This vectorial nature of (phenomenal) experience is intentional, i.e., meaningful present acts aim toward and determine meaningful future experience.* The unique, incarnate, and meaningful circumstances of each present moment are what makes a qualitative change in future experience possible.
In this depiction of the structural continuum of experience, what some Buddhists refer to as the mental continuum (a problematic translation), there is no room for free will. If there were free will it would require input from a willing agent. This agent, a self, possessing such a will, would of necessity be unconditioned by the past and have the capability to make decisions without relying on input from the past or present circumstances or a conceivable future which would also be free of any input from the past in any conception of a future. This agent would be free of all conditioned imperatives even those which demanded the next breath. Such an agent excludes the existence of a memory in any conception of the time in which and for which a decision had to be made. One is exhausted by any attempt to even conceive of an unconditioned agent possessing free will let alone making decisions...
*This movement is
May 28, 2018
Some notes on karma, novelty, change, and free will
This blog is essentially about two narrative topics that are or will be more important to us in the near future, chaos and determinism. To quote Edward Lorenz, "Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.” and, oddly, William Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Strangely, both succinctly declare what this blog is all about and how chaos, determinism, and the past along with sentience or awareness are in process of generating human subjective experience--again, the life of each one of us as it is lived. This blog seeks to humanize our language of experience and to help us focus on experience at the expense of an undue prioritizing of theory over experience.
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