Before epilepsy was understood to be a neurological condition, people believed it was caused by the moon, or by phlegm in the brain. They condemned seizures as evidence of witchcraft or demonic possession, and killed or castrated sufferers to prevent them from passing tainted blood to a new generation.
it’s insane to me that someone could understand the ramifications of trauma on neurobiology and conclude that free will doesn’t exist
i feel like, without free will, no one would ever escape their trauma. without saying something shitty and uncompassionate like “you’re only held back by your trauma because you’re not strong willed enough”; that’s not true at all
but i think, at it’s core, healing from trauma requires two things: a person who you feel safe enough to trust, and the willingness to take the leap and trust again
if you don’t have one or the other, you’re going to really struggle
and that moment where you choose to trust, how can you see that as anything but free will? when everything about your past, your nerves, your biology is screaming at you to do otherwise?
i dunno. i don’t think any of us would have grown past our trauma at all without free will
that said, i think there’s also just too much going on in the brain to conclude there’s no free will for sure. i guess that’s not the same as saying it’s deterministic, which you can’t really say, because physics gets too fucking weird at low levels, right?
anyways, i guess we can never really definitively say whether free will exists or not. but i think you can still make very strong arguments for being compassionate to poor people / traumatized people / people with mental illness / etc without saying we all don’t have free will. it feels a lot like saying we’re all doomed to be what we were made to be and we can’t make a better life for ourselves
it just starts with convincing people, and believing, that we all deserve that
We don’t really know why one person chooses and the other one doesn’t. It could be genetic, history, chance. If free will exists and includes any of those then it isn’t 100% free will.
yeah no, my post is closer to “there’s more than 0% free will” than “there’s 100% free will”. i definitely know too much about trauma to think it’s 100%. but trauma get so deeply ingrained, and it’s so cyclical; that anyone can break free, seems nothing short of miraculous to me. to me, if we had no free will, that would never happen
Yeah it is an eternal mystery. And assholes will exploit compassion even though some people deserve compassion because of their circumstances (which may lead to crime). Conservatives tend to think only suckers have compassion for those that don’t “pick themselves up by the bootstraps”.
Even in a marriage there is tension because one does not know if their partner is exploiting good will. Relationships are hard and not a science, despite what the latest self-help book preaches.