Reply To: What is Mechanism (Philosophy)?

[Gary]

Neither of which preclude the possibility of a SUPERnatural overseer or two, which by definition are outside the scope of science, which only studies natural phenomena.

There are people, including me, who would argue that god is a natural phenomenon and that it is possible to study her/him/it, in fact if I am not mistaken, it’s what all of religion and much of philosophy has been trying for the last few thousands of years.

I want to ask if anyone else out there has found a philosophy (more so than a religion) which has greatly improved their quality of life. I’d be interested in hearing about it.

I like the daoism way of seeing life as a harmonious system of eternal movement and change, where everything is counterbalanced by everything else. In terms of personal philosophy I prefer the traditional yogic one: (expressed in modern terms) – the body and the hormonal system is the hardware
– the mind is the software Both have a mind on their own, which can not be considered real human. Both are filled up to the brim with desires and the person who is operating the computer is eternally occupied. Imagine that your computer would tell you all day that the processor needs a wipe and that the harddisk is in need of defragmentation. The software jumps in and forces you to use it (oh … doesn’t game addiction fit that description quite nicely?! :)) to update it etc. etc. Instead of you, the user, being in control, you are eternally following the whims of what is not you. Here yoga comes in and fine tunes the hardware and the software, so that at some point you as the user take control. The goal is to kill all desires. If you have no desires, you have perfect free will and perfect contentment. You are not compelled to do anything, but _can_ do everything.
You don’t need anything to feel happy and are free to be happy with _anything_ or even without anything at all. For me, Yoga is one of the few sciences in the world, that really brings out the “sapiens” in “homo sapiens”