannot think, feel or do independent of this. You do not exist outside of natural law. Nothing is supernatural.
Yes, you can add an if clause, but that makes it purely hypothetical. You can say that, but it isn’t what happened, so therefore it wasn’t able to happen, or it would have. The chain of causation did not go that way.
The material conditions have long existed but the consciousness has not yet fully developed. If it does, socialism will happen; if it doesn’t, it won’t. We want it to, so we must continue to work for it.
Was the consciousness enough in 1890? No. Is it yet? No. Will it be? We don’t know. We must work at it. But our will for it has been produced by our life experience, based on numerous personal as well as social factors. Our will is not its own First Cause, and neither is anybody’s. It is within the chain of causation and follows the same laws of motion, of cause and effect, as everything in nature.The material conditions exist; the consciousness has yet to develop where most are concerned. If it happens, it could. If it doesn’t, it couldn’t.
We would say it’s not just the Tories but the rest as well: all representatives of the profit system.
I’m 62, to be 63 next month.
We also have an Off-topic forum here, which is for humourous messages, jokes, etc.
We can speculate for fun. But to say “it could” is to ignore all the antecedents that led up to what actually happened.
It was not in one’s power to think about what one didn’t think about at any given moment. It is ludicrous to say one could have.
One cannot will to will.
And free will is really an insidious notion that buttresses capitalism: from punishment and penal law to the Great Man Theory.
It rejects materialism.Necessity was the one truth that Godwin said would take the longest for people to accept, and he was right.
