The World's Largest Coalition of Nontheists and Nontheist Communities!

One potential

I often hear people speaking of how they want to be able to reach their “full” potential, as if they were currently operating at some lesser capacity. How I see it is, we are always operating at our full capacity because we only have one potential. Given the nature of causality, the engine of our deterministic environment, ones actions are determined by the conditions of the environment. There are no choices or options, only illusions of choices. There is only one path, one potential. Out of all the seemingly alternative paths or choices we think we see, we are determined by the conditions to only go down one. The other seemingly alternative paths or choices that we did not go down were not really options at all, only further conditions that contributed to determining the path we did take. To speak of “full” potential is to suggest there could have been alternate paths, and choices. But there are not. So, we are always operating at our full potential.

Tags: actions, causality, choices, conditions, determinism, free-will, life, movement, potential, stimuli

0 members like this

Comment

You need to be a member of Atheist Nexus to add comments!

Join Atheist Nexus

Comment by TJMorgan on August 2, 2008 at 5:34pm: Laws and penalties are in place to condition us to act a certain way, if one doesn’t act that certain way anyways because other conditions have determined them not to, then they are determined to face the penalties. Them having to face the penalties is designed to reinforce and strengthen the stimuli to increase the conditioning effectiveness of these laws for others. When a person is found guilty, they are guilty of breaking a law in which they had no choice but to break (no free-will, they were determined). While it seems that the failure could be on the deterrence systems part as the conditions set in place didn’t work, that cannot be the case because even the systems failure was determined, so it can’t be blamed either. However, the result is that when the law punishes someone, the person being punished is just collateral damage in a cause that has a greater agenda then just the individual. It is us being determined to try to control a deterministic environment in which we have no control over.