I was half-offline as I was listening while driving and missed much of the discussion. I only heard the increasing tension in your voices. Glad everyone made it through the discussion without any bumps or bruises! Appreciate Raymond Cattell’s formula @Mark_Jabbour.
Yes! exactly! My simplistic mind has always wanted to state that the focus on “is there free will?” is the wrong question. Of course there is determinism…we can never say we have true free will; of course there are indeterminate chances floating about, allowing for many possibly futures and some level of choice.
I am interested in the moral side of things, which @ZacharyFeder explored in his writing (and we loosly discussed in the conversation), an updated tech version of “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” based on the knowledge or “prediction” of our traumas and personality glitches from generations of living in a confusing world with only a grand monkey mind to make sense of it all. If we do the Zac’s father technique of transposing our life onto that of another individual, we may realize, once we “become” this examined individual, that we could have really been that person. We could have been (or “thrown” into this world as)the being that follows the path towards the abusive parent, the murderer of a family, or we could have even been the most respected member of a community. Sam Harris explores this in depth in the straightforward short book Free Will. (highly recommended if you have a couple hours to spare - please note that I despise most all of his other writing.)
No one wants to be the trauma-inducer, and if they had the ability to stop, I am sure they would. Even if they do want to induce trauma, we are likely back to the modern day “they know not what they do,” perhaps because of a brain injury or repeated childhood abuse. But we have to do something to them…an awakening punch can be all they need to stop. Others will need lifetime in jail. But what do we do with drug addicts and other self-inflicting abusers? I think Sloterdijk is correct to conclude that “microclimates and lifeworld atmospheres could become legal and political factors” (Globes, p. 333)…once the “stench” of others’ actions affect more than the individual, the collective has the right to protest. We could do as Zarathustra does in the “On the Rabble” section and "hold our noses as we wander “disgruntled through all of yesterday and today,” or we can use our growing knowledge of all things human to make more conscious predictions and change society into a more spiritually conscious entity.