Cleverness

The sophy part of philosophy is sometimes translated as wisdom, sometimes knowledge ... the difference is critical and cleverness is often a barrier to wisdom ... the big thinkers and repositories of knowledge seem sometimes less wise than a simple ignoramus ... anyway, the flirtation with the clever philosopher and bestselling-author of Sapiens and Homo Deus is over and the over-excited brain can relax again ... pondering whether publication was purposely post S.M Goenka's passing ... or maybe the dystopian vision of Artificial Intelligence enhanced Human species is right .... or just one of many possibilities according to choices made by Sapiens ... evolutionary branching of homo-sapiens is almost discernible .... though at what stage mechanicallly "improved" people cease to be seen as sentient beings is a question ... the bigger question historically is how the currently dominant species rampaging around the earth ever earned the name sapiens or wise ...

Interbeing, and evolution of humans as conscious and aware superorganisms ... proposed by Thich Nhat Hahn has more appeal somehow and much as the implantation of chips in the brain may improve memory and intellect, like television (and its latest version which watches the watcher watching it), microwave cookers, nanobots in the bloodstream, cocktails of pharmaceuticals and so on, are not yet compulsory and may be best resisted ...

Bringing us back to free will, another big question ... yesterday's conversation with a cognitive psychologist friend suggested that my contention that the Libet experiments, supposedly showing action preceding the associated thought and therefore denying free will, could be explained by the thought identified by brain imaging being a post action rationale and the trigger being intuition, was wrong, since intuition would also be seen in the brain imaging ... possibly right ... if intuition was located in the brain ... anyway Libet himself refuted the conclusion that his experiments demonstrated that free will did not exist and you can read about it in the link above ... the bigger question from my friend was why I was at all interested to spend so much time on such questions ... to which there is no answer just now, but it is a question worth considering ... anyway, apologies for the lengthy and rather clumsy sentence above .... good luck following it!

My current view on free will is "don't know, but I find life sweeter if I act as if I have it" ... to be amended according to evidence arriving via the brain or wherever else this stuff is processed ...

Ken Wilber is the antidote to over-cleverness for now ... revisiting him after finding his persona rather guru-ish, seeing the spiritual aspect and the insistence on integrating it with the other essential parts of being human as most refreshing and instructive for programmes on the Art of Living ...