Being humble and honest about which pieces of me function in a mechanistic manner allows me to strategize their placement/employment…it allows me to direct these processes, and in doing so, honor the premise that maybe, just MAYBE, I am in possession of something as precious—and arguably divine—as free will.
So yeah—humility, honesty, and constant assessment of the evidence. The more I focus on these, the more I increase my chances that I won’t end up as a predictable, flesh-bound robot.
Dirty Sci-Fi Buddha 
The more you interact with others, the less you may need to focus on yourself. if you can stay connected to people you align with AND rise to leadership, your life will reflect all your work. What are the skills and habits of connecting and staying connected to people? No matter how good you make yourself, the test will be others.
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Possibly, but I’d say crazy celebrities are a case against that. I’d say that interacting with others is a valuable way of checking the integrity of one’s inner landscape. While they may be A test, I wouldn’t necessarily say they’re THE test. Some tests happen when no one’s around.
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I guess Life should be constant set of course corrections with frequent ‘Where the Heck did that come from??’s. And perceptions of humour and suffering.
I’m suspicious of folk who insist there is no free-will, sounds like a cop-out while trying to sound clever.
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I’d say there is substantial evidence that our free will is limited, but until we can definitively prove that it doesn’t exist, then we should believe in it. If we have so much as a smidgen and deny its existence, it destroys a lot of good systems that we’ve managed to conceive of.
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I would agree as far as the Laws of Physics and Chemistry are concerned we are sort of limited (not that I ever wanted to float away, you understand ).
As regards the rest these minds of ours are such restless, enquiring things and our spirits when given full scope soaring and swooping elements I believe it is our role to be free and explore the home, the Universe, if only mentally or spiritually .
I agree this is something we must never deny.
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I hope so! If not, then our ideas of justice and a whole bunch of other stuff goes right out the window.
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Some folk try and impose on the whole people all of the time, but it never truly works for them. Humans are just too cussedly enquiring and creative.
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And they get sick of stuff pretty quickly, in the span of time. Often that translates to brattiness, but it seems to translate to innovation often enough.
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Humanity. All about change.
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Clearly, free-will is limited by the capabilities, social constraints, and environment. Most people have a set of responses they developed in childhood to: confrontation, approval, pain, control by others, love, and so on.
The real question I am reading here, is are we predestined to a particular fate, regardless of our decisions. In other words, are we rats in a maze. The other question behind this is, gods, and forces that act on us in some ways, either favorable, or unfavorable. Football player pointing to the sky when they score. Suicide bomber believing in Allah to take him to paradise. Good luck charms. Lucky t-shirts. The labels stretch from superstition to religion, but they are the same magical thinking.
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I’m not sure…I think in order to draw a conclusion one way or the other, we’d have to first have a model of reality that accounted for every interaction at the smallest level, then see how if we could iterate into the behavioral level and either predict or not predict every action. Until quantum physics comes up with a comprehensive model that allows us to do that, I think it’s safer to assume we have free will, so that if we have a bit of it, we don’t waste it.
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The only freedom a human has, is to chose if he grapples or ignores the opportunities that life offers. It’s connected with an ability to approach the reality from a fresh perspective. Whatever an individual does, will not alter the general course of evolutionary history.
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Or cosmic. Yeah, it’s just more practical to “swim in your own lane” so to speak, and if the lane widens, then there’s more water to take care of, but eventually the game will end for us all. 🙂
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