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Originally Posted by Eisho  In my opinion though the active part we play is already colored for us. We are already molded. Already pre-disposed.
How two people react to the 'truth' of the LoA was decided for each of us a long time ago. How two people react to the 'truth' that our minds create our reality was similarly decided.
Cheers,
Eisho |
Hello Eisho. I'd like to understand what you mean about the prior 'coloring' and molding - are you talking orthodox physics & biology, or something else?
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Originally Posted by Daffy Duck Well, I could tell you some conscious goals I have accomplished, if you wish. These are things I have consciously decided I wanted and work towards. You can call this the "LOA" if you wish.
I'm the first in my family to go to college, and I'm doing very well. I've more than doubled my income in the past twelve months with a new career and generated passive income. I have a very happy relationship with a woman I very much enjoy. I just got back from Canada, finally the first time I have traveled out of the USA, and I learned how to snowboard.
So yay for conscious direction! Yay for not living life on autopilot! 
I could continue, but I don't feel like scanning images of my salary stubs. Forgive me. 
Are these all attributable to merely my own actions? Seriously ... of course not, but it wouldn't of happened on autopilot either. |
Yeah, yay for conscious direction, and yay for you Daffy. I've just caught up with your side of the conversation here and we are almost exactly on the same line of reasoning about all this, so I won't butt in too much. I just wanted to reiterate that point and expand on it too. The "look what X has provided me" argument of practitioners of the LoA is just one example of confirmation bias that can be witnessed being performed by many magical thinkers. Go on a Christian forum, and not only will you find people saying that Jesus sucks, you'll find a lot of born-again types telling you how blessed their lives have become since they invited the one son of god into their lives.
There is quite a lot of evidence that this is the reality behind a lot of irrational beliefs. Another example is in the placebo function of alternative medicines. Again, as you argue that LoA can have good effects, I'm not saying that alt med never works for physical reasons, and nor am I saying that if it works via placebo that should be a reason to dismiss it or ban it from our store shelves, but when investigated, a lot of supposed cures do absolutely nothing and rely on the fact that we tend to get well again without any treatment. If we took nothing, we'd get better. If we took the potion of the wise woman, we get better, but because it is our tradition to take the potion, and because we don't apply empirical testing, we never learn the truth about the potion - and even start to panic when we can't get any, or paying large quantities of our cash for it.
But that was a side issue - it's just vaguely related to the thing I noticed - that you and I haven't been posting 5 times a day about every little success in our lives, and attributing it to "Bothering to get off my arse today" or "Ignoring my list of jobs while I indulge myself in a bit of an online rant" or "Doing the jobs on my list" instead of having a rant online. Why? Well, because we're not so desperate to grab at indefensible "reasons" for everything; we understand that things are more complex than what our childish whimsy thinks about life; we listen to the arguments (boring and orthodox though they might seem to some) that there are planets and galaxies and a fossil record and our own genetic code and accidents and so on, rather than just dreaming everything into existence before our very eyes, and then - bizarrest of all - appealing to the objective truth of "Quantum Mechanics" written about on the "internet" to prove our circular argument.
Anyway, I appreciate your posts here very much, Daffy.