It’s correct to regard trees, but not people, as products of their environment. Trees don’t make choices. People do.
IOW sure if objective judgement is needed towards some utility - making formal/societal ones - do it. The point like with every 'don't' is not to say don't judge no matter - point is don't generally judge unless it is fair/useful/targeted towards general betterment.
If I am truly honest, I think it is ironic to preach for people to not do something (like judge) as a means of supporting an acceptance of people's behaviors. I feel like there is an underlying assumption to your stance that judgement and harsh language is inherently bad. You can both accept someone the way they are and judge them for it.. and I personally believe it is /required/ to accept them the way they are in order to provide a more "objective" judgement.
edit: to answer your question, yes i believe idle judgements are the grassroots to future formalized societal rules. formalism is a well studied idea in philosophy and is ultimately a self sustaining illusion built upon informal phenomenon. In other words, you cannot create a formal system to govern subjective behavior without informal subjective behavior laying the groundwork first.
Let's state the obvious: humans _choose_ to modify themselves and their surroundings in a way trees do not, and it offers us the ability to move away from the light if we want. Failure to recognize this apparent difference stunts any drive to investigate further and it's insulting to both humans and trees.
On a level of empathy, I get it. We need compassion for eachother and predicaments that are often not of our choosing. Fine. Let's at least say that in some ways people are like trees and in other ways they are not. Ultimately that's not a very deep insight and rings very much like the kind of thing teenagers say while stoned.
However - I mean no disrespect to Richard or Ram or however he wanted to be called. The man did incredible work toward helping his fellow humans and for this reason alone he deserves great respect. I'm sad for his loss and I hope I can do even a portion of the good he did during his life.
In other words, if they are asleep they're blameless and if they are awake they're harmless.
I'm not claiming it's true, I'm just saying that it's helped me to be more forgiving and easy-going.
True. Being present means you observe the heart feeling, the mind thinking and the body acting. It means you bring yourself into focus, becoming aware of your own existence, watching the motives and the results of your actions, and Studying the person you have built around yourself, inadvertence. I became less judgmental, and calmer since i began learning to 'query' and question my motives. These days I don't do it as often as I used to, but i am much less on auto-pilot.
There are philosophies that believe otherwise.
1. Choose a movie title
2. Now do it again with your eyes closed and try to figure out precisely how you chose the movie title.
3. Keep doing it.
After a while you realize that stuff just “appears” to us. The same holds true for more than just movie titles. How exactly that process works, or why it appears like as if we have free will is an interesting subject.
I honestly understand why determinism sounds like a compelling theory, but it's not just experience that defies it. I see no compelling reason to argue for determinism if you sincerely believe in it.
Anyway, try defining free will precisely. You'll find that it's an extremely incoherent concept (within our current model of causality) . Try posting your definition and I'll be happy to poke holes in it. There's a reason that the free will vs determinism debate hasn't gone anywhere for thousands of years. Perhaps we need a new way of thinking about causality.
Legally determinism is rejected out of hand, interpersonally we assume that individuals bear responsibility for their choices, it's only in some abstruse metaphysical sense that determinism means anything, and there it's largely meaningless.
But we also make choices and decisions as we encounter situations. I'm not a particularly creative person, so I see my freewill expressed more in the form of the decisions and choices I make. I am fully conscious that if I do this, that is a likely outcome, good or bad. I have emotions that affect my judgment and decisions, but I also have the ability, with my own willpower, to choose to overcome those as well.
To describe this process as just thoughts appearing to me seems overly simplistic. Just because we don't understand a process in intimate detail doesn't mean we can ascribe to it sheer randomness. There are very real things happening, and we acknowledge this through other, more complex emotions like guilt, regret, sadness, and so on based on our actions that go a certain way and then with pride, happiness, and confidence when they go another way.
It seems like an overly complex system for things that just "appear" in out head. The fact that we experience these emotions as a result of choices indicates to me that we are capable of acknowledging when we've made a "right" or "wrong" choice, and sometimes it's also "complicated", like almost everything else in this world is (i.e., somewhat in between).
> excerpted from "This Book Needs No Title: A Budget of Living Paradoxes" by Raymund Smullyan
And you can use ideological systems, like math or economics or even your impression of another person, to generate endless amounts of ideas. And for each of them you veto all other possible options in order to generate the one you do at the time you do so. Then on top of that you have the conscious power to accept or reject the idea you've generated.