Godfree

Godfree is a term that is by Andrew Sneddon in  'A Is for Atheist: An A to Z of the Godfree Life'.

He is a professor. I can see why his students give him such a wide range of reviews if his classes are like his book. The material is arranged alphabetical, not in a logic progression. This makes it difficult to grasp unless you more or less already know the information, as it is for me, in this case. I do not know how else one would order such spaghetti thinking though.

It is also short of some of the big changes necessary in the change from believer to godfree, after becoming godfree. Social change and meeting other godfree people in a religion based society is rather limited. There are so many depraved, angry  and caustic personalities within our ranks. Also responsibility has many aspects that are different than reported here. 

After becoming godfree our belief system needs further cleaning and examination. This is a concept of looking at each belief, value and concept and examining it to see if it fits with what is logical in light of our new thinking. 

Consider freewill as a concept. It is a Catholic concept I expect. As described in Christian literature and in modern philosophy, it is essentially a illusion, as Sam Harris says, in my opinion. But in Stoic philosophy, stoic thinking, free will is real and really free within it's tiny domain within the triune mind. Cognitive dissonance what? Conflict with Sam Harris what?

Some things are up to us, some are not. We can divide all things into a bunch of heaps and separate out first that which we have complete control over. This is not much to start with. We have control over our ability to accept a mental proposition, our judgements and little else initially. As we exchange our learned beliefs for truly our own, we develop complete control over our beliefs, our judgements, our impulses, our desires and aversions, our mental facilities in general. These we have free will over, but the free will choices are set by our beliefs, and these only become ours after we own them. And yet this beliefs system, our preferences system pre-makes many of those choices, so our free will is even smaller. It is essentially those first time choices; after that precedence is set. We are free to believe what ever we want, as long as it does not cause cognitive dissonance.  Heavy what? This is the land of free choice, small and entirely within our control or our rules.

The next heap is just beyond complete control, that is the stuff we are responsible for, according to society, yet do not have complete control over. Our memory resides in this heap unfortunately. That seems unfair, but it is the way it is. This includes our body, our actions, our behavior, our speech, our economic outlook, our personality, our attitudes, and the like. These are influenced by our complete control heap, but of these we do not have complete control. 

There are a number of other heaps: controlled by others, influenced by others, and the big one, beyond everyone's control or influence. This is the land of cause, random choices not taken, random events, choices of others and nature, where shit happens. Oh well.  

So the modern thinking is a conglomerate thinking, while stoic is dis-aggregate thinking, from model theory of years ago. In conglomerate thinking, free will is an illusion, while in stoic dis-aggregate thinking it applies to only one heap, and then only until the rules of the automatic part of the mind become set. It applies only when the logic part of the mind is active and in use.

But what do I know?