You can only determine causes by triangulating both cause and effect.
That is no more or less than grounding them in necessity.
Scientific determinism is the reduction of history to that which brings evidence of certain highlighted aspects of the present. All other kinds of determinism are speculative. Meaning that whatever causality one accurately discerns, there is always a larger theatre to worry about.
So, Ill try to leave the thread alive and chill out after this, for determinism to fully account for things you need a closed environment. A closed environment is known to generate entropy in itself. Therefore all non entropic phenomena are acts of free will. Since the universe since the collision we call the Big Bang went from being a turbulent plasma to an orderly system of turbulent plasmas, free will governs the infinite order of time.
Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid, Annuit Coeptis – a bold enterprise is the only thing that will stand in this cosmos. That is the one final cause of all things. Causation isn’t ultimately a local game but one of general demand. Existence is local, but the chains of causation are local, but the particularity of the used chains is not. I assume this has to do with electron spin entanglement, which overturns all ping pong models.
The future is a free cause. The past tries to mimic it as best it can and this attempt is our mind.
Still listening to this but, I agree completely with that thought that the citizen needs to have agreed to a treaty to be morally punished.
“Obliterating power of forgiveness”, haha.
Its adding insult to injury to forgive someone for something he didn’t consider wrong.
I think 2003 was a year when humanity really saw the nature of the affective nature of the prison system in Abu Grahib.
(The circus itself)
Yes, a convicts enmity towards the state would be lessened if the state were not a hypocrite.
A societies art forms are a remedy for its morality.
Good lecture. Believe me I know the clown part. It is strictly the tendency to be truthful that is always having the comical effect on people who believe in the moral righteousness of the State. Most of my family is that way. You can’t rely on such people for anything at all Im afraid. Mice. You can’t blame them for being weak. But indeed the criminal justice system could, under very intelligent hands, be transformed to something that doesn’t subvert a mans self-valuing - but this requires vey harsh, Dostoyevskian psychology.
I don’t know if you’ve read this thread but you should, concerning how these Determinism v Free-Will arguments have progressed:
I’ll simply define “Free-Will” in my own words briefly, so that my position is not misunderstood. “Will” means desire, Want, and the biological need of any-and-all organisms. Thus Will is a product of biology. Non-living things do not have a “Will”. Therefore existence or “The Universe” cannot have a Will (this runs against the Judæo-Christian narrative), except wherein only living-things are intended to comprise “The Universe”. This observation is usually conflated, even in the “Deterministic” case, in which as you say, is Anthropomorphic. It is Anthropomorphic because “Want” is extended to non-living things. So the cause of Elemental forces, Physics, non-living things are reversed, to say that “all things are caused”, which is then mixed up with the “Want” (Will) of all things.
Outside Biology though, non-living things do not have a “Want”, and therefore do not have a will, and therefore the Anthropomorphizing of Determinism, is a logical fallacy. It’s invalid.
Therefore, again to conclude, the “Causes” of one thing (non-living physical compositions, chemicals, elements, beings, things) , are not the “Causes” of another (biological life).
If Silhouette were paying attention, this would mean that he, and you, must both reconcile how the “Determinism/Causation” of elemental forces (Physics) are the same both within and without Organic life …which is why I can compare the “freedom of a rock” to the “freedom of this or that person”.
Intuition is easier. If a person is “dumb as a rock” then the implication is less free than others.
Well I think we can get a long way in designing such a morality.
The first step would be the acknowledge that it has to literally apply to and formally also be consented to by all humans.
But I think we can get there if we define satisfaction first, as “that to which toward a person gravitates” or some other wording to the same stoic effect.
This avoids defining satisfaction and purpose in terms of a pre established objective value. (after all that value depends on the nature of the subject)
A morality could only mean a path to guarantee that everyone is perpetually free to satisfaction. He or she can be satisfied at any given time. But satisfied of what? What kind of thirst are we talking about here?
But then if non living things are excluded, do the examples of fire, water and rocks really count for anything with regard to freedom? Are we discussing free will in terms of other freedoms than those of the will?
On the “great criminal” from Nietzsche, he himself of course aspired to be the greatest criminal of all. The philosopher is irreducible to the law, because he produces a stronger one - the establishment of law as a primordial crime. That would be caused by very few other causes than those that lie within oneself. The founding fathers were the only truly free Americans.
Concerning Ability,
Silhouette and I argued on this point for probably a dozen pages worth of the thread.
I completely disagree. “Freedom” is a product of ability and complexity. Thus the more ability and complexity an organism has, the more Evolved it is claimed to be, the more intelligent it is claimed to be, and therefore the ‘freer’ it is claimed to be. One person who is “most-capable” would be freest, in the sense of choices, options, and a general standard-of-living.
Your counter-argument probably would be, unless I’m mistaken, that “any freedom” any person could have, whether simple or complex, must always abide by (General) Causality. And this was Silhouette’s consistent argument as well. My response to him, and now to you, is the same. What then is “Causality”, what is the process exactly, except a backward-looking justification for events and processes.
Any person, any human, any intelligent life form, crosses a phenomenon that it cannot understand, but desires to recognize (and memorize), and so studies it. Even babies and infants do this. All cognizant life-forms do it. Organisms simply interact with environments. An organism does not know many aspects of “its own” environment. Even in the most developed/evolved case, a smart human, will go through life encountering unknown situations, unknown people, and unknown environments. And so the cognizant process is one that seeks-to-understand, by looking for ‘Causes’.
But it does so after-the-fact, after the “Unknown” is already admitted to. So seeking-causes is a response, to unknowns. This is why I repeatedly argued against Sil that Determinism v Free-Will is Epistemological. If you don’t know the causes of the things or phenomena you refer to, then you can’t thereby infer that they are “Determined”, more-so when people already Anthropomorphize Determinism, because it’s then a double-error.
Logically, Determinism must only refer to “known causes”, otherwise such causes would be un-determined.
And, in my opinion, that is what “Un-determined” means anyway …unknown-causes.
Yeah this is my ontological position as well.
Causality is a selective narrative inserted into the past based on non-universal observations in the present. If someone has green eyes and the father also has green eyes you can see a causal strain. But if a green eyed man and a blue eyed woman are sitting before you you wouldn’t know what colour the eyes of their child was going to be.
Science consists of that which can be extracted from the past so as to be projected on to the future. That is very little in effect, otherwise we would have not be in as much confusion and trouble as a knowing species. Causality is also a morality, a selection of phenomena to suit the premise that it should all be chronologically ordained.
It could very well be a matter of description.
And the ‘freedom’ of one person, is that of a rock, and the freedom of another person, is that of wind/air.
Why are some people freer than others? If it is a matter of intelligence/ability, then this is why one who is unintelligent/slow would be “thick-headed” or “retarded”, dull.
Some people can move around freely, whereas others cannot. Some people can ‘think’ freely, whereas others cannot.
However all the “causes” which lead one person to one state of greater freedom must be compared to the causes which led another person to a state of lesser freedom.
In the case of my other thread, I introduced to Sil (but he could not advance the conversation far enough), is it matter of Nature or Nurture? Can “slow” children be nurtured to a state of greater freedom, or is it a waste of time, energy, and focus? Or a better question, to what degree can education or nurturing be used to provide choice (or training) to a child, that would increase his/her freedom?
How is freedom then any different from “Privilege”? And if Freedom pertains to Privilege, then is Freedom also not a factor of Power, and Control, and Choice?
This would be the part where “Free-Will” is a matter of Society (politics), not merely the individual.
In the other thread, I categorized types of freedom:
So what does a truly free man (also for woman) do with his freedom?
How can we recognize the free type?
pondering:
In a sense it is freeing to believe in causality entirely as one can no longer doubt oneself.
If one believes one is free, that means that whatever one is doing is apparently ones free will, therefore one should keep on doing it.
This is at least a treacherous possibility that could emerge in an unfree person.
So within the deterministic system and with this running definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result, not counting throwing dice, the insane person would be relatively the freest, as he isn’t responding to consequences.
That can also mean that the most stubborn person is the freest.
This ties into the idea of resistance as the kernel of free will.
Resistance is understood as the condition to causality.
If there weren’t resistances, there could be no discernible cause and effect, but only a continuous flow of some no-thingness or whatever.
Why “The resistance” if it is smart always nonsensicalizes the ruling order. Whatever dominion isn’t serious can’t withstand being nonsensicalized. Compare that to Trump who won by being nonsensicalized and responding enthusiastically, that is a great freedom. Thats why I compare him to Lincoln, who acted like Macchiavelli in order to set the definitive moral precedent of humanity; habeas corpus. Trump acted like a silly person to save the world from annihilation and worser things. But this will cause some riot.
Hear hear.
Thats when you really know an effect is going to happen. Rage is the easiest effect to predict; therefore it is the monad.
Someone still needs to surpass The Shawshank Redemption.
Deterministic philosophy is like Wing Chun: if the way is free we go forward.
(edit I was going to judge that but Wing Chun is still elegantly effective where it matters)
And Ive seen people who thought they were the freest get caught and lost. There is always more than you can discern. I thought that this ws an argument against determinism but in practice it speaks for it. If freedom is set, rather than as a given, as a value, then one can use all that is determined, known and unknown, to actually act like a free agent. If it is seen as a given, then this brings, ironically, a heavy responsibility. And alternately, a furious ecstasy - the master of the temple versus the Maenad.
This is precisely what it is, determinism determines itself free. That’s what trial and error and truth from that trial and error, is. Determinism is determining itself free by options and complexity. So it would seem, that is what wisdom is and the pursuit of it.