We have the free will to choose what effects we create into reality. These are our actions and behaviors. With our free will we can engage in outcomes that affect the reality everyone else is also in. No one has access to our consciousness to determine what we will do at all times. Despite tendencies in behavior and conditioning to do certain things, we can always change our mind and do something else. We are a random causal agent among the many deterministic factors in the universe.
What we do is ultimately a choice. We may be pressured to do things, such as for survival, but it’s always a choice. We have the power to create good and evil into the world. The bad things we do are choices, no matter the excuse. Whether we think deeply about what we’re doing or not, the responsibility is ours to bear.
We can choose to develop self-control and self-mastery over our behaviors. A failure to think and choose what to do an instead to responding instinctively, automatically or emotionally, is a failure to choose to develop more self-control over our actions.
The world exists as it does because of our combined actions and behaviors that generate effects and create what the world is. Thing scan be changed, and this requires our behaviors to change. By understanding how the current conditions were created, we can change the way of thinking that produced them in order to change our way of acting and living in the world. Without recognizing why the current condition manifested as it did, we won’t likely be choosing how to correct things properly.
There are many potential actions we can take, and each is a causal force which generates effects into the world. Each time we make a decision and act, all that potential is reduced, consolidated or vanishes into the single choice we made. The future we create comes from choosing one of the many possibilities. This is the power we have to affect and create the human world around us.
All that exists can have an effect upon us. Our environment influences and affects us just by us being present in it. This includes everything we see and hear that is input into us, either consciously or subconsciously/unconsciously. We are influenced with effects which affect our understanding of reality and the future choices we will make.
The input we receive influences what we output. That which we care about, and have convictions about, will motivate us to act in some ways as opposed to others. Receiving low-quality input or knowledge will generate low-quality processing of information and the subsequent low-quality output of actions. What goes in gets consumed to become what goes out. The quality coming in will affect the quality going out. The more garbage that comes in, the more likely we will get garbage to come out. Low-quality in, low-quality out. Garbage in, garbage out.
In order to try to create quality output and navigate reality more effectively, we should care and want to input quality knowledge and process it to derive true understandings. This is why seeking truth is crucially important. Truth, and specifically moral truth, is what determines the quality and condition of our individual and collective lives.
Contrasted to our free will choice to generate effects into reality, there are deterministic components to reality. When we act as causal gents to create effects into reality throughout actions, that action comes into existence and can affect others regardless of their desire to be affect or not. We have no free will choice to not experience many effects that are generated in reality, be they generated by free will causal agents like animals, or natural causal agents like the weather.
Whatever happens in reality, we don’t have a choice over it having happened. We are not the ones who decide what happens in existence or what everyone else does. Each individual consciousness is only the generator of their own choices and actions. We can however choose how we respond to the various effects that manifest in reality.
I could be walking and get hit by a biker or car that is out of control. If I am aware of them coming towards me, I can avoid getting hit. I could be walking and get rained on. If I am aware the rain is coming, I could have an umbrella open and avoid getting wet. The effects, once generated, are deterministic. They can’t be undone or willfully reversed. Rain doesn’t go back towards the sky, and car doesn’t reverse its inertia or momentum to go back to a safe position.
There is both randomness and determinism is reality, both free will choice and causality. Most of what happens in reality is interconnected in a causal change of relation and isn’t truly random. But consciousness can choose one action over another or many others. Whatever consciousness is or isn’t, it’s a word we use to reference the psychological dimension of existence demonstrated by various animal beings. We operate as causal agents that aren’t purely moving forward in time based on the causal forces that came before. We can make incorrect, flawed or less optimal decisions when faced with many choices.
We and much of reality acts as a causal force to affect other things in reality. We move a rock, which can hit a window and break it. The rain can fall, loosening up dirt on a hill, and a rock flows down and hits a passing car. The effects can be a result of purely natural law causal forces, or from the power of consciousness to engage in free will. If the free will causal agent didn’t exist, the effect wouldn’t have been generated. But regardless of a free will causal agent being somewhere at a particular time, like a car passing by in the rain, the rock would still slide down the hill due to the rain.
As humans, we demonstrate the greatest power of consciousness toot affect the world around us, or better or worse. With great power comes great responsibility. Consciousness is a double edged sword. We have great power to create good or evil. We must develop the knowledge of understanding ourselves, to comprehend the power we are using now, and the potential power we have to change things.