Interesting point. I agree it's all a matter of perspective. I used to reflect a lot about things like why and how do we know that stealing and killing is bad, is it because religion said so etc. But it's simply because we know it hurts people isn't it? I mean yes laws have been put in place so that there is a punishment if you do something malevolent, because without laws, a large number of people will steal, rape and kill if they think they can get away with it. Because knowing that they are doing harm to someone is not enough.
From a perspective point of view, I have no doubt that different people feel joy for different things, some may feel as happy when they beat someone to death as someone else would when they help an old person cross the street. As you say, in the end we're only acting according to what makes us feel good, whatever this is.
But that just exacerbate my mysanthropy.
About the third level, I refuse to believe that. I believe too strongly that life can go in all sorts of directions. It does when you start making random, unusual choices. Some things are of course dictated by the environment, but I'd say at least 50% depends on choices. This specific number comes from nowhere, but you know what I mean. If I decide tomorrow that free will doesn't exist and my life and the person I am will be exactly the same no matter what I do, so I'll just sit on my couch and drink vodka, I'm pretty sure it's going to change the course of things.
Good points, I think for some things we may just see things differently. As to your point about things being bad simply because it hurts people, I feel its too consequentialist, which is a school of thought that focuses on the outcomes more than the reasoning behind them. The anecdote that puts me off of that way of thinking is this: Imagine a man has a wife dying of cancer, and decides to put a drug in her food everyday. Three months later, the woman goes to the hospital and she's cured! The drugs her Husband put in her food saved her life and discovered a cure for cancer, he's a hero. The man smiles and accepts his accolades, although the real reason he was putting drugs in her food was to kill her. He was tired of having to take car of his dying wife, and wanted to move on with his life, so he intended to kill her slowly with drugs.
In a situation like that, I think most people agree he was doing a bad thing, and that's how I feel. But if you look at how things turned out and assume no one finds out what his true intentions were, no one is hurt and everyone involved is better for it. The world is better for it. So I use that example to sort of say that I think there is more to good and bad than outcome. That's why I see it as so complicated. In part it's because I don't think we can ever know what anyone is truly feeling or thinking, or what is going in inside their head or heart. And even if we could know that, I still think there is some uncertainty about what should matter and what shouldn't, which trickles down from the third level for me.
Before I jump into that, I think I can understand how we can look at the same thing and I find solace and you find misanthropy. When we both look at that guy who murders and deep down he's feeling like he's doing a good thing and making the world a better place, and not resulting in bad things, I can understand how that would make you dislike mankind more. If people feel good or feel right doing things that hurt others, I can definitely understand how a species that includes people who have to decide between doing something they think is good or right (murder) and doing things that won't result in the pain of others (not murder) is not the type of species you'd like to be around. Where I get solace out of this, or at least see an opportunity to see things different does largely come from the unknown of my third level.
With your example about the couch and the vodka, I think I understand and agree. What I think you're saying is if you decide to sit all day and drink vodka, it will change the course of your life as opposed to you deciding not to drink vodka all day. Maybe you'll eat a whole pizza, drunk dial your ex, break your favorite glass, and wake up late the next morning with a pounding headache. And all those things would happen because you drank all day as opposed to didn't. I would agree. I would also look at that more through my first, "Real world" level of things. Any cause an effect I think. At the third level, I am wondering
why you decided to drink all day. And I don't mean the thought process you used to make the decision, but where that thought process came from.
I am questioning how much *we* actually have to do with any thought or feeling we have. To take one of the examples I sort of threw in there, the idea of the tabula rasa and that we are born as blank slates. To take it to the extreme, its the idea that we are all born exactly the same in regards to our thoughts and feelings, and we are basically coded throughout life by our environment. When I think of things through that scope, I don't feel you deciding to drink vodka all day is actually a decision you made - it's a decision that results from a series of a trillion different things that had occurred up until that point. *You* had as much to do with deciding to drink as a robot does in deciding what restaurant to suggest for date night. And just like I wouldn't blame the robot for giving me a bad suggestion (I would blame the people who created the robot or the people who created the algorithm used), I would have a hard time holding you accountable for deciding to drink. That's where my feeling of everything being arbitrary and maybe nothing really matters stems from.
I do want to say I'm not just completely rejecting the idea of free will on this level though, but I am putting a big question mark in response to the question. I was up late last night thinking about this, and perhaps somehow we all created ourselves somehow. Like from non-existence we made ourselves exist. It's not a very fleshed out thought, but if that were the case perhaps there are things about ourselves that are meaningful because they are from ourselves. But something like that is impossible to prove, which is what the big picture of this level is to me. If we dig deep enough, where our thoughts or feelings or desires or anything about us comes from becomes a question mark. And with so much uncertainty as to why we are what we are or do what we do on a fundamental level, it leaves open the opportunity for a lot of discretion on our parts.
I used to hold the belief that all people were good except me. My logic was that our feelings came from a different place and as long as we did what are feelings told us was right, we were doing right. I would think of someone like Hitler and think that although on those first two levels he's a monster, and justifiably so, but on that third level I could convince myself that deep down he genuinely felt his actions were right and for the betterment of the world. In my mind, those feelings had to come from somewhere and that that place meant something. As I got older and saw my feelings conflict and at times be wrong, I decided to reject that idea. I don't know if that makes any more sense than what I said before, hopefully it does.
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