Apr 10 2011: I've found that the best thing to help keep creativity going is to cultivate as much new/novel and varied experience as you can. I think when a person gets stuck in a creative rut it's mainly because their mind doesn't have very much new experience to learn from and introduce new views and ideas and understandings and relations and contrasts into things. Gotta have time where you're not being creative so much or even productive. Time where you're just taking in everything coming in during an experience for new things to work with, gotta step back from being productive/creative to refuel it basically.
Apr 9 2011: Also one more thing is that if we live in a universe based on cause and effect (I think we do) then free will is an impossibility. Everything as far as I know in its current state is dependent on everything that's happened in the past, I've never heard of anything being able to supersede cause and effect and if nothing can then free will can't exist. I think it can seem otherwise though just cause of how many factors go into making up conscious experience.
It's not easy to keep track of everything seperated as much and notice that it's just a very complex and large amount of factors changing in response to causes and in turn becoming causes for future effects with no times where any part of you can rise above cause and effect and in turn that makes free will impossible. If you can't rise above cause and effect then you can't have free will because the state you're in at any moment is fully dependent on all the causes in the past, which are dependent on the same and so on forever into the past (or atleast to the point of the big bang, I'm not sure if cause and effect ruled before that)
Apr 9 2011: I'm prolly wrong cause I don't study much of anything and this is all just my thoughts but i'll throw in anyway lol. I don't think free will exists cause I don't think anything has any inherent existence independent of everything else. IMO each thing is just an intermingling of all the influences of everything else coming together at that point in time and space. The word thing might be bad though cause that implies something that has a solid existence free of any influences. Nothing exists except by virtue of everything else I spose is what I'm trying to say.
I think part of the sense of having free will might just be from how communicating things to others requires you divide up the universe into many separate parts instead of just one flowing system if that makes any sense. Words like me/I/you and such. I think some degree of consistency (may be a bad word for it) also might be a part of the sense of free will or self directed action or whatever you wanna call it.
Like how the factors that you identify with your idea of 'you', like your likes and dislikes and views on things and even the matter that makes you up changes over time. So many factors that only a small fraction of them are changing at any point in time. Over time all of them will have changed to where you're pretty much a completely different person than you were 10 or however many years ago, but they happened so gradually and without shaking up the large majority of the factors in too short a time. You have time to integrate the changes into your concept of your self bit by bit. You'll be in every way a different person. Just the changes will have been so minor and unnoticeable at any point in time to where you'll have the feeling of a consistent solid self going through life at all times since you focus on all the factors together at once as you and they don't all change at the same rate or time or whatnot. Gives the feeling of a solid consistent you at the reigns going through life
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A comment on Conversation: How to train my self to be creative?
A comment on Conversation: There is no such thing as free will.
It's not easy to keep track of everything seperated as much and notice that it's just a very complex and large amount of factors changing in response to causes and in turn becoming causes for future effects with no times where any part of you can rise above cause and effect and in turn that makes free will impossible. If you can't rise above cause and effect then you can't have free will because the state you're in at any moment is fully dependent on all the causes in the past, which are dependent on the same and so on forever into the past (or atleast to the point of the big bang, I'm not sure if cause and effect ruled before that)
A comment on Conversation: There is no such thing as free will.
I think part of the sense of having free will might just be from how communicating things to others requires you divide up the universe into many separate parts instead of just one flowing system if that makes any sense. Words like me/I/you and such. I think some degree of consistency (may be a bad word for it) also might be a part of the sense of free will or self directed action or whatever you wanna call it.
Like how the factors that you identify with your idea of 'you', like your likes and dislikes and views on things and even the matter that makes you up changes over time. So many factors that only a small fraction of them are changing at any point in time. Over time all of them will have changed to where you're pretty much a completely different person than you were 10 or however many years ago, but they happened so gradually and without shaking up the large majority of the factors in too short a time. You have time to integrate the changes into your concept of your self bit by bit. You'll be in every way a different person. Just the changes will have been so minor and unnoticeable at any point in time to where you'll have the feeling of a consistent solid self going through life at all times since you focus on all the factors together at once as you and they don't all change at the same rate or time or whatnot. Gives the feeling of a solid consistent you at the reigns going through life