"What will keep people--resigned to their fate--from plopping on the couch to wait it out, as opposed to attempting something more ambitious?"
When the mind and body is in movement, when it has goals and ambitions - that all creates a good feeling for a human being. Look at kids in healthy environments. Look at kids in unorthodox schools. Look at successful entrepreneurs who keep working even after they become financially independent.
The opposite "lying in bed" doesn't stimulate the mind, nor body, is boring and depressing.
Only in today's world, where we have the concept of responsibility, we blame people if they try and fail. Or we don't create opportunities for people to learn useful skills, and then we force them (in a moral ways of course) to work in poorly paid, low status and hard labour jobs. Of course, under such conditions, many people believe that happiness is lying in bed.
Our all current social structures, norms and concepts evolved on the basis of the illusion of the free will.
When we look from this perspective, we put so much emphasis on the concept of personal responsibility. We assign points of success or failure to people based on their personal responsibility and our lives depend on it, in many cases it's even a matter of life and death. That's why we are so heavility invested in the concept of personal responsibility and think that it's so important.
But in the culture without the belief in free will, the concept of personal responsibility wouldn't even exist. It would be meaningless. The society without the free will would look at life from completely different perspectives, have different values and would organize itself in different ways.
I think that the illusion of free will is just a one step in our consciouscness. Sooner or later we will move forward and leave it behind.
You are right that my all expressions are predetermined. The concepts of free will and of it being an illusion are also predetermined.
With my completely predetermined wholeness, I see the possibility for a better life in which the concept of the free will doesn't exist.
As a being, I'm designed to evolve. My prior message about the illusion of the free will is an act of evolution. By publicly stating that free will is an illusion, I try to change minds and move to a better future.
I find the topic of the free will to be the most fascinating.
The abscence of the free will ('free will' as it is defined by the pop culture) is a revolutionary idea because the current world structures and narratives are based on the notion that free will exists.
It is a much more revolutionary idea than Copernicus' round Earth discovery, because the illusion of the free will influences our lives more and in multiple ways.
I'm also a strong believer that the society without the idea of the free will would be a much more compassionate, healthier and happy.
Maybe this sounds to good to be true, but the main principle is that this natural eyesight improvement is not about exercises, but about re-learning the natural seeing habits.
When you re-learn to see things in a natural way (without strain, without fixation), you then see things clearly 24 h/day without any exercises.
Before, I also had this theory in my mind for a year or so.
But for example, right now I'm in Thailand, traveling here for the first time. Everything is new, unfamiliar and unpredictable, daytime, nightime. I have no problems seeing things, everything is almost perfectly clear and sharp. I needed some time to adapt to a smaller screen of my laptop (I was using 24 inch before), but now I'm doing fine.
Actually, the more you look, the better you see. Like in Aaron Swartz blog post, if you want to retrain your weak legs, you need to walk more. Same with eyes.
Just bought a domain https://seeing.fun and will try to do something good with it.
I have already written extensively about natural eyesight improvement in my native language, and also I'm a web app designer and developer. I can combine these things into seeing.fun
One thing I know, is that this practice should be relaxed and even fun, definitely not serious. If you become serious, there will be no results.
Hey, this is really cool to see natural eyesight topic on the hacker news.
I practice this for more than 10 years. Each day I work with computer for ~10 h., drive a car and do other things, and never wear glasses, even though the traditional ophtalmologic measures clearly indicate that I need strong glasses and I shouldn't see even the biggest letter on the Snellen chart, but I see not only the biggest, but sometimes even the 20/20.
Doctors can't explain this, and only congrats me on my achievement. Of course, the eyesight is not perfect. I see clearly in the daytime, but in the nighttime or low light conditions it becomes much harder to distinguish faces.
The best book I found so far is "Relearning to See" by Thomas R. Quackenbush. The originator of this theory was William Bates.
Actually, there is no clear unified theory on how to achieve this. Everyone interprets it differently and the results are inconsistent. There is also a lot of criticism from the medical establishment.
Natural eyesight improvement really works. And the unified theory, in a form of an app, or a good book, maybe including findings from neuroplasticity, would be a great gift for humanity.