From my perspective, it is the difference between someone choosing to investigate it, while assuming she was able to freely, autonomously, willfully etc., choose not to investigate it, and someone convinced that this is the case when instead it all unfolds entirely in accordance with whatever set into motion the immutable laws of matter.
The investigation proceeds as it does, but only because it could never have not proceeded in any other way but the way in which it must.
- Is human consciousness “mindful matter”? Your use of the word “matter” intrigues me most. On the internet I only found “Mindfulness matters” or “mindful matters”. I anticipate that this stems from an assumption you have made along the way, but where did you get the idea from? I also searched the Wiki-Article and found nothing.
Matter has many definitions, but the most common is that it is any substance which has mass and occupies space. All physical objects are composed of matter, in the form of atoms, which are in turn composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons.
And going all the way back one supposes to [at least] the Big Bang. But somehow along the way the matter that we call “star stuff” was able to evolve/reconfigure into the matter that we call “the brain”.
Sans God, anyway. Or, sure, maybe not.
In any event, living matter. Matter able to reflect on itself as matter able to reflect on itself as matter. Which precipitated down through the ages all manner of debate regarding “dualism”. The ghost in the machine. The Homunculus. The soul. The autonomous human mind.
But: what on earth does that really mean in a wholly determined universe?
Yes, we have been here numerous times before. We can only judge on what we know, or believe to know, or what we have experienced, or believe to have experienced. That means it is always impure and prone to failure, which is why we can only have humility in all our dealings with others. There is nothing else.
On the contrary, the objectivists insist, re either God or Reason or political ideology or Nature or – philosophically – one or another deontological contraption, we are able to extricate that frame of mind which allows us to live our life on this side of the grave wholly in accordance with the moral and political truths righteously embodied in “one of us”.
And then, with God, it all reconfigures [through the soul] into immortality, salvation and divine justice on the other side of it.
I see such inspiration not as an eternal truth that has eternal value, but a timely truth that helps us proceed. Where does inspiration come from? Did I always “know” but couldn’t access the truth? Did I create a touching story that helped me over a gap? Is a blockade dissolved in that instance? I’d love to tell you, but it could be all of them.
Well, the aim of this thread was basically to explore the implication of this when particular behaviors are chosen by particular people who are inspired by conflicting renditions of “the good” derived from conflicting renditions of God.
Again, as that relates to how they go about “for all practical purposes” making a particular choice out in a particular world understood from a particular point of view given certain assumptions about their soul – “I” – on the other side of the grave.
Insofar as their own narratives may or may not facilitate me in extricating myself from my own [at times] brutally grim assumptions.