Epinoia

"And they brought him (Adam) into the shadow of death, in order that they might form again from earth and water and fire and the spirit which originates in matter, which is the ignorance of darkness and desire, and their counterfeit spirit. This is the tomb of the newly-formed body with which the robbers had clothed the man, the bond of forgetfulness; and he became a mortal man. This is the first one who came down, and the first separation. But the Epinoia of the light which was in him, she is the one who was to awaken his thinking."

from 'The Secret Book of John'

Epinoia - a Greek name, with one possible interpretation being 'inventive consciousness', specifically, inventive consciousness that points towards spiritual truth.

In my latest philosophy essay, we're questioning the extent to which free will and determinism are compatible, incompatible, are co-evolutionary or, should never have met on the dark street corner of a Fourier transformation.

To attribute the moral responsibility that is the lapdog of free will to human beings, we need to stop shy of an injunction that requires that we 'self create' on a moment-to-moment basis, and look to a deep self that has developed, over time, in response to the social and cultural environment. In short, regardless of my predisposition towards an episodic perspective, I can see (and I happily utilise whenever it suits purpose) a narrative self, a self can almost be defined in terms of component particle mechanics, if we take a historical view of development to date. There is a self that can be defined by initial conditions (for example birth) , by an equation of motion (cognitive development), and by the present, which is the boundary condition (a university student, struggling to make head or tails of metaphysics).

And while Bertrand Russell does a whizz bang job of pointing out that there exist an infinite number of other possible equations of motion that represent courses of motion forsaken by me throughout that history (implying that there too exists an infinite number of paths through the Now that my being-ness could represent in the future) I like that in this present moment, with this dazzling range of possibilities, I have Epinoia, 'inventive consciousness', available for my reflexive response, right now.

She seems to be a sort of wake up call to spiritual truth, that for my thinking, is inextricable from moral responsibility. A second order sanity check on any of the first order actions I could engender in the bright, luminous and ever sparkly world.

Epinoia. Not just 'cos it's a really pretty name.

Ref: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/