I'm 61, male, and started in software back in the mid 70s. First computer that I could physically touch was a PDP-8/M with an ASR-33 teletype with paper tape reader and punch.
In my mid-50s, I started listening to Alan Watts and learning about ancient Indian religions / philosophies. My world-view today is some kind of cross between Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. I'm a free will skeptic, as well.
While I'm not paralyzed by it, I've come to think that we can't know how any decision we make is going to turn out. We can't know with certainty if doing X is going to be good or bad for us in the long run. All we have are our own estimates of probabilities, and I'm not sure how well we can estimate them, either, honestly.
I also don't know who "I" am, or where I begin or end. In infancy and childhood, I think we come to accept a belief that "we" are individuals, each residing in our physical bodies. Yet I understand the Universe to be a single thing (a quantum field? a simulation?) and so the idea of us being individuals seems a bit off to me. I think we are far more connected and interdependent than we usually recognize.
One good outcome of my world view is that I don't really worry about passing away. A less pleasant outcome is that my world view is so out of the ordinary that I don't often connect with people that I can talk about this with in any serious way.
I share a lot with how you view the world, but could probably stand to learn a lot from you as well. I'm in my mid 30s, software developer, and generally open to spirituality but not in the conventional, western, judeo-christian sense.
One of my foundations of belief is that life is entirely about probabilities and chance. It's a sort of guiding force that I follow. I view everything similarly to how you do, in that we cannot possibly know for sure it's outcome. By extension, we cannot possibly know what the right choice is for us. Sometimes, you have to close your eyes and roll the dice.
I'm deeply interested in the random nature of the world / life. When you stop to think about it so much of our existence is truly random in nature right down to our conception. It boggles the mind to think how little control we had over even our own existence.
As for identity I'm also a free will skeptic as you put it.
Anyways, just thought I'd let you know that people like you are out there. I also find it a bummer that we're a huge minority, but such is life I suppose.
Being a skeptic of free will, do you believe your belief in determinism makes the knowledge of living in a deterministic world a moot point?
Even with things being predetermined, our conscience minds still desire to optimize our existences with what we ultimately see as choices and decisions.
I’m this case, free will can then be preserved as an ideological concept that emerges within a deterministic system that breeds consciousness.
That's funny, I just got a few books on Zen and while I don't know what to think of a lot of it, it's definitely a very new way of thinking (or not thinking I guess). It's almost an alternate universe version of Stoicism which I was pretty interested in when I was younger and harder on myself.
I definitely agree people way overestimate what they can predict about their choices. There are a few choices you can't take back but most of the time you're continuously choosing (mainly on auto-pilot) along a path, it's not a binary choice. Like most of us could, tomorrow, stop working in software and/or move to a different country for example. It would be hard but it's not like you chose once and now you're stuck forever.
Probably the literature about ten is better these days. When I read about it, it was mostly from D. T. Suzuki. I was surprised when I attended a zazen meditation in Kyoto a few years ago about the differences. It seems (after reading about it) that Suzuki was part of a fringe branch and not telling us about 'mainstream' Zen.
It sounds like you are going through what the math community went through upon the discovery of Godels Incompleteness Theorems.
While it’s important to know logic systems have limitations (somewhat of an analogue to our understanding of the world), it’s important that we make use of that knowledge by trying to find different mental frameworks that are useful to us and help us move closer to our desires (whether it be a framework for the discovery of more math or a framework that guides us further along our pursuit of happiness)
I’m in my 30s and have a similar world view though I’ve never paid much attention to religion and just sort of landed here by default. The system we’ve created for ourselves doesn’t care much for world views though. Its important to adapt to our micro environment as well as macro. This is probably why it’s rare to bump into likeminded people. You probably wouldn’t know I think like this if you met me either.
I have a similar view, although probably much more influenced by Nagarjuna and the Mulamadhyamakakarika. I noticed most of the western philosophers who I thought got closest to the truth - Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Wittgenstein on language, Hume on the self, Parfit - all seemed to have either been influenced by or have a lot of crossover with more eastern thought, which I hadn't taken as seriously as it deserved.
Normally I can get friends to agree with most of the propositions, even that 'they' don't ultimately exist in the conventional western sense, but I don't think they buy into it emotionally, which is probably where it counts.
> One good outcome of my world view is that I don't really worry about passing away. A less pleasant outcome is that my world view is so out of the ordinary that I don't often connect with people that I can talk about this with in any serious way.
In my mid-50s, I started listening to Alan Watts and learning about ancient Indian religions / philosophies. My world-view today is some kind of cross between Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. I'm a free will skeptic, as well.
While I'm not paralyzed by it, I've come to think that we can't know how any decision we make is going to turn out. We can't know with certainty if doing X is going to be good or bad for us in the long run. All we have are our own estimates of probabilities, and I'm not sure how well we can estimate them, either, honestly.
I also don't know who "I" am, or where I begin or end. In infancy and childhood, I think we come to accept a belief that "we" are individuals, each residing in our physical bodies. Yet I understand the Universe to be a single thing (a quantum field? a simulation?) and so the idea of us being individuals seems a bit off to me. I think we are far more connected and interdependent than we usually recognize.
One good outcome of my world view is that I don't really worry about passing away. A less pleasant outcome is that my world view is so out of the ordinary that I don't often connect with people that I can talk about this with in any serious way.