First of all, some working definitions. A working definition is a preliminary attempt at a definition as useful to as many schools as possible without losing the general sense of the word, so a working definition generally tries to start by capturing such general senses.
- awareness - first person perceptions
- consciousness - firs person perceptions
- will - a perception of acting
You can see I don't distinguish at this point between awareness and consciousness, but the latter seems to carry additional terms for others. Perhaps consciousness means, for them, self-awareness, but to me it seems like this is "self consciousness".
I will compare the meaning of my theory of will to alternates, such as the idea that will is an illusion insofar as there is no real choice (i.e. all choices are predetermined by prior conditions)
Social Activism
One major impact of my view on will, compared to the notion that choice is an illusion, has to do with social and political activism. I blogged politically for years and found it a great way to stay involved with politics without having to be in the city, and there there is an assumption you can make choices. I found there was a lack of philosophy. Then, when I find the liberal philosophers, I find they don't even believe in choices, which makes me think the progressive activists lack the council of the progressive philosophers, on the ground that it is impossible to advise best choices where there are none really.
A belief in will power, that there is energy in will, gives the idea that there is energy in will, just like energy from the sun, or a tsunami, or of the wind, there is will, and with engineering it can even be as strong (in sum) as those former.
Vegitarianism
It was a surprise to me to discover that one issue about "consciousness" is vegitarianism. When I was an ethical vegitarian in the past, it was due to the cruelty of the big ranching industry. I was not as concerned about eating animals that lived well, for example, in the wild, and were not hunted cruelly (quick death, don't take animals with young, etc). But then, perhaps that shows lack of real commitment, explaining why I stopped being a vegetarian in my twenties. It seems a lot more vegitarians pride themselves on not eating "conscious" creatures, and one suspects the term "awareness" won't really change the reasoning.
I can of course see the implications of that, but I still tended at first to miss the impact of this on such vegitarians, and thought that sufficient distinctions were available... e.g. eating a conscious being that is not very conscious (conscious of thirst is not like the neurological machines that allow things like human trauma), and has no pain neurons, which I pointed out. I repeatedly talk about relative dullness of the senses.
But pointing out such comforts that to me still make a distinction, ethically, between eating animals vs eating plants was really just harkening back to my own thoughts on vegitarianism, which was that animals should not live abusive lives. The senses of the plant, being so much as focussed on slower moving phenomenon, in my estimation, and it's lack of mobility make it much easier to raise in a habitate it appreciates and flourishes in. It is difficult to maintain a large enough natural area to house 100 head of cattle in the way most comforting and healthful for them, but relatively easy to create a garden in which 100 plants will have everything they enjoy, sunlight, water, nutrients.
But if the notion hinges on the act of death, and that it snuffs out an awareness, a consciousness, perhaps none of that is comfort in the face of the fact that there literally is no way for us to survive but to consume other living things, at least not until we create entirely synthetic food... which hardly sounds as good to me as a proper organic polyfarming agriculture where all the animals and plants live in a harmony enhanced, rather than abused, by the will of man.
Microbial will perhaps aids the argument that life is cannibalism too strongly, but my attitude is that this seems to be the case, and I will not reverse engineer what I've learned to make the universe seem worthy of a better reputation over all. For my part I find it much more complicated, an fortunately so, when it comes to what type of ethics is possible in such a living world. I note that our cells themselves were probably created by bacteria eating bacteria, and sometimes, instead of the eaten being digested, it just went to work in the cell, and increased the size of the partnership, as with mitochondria. There is symbiosis involved. I think it's possible to raise animals and plants in symbiosis, and I suspect we will stop eating animals... it's too expensive, has many drawbacks, and many aspects which simply cannot ever be fully mitigated, whereas with plants, they all can be mitigated.
Crime and Punishment
I'm glad our discussions on will and consciousness do not always centered on the ramifications in crime and punishment. This is a traditional way to reverse engineer ideas of will... people must have will so we can punish them. I think the issue of how to deal with people that refuse to cooperate with us in ways we find minimally acceptable, at least, can have no influence on the will, but it is certainly not true the other way around... views on will must affect how we treat other people's use of their own will.
As a relativist I think it's impossible to find an absolute view of "how we should treat each other" and the potential restrictions on how we might otherwise behave and so it is impossible to expect a particular agent to agree with such a view. However, as a skeptic, I do think it's possible to find systems one believe in and can accept. Thus we can find systems agreed on by a wide group of people. The issue of crime in punishment is not a matter of convincing those that reject the system agreed on by this group, but is rather a matter of agreement itself, a part of the agreed system... "we say that you cannot steal, those that disagree will suffer the following treatment..." Such sentiments are part of the social agreement. People ought to have as much chance to explore their will as possible, and thus if a group of people wanted to ban construction of cities, while this is a restriction on those that want to build cities, such people could have a region to try their ideas, and let those that would build cities have theirs.
A belief in will in all things, and that given all chances it ought to be less constrained wherever possible, leads to a distribucratic view, where dissagreements that can not be resolved satisfactorilly to all parties ought to be compartmentalized in the spirit of "self-soveriegnty", which means delegation to the individual will in all things possible, and delegation to groups of wills where nececessary, going up to groups in general, to the group of all humans, to the group of all creatures. At the level of all humans I would give an example... murder... it ought not be allowed local legality. But I can think of a lot of things that should.
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