Oh yeah, I forgot that the topic of karma brings out some unreasonable arguments here. Which is weird because cause and effect is quite reasonable to understand.

Well, to be fair, Karma doesnt really apply in Veedz situation. Or at least not in the way: He didnt give money -> Karma makes him spill his coffee.

That would be precisely the missunderstood concept of Karma that dominates the western understanding of the subject. And why people disregard it.

Karma would rather work in the way Masque said: Because he didnt give money, he thought about not giving money, hence he accidently spilled the coffee.

Or: Because he gave money, he feels good about himself, hence he smiles, hence the cute girl sitting next to him in the bus starts a conversation, and they lived happily ever after.

At least thats my understanding of the word. Not an expert.

Some confusion is in part because it is rather simple as a basic concept and has also grown into more complexity as a set of related beliefs.

As a natural observation it is simple as watching a causative wind effect a leaf in a breeze. Or giving food effects a person's belly. Spilling coffee hurts.

Karma doesn't contradict science until a particular belief is attached which does.

The issue as to why karma is hooey is because of what the mass populace generalizes about it. They assume no matter what injustices will be righted. They believe since Jack The Ripper killed somebody in 1888 down the road in 1903 some unconnected event is bound to happen to harm him.

People just fail to see the connectivity between certain actions and reactions that allow things to happen in such a way. People are just generally poor at analysis of these things. They can't track the course the lead to the reactions to certain actions. This makes it look like mystical karma as opposed to the general track of actions intertwined between people.

You didn't pick up on my facetiousness here. On a related note, I applaud your and Masque's effort, but neither of you will ever be able to demonstrate the workings of "Karma", in the case of those who do not believe in it. It is a non-falsifiable belief, or concept if you will.

The rejection of Karma, in a few folks, is not based on a misunderstood concept of it. Rather, it is the understanding that any concept which relies on a deterministic interpretation of free-choice (e.g., pre-destination, causal determinism, fate, karma, etc.) is non-sense; put succinctly.

I will not bow down to a tyrant, in the form of Karma, any more than I will bow down to a tyrant in the form of fate or causal determinism. I will not deny the subjective experience of free choice, any more than I will deny the subjective experience of pain. I will not be in denial of the full implications of causal determinism, as per compatibilists, nor will I be in denial of my own experience of free choice, as per both hard-determinists and compatibilists. Denial shall not form the basis of my perceptions of experience.

For these reasons, I spit and urinate on Karma simultaneously; comedic effect is always desirable.

But that's like pissing on a tree, which is fine to some extent, but the karma of not managing our poop is imaginable.

So VDz, what what do you suppose is being denied about karma? Your bias seems to be against authoritarianism and manipulation, however there is clearly karma present which is indifferent to authority and manipulation as it can be.

Free will and karma works just as well as gravity and walking works.

This is entirely inclusive and I might point out is a change a person with a sense of belief about karma can make which destroys authoritarian manipulation. Who needs an authority or manipulation to proceed carefully and prepared? That's karma as much as that which you characterize.

Interesting point.

Determinism is destroyed with partial wave duality and quantum mechanics. However pre determined events do not have the same problem.

So I personally do not be believe in Determinism but do believe in events being pre determined.

Try this perspective. There are around eight billion people in the world. One of those people is one in eight billion lucky and one is one in eight billion unlucky.

Now just imagine how life appears to each of these one in eight billion individuals. For sure each of them must exist and each are going to have a thoroughly messed up world view.

Its not that coincidences happen. Its that they must happen, and human intuition is totally hopeless at unraveling the situation. That's why, unless you work out the maths of a situation, implicitly or explicitly, you are going to get it wrong.

Is intuition universally fallible or just fallible to people who don't really use it? We are talking about mere coincidence It's not clear how that makes intuition hopeless or even totally.

I assume when you say events are pre determined you mean that there is a course of action which is currently in place to lead the involved parties to act in said pre determined event?

How can you define a lucky individual or an unlucky individual when people hold different perspectives?

Intuition can be trained. This is what all good poker players do.

If the last few times you picked up a big pair, AA, KK, QQ etc,.. you lost a painfully large pot you natural instinct is to be more cautions with big pairs from now on. Maybe limp in to see if an ace hits or whatnot.

In a general setting, this might make sense, if you do something three times in a row and got painful results, changing tactics might be a good default action. Clearly in this case it is terrible reasoning and any good poker player will have learnt to override these sort of default instincts.

Perhaps immutable is a better word than pre determined.

So I am thinking of the universe as a solid object rather than a stream of events; the stream view being an illusion imparted by our own personal perspectives.

The catch is that the only way to determine what will happen in what we perceive as the future is to wait and see what happens.

So what actually does happen, is what was always destined to happen and could not have been changed in any way. The fact that we feel that we could change the future in some way is a consequence of the sensation of free will that we have developed during the course of evolution.

Guess I am just weird.


You choose a concept of luck and determine your definition of a lucky or unlucky individual relative to that. The exact definition of luck was not that important to my point, just that it was not too far out of the range of general usage.

psychosis is often correlated with the mind making too many connections and noticing too many coincidences. as long as these coincidences you find remain part of your imagination, ie- you can laugh about them, then it is perfectly healthy to let your mind run wild.

How about synchronicity? They are many prominent people who talk about it, Schopenhauer, Leibnitz, Pauli, Jung, etc. Are all of them wrong?

Yes

No.

In my opinion the phenomenon of Synchronicity does exist. It is part of our everyday life. It is noticed by almost everybody but cannot be explained easily. It has been known throughout the history of mankind. Paul Kammerer wrote a book called the The Law of Seriality. I don't think that ever was translated in English maybe till recently. When Einstein read the book said that it was by no means absurd. So again it is puzzling to me that how so many brilliant people ( Goethe and Flammarion come to mind) can be so wrong about this phenomenon and right about other things? Question: Why poker players say "Today is not my day?"

Because they are idiots who believe the gambler's fallacy

This looks like BS to me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

I mean, as a separate real phenomenom. In our personal lives we stumble upon these thoughts, can try to check them out, and preferably discharge those with no serious content, as they usually are. Or then we choose to live in a fantasy world, don't like that much personally, only very temporarily when for example checking out a music video.

I guess if you leap to conclusions about what people might do when facing meaning, any bad guess made is as possible as any good guess.

But the people who find meaning aren't all guessing and some have no clue how anyone could possibly guess their meanings before they chose to tell it.

Nilhists may enjoy derision of ideas like synchronicity as well because they can find meaning in asserting no meaning like a conditioned reflex.

The point is you should have the guts to check it out, discard the majority, and keep the pearls.

Not keep the **** to the smell of which you've got addicted.

Avoid conflating it with other its. That is possibly a most common mistake about it. It's not the bird in the cage. It's the bird you can not expect to appear anywhere or anytime particular in the yard.

Synchronicity is a new word for a more ancient concept. But as everything else, it also lived accordingly to the epoch, more beloved in one culture, not so much in another one. It has been known equally for ages, not only to introverted Eastern mediative practices but to extroverted Western science as well. Sliding back and forth between Scylla of skepticism/ cynicism's implausibility and Charybdis of delusional paranoiac activity, it never disappeared. It is personal, psychological therefore cannot be quantified. I think the edge of emotional intensity (stretched across a gap that holds a tension of opposites) and non locality are the basic factors.

Whoa. Spank and Carlo had a baby! Congratulations and may god have mercy on our souls.