Another point I’m reminded of,
Doesn’t the “Freedom” of one come at the cost of everybody else? And so one vision of freedom (barbarian warlord) comes at the cost of millions and millions of others (killed on the battlefield).
So then, Freedom is a political field as well as a personal and private one. Can ‘Freedom’ ever be merged with others, or is it completely and absolutely exclusive?
Freedom cannot be shared between biology?
Promethean is of course correct that the whole discussion is moot entirely, as I was right in saying that also, because… well, what s the real issue in life?
Do you know?
It is what do you want.
To be spending all time discussing whether this is all free will or determined (to me it always seems the two terms are in no way a contradiction, just different modelings, its weird to me to think they should exclude each other) is to gloss over what this will happens to be.
In fact Ill state parodically it is due to the “illuminati” that this discussion erupted, because to obfuscates the real point about the will: that it wills something.
Analysing the will, dissecting it, to find out if it is really “yours” or “not”, is the best way of evading it.
A strong man of tradition is generally proud to be the result of many generations of identifiable causes. Adopted orphans aren’t generally too proud to not know their parents. Its an issue of pride to know where you come from. And pride is a freedom.
Is pride not a freedom? And is such freedom not a cause to the further quality of the life of the pride person?
Look at it as if it is life, rather than academia.
Then you see words and terms aren’t the sort of things you can smash together and see which one is stronger.
And strength of it in pride is at times more an action , the reaction.
Actions and reactions are sometimes caused by pride, and sometimes by the lack of it.
Fear is at times significant of lack of pride, fear of lack of self control over exhibiting pride. Being controlled by strength diminishes pride into fear.
But how all this is sourced, puts control in the central position , as a regulator, with power on one side and will on the other.
Control increases power by willing more power, over other, when it is sensed that the other is incapable to generate an equal or more power. The amount of power will determine the amount of will to regulate power.
Then, the will of one will change the regulation of the power to will.
So power and will depend on sense of this interchange.
Control becomes the key of determination of subsequent patterns of control, and slavery is the result of almost no power to will.-to power.
So yes the mean ing is determinative to the sense of control, (primae faces)
but it is only description of the dynamic of the will to control, where control has been displaced as a regulator, to being subject to apparent power differentials.
The sense, or the need to regulate is no longer in an autonomous position , (sensibke), because looking the understanding of its relationship as both known and sensible
Fear develop a without it’s proper role, and that fear effects an automatically role, by the dyssymetry between automatic behavior, and the gradual knowledge of the use of the power to will atominously, rather then automatically.
Academia centers such sensations as live, hate, fear, rather through meaning, as if analysis can power The will through function even through a compensatory will to control the interaction between fear and the will.
For instance, a slave after emancipation remains a defacto slave, even if free de-jure.
To all outward relationships this seems inexplicable. The dynamics remain ex-cathedra, compensations between sense and control are still perceived in the usual way, control still relies on apparent signifiers of control based on sense.
This sense is not necessarily trying to understand the level of extrinsic political power , but the capacity to regulate, or control the uses of power to both: will and understand.
I know that this could have been expressed in a shorter and more academic Zen Joan, but, ivory towers assume the same pattern . and they probably internalize a like minded slavery.
so how do free will and determination interact? By functions related to application of control toward underatanding and applying the will to power, through transferring power to war the emotive transcendence of and through objects of fear. The understanding od the repetitive and automatic reliance of the dynamics between them, can in time displace control back into the central position, thereby re-integrating the will into it’s central power source, delimitong it’s compensatory function.
And it goes on forever. Power at the top, achievement restarts the pyramid.
The Freedom of a barbarian warlord (his value) is not the same as a king who must attend a throne, or a priest who must develop his devotees, or a wife who must bear many children for her husband, or a child who seeks to learn astrophysics, or a bird with one wing, or a polar bear in Antarctica, etc.
Surely you can advocate and push a rarer position: such-and-such fantasy is the best. But what is really meant is, best for you-yourself. And the dream of any one individual, is never the same as others, although some fantasies are shared farther and wider than others. Surely it appeals to many men to be barbarian warlords, which is not to say its popularity has merit, or would be attractive to everybody. What is the more casual and realistic stance?
Most men just want to work a 9-to-5 job, have a home, some land, a wife, some children, etc. This would be most realistic if not the most lived situation. Would most people claim to be “slaves to their jobs”? In Modernity, probably, yes.
The Modern and Post-Modern situation is same as its always been. There’s a relationship of Dreams/Fantasy/Ideals/Art versus the reality. Sometimes a society, culture, or group of people dream much bigger than others. Sometimes the Desires are too great. Sometimes they are not enough.
But it should be more obvious now, at the very least, that Freedom is “tied” to value, and to the will. There is a necessary-relationship.
The Manifestation of Freedom is more interesting to me now. Everybody, potentially all living things, have innate-desires, and so perhaps, qualities and types of Dreams/Desires/Ideals/Goals. So the freedom of an insect, bird, fish, mammal, will never be equal to one-another. But it can be the case that Will is shared, and more people or organisms have common interests (Will-to-Power) by specie.
An organism is “designed/created” (determined?) to do one thing.
Another organism is designed/created to do another thing.
It doesn’t change the arguments or the fallacies. Determinism is still a post hoc fallacy, always looking backward with “it always must have been so beforehand”, and when pressured to provide examples of Freedom, or proof, will always move the Goalposts, never allowing any possibility of freedom to leak in. Because to do so, would break their paradigm, and admit that Control/Power/Fate is relative to individuals, and their values, and their goals.
Freedom is the essence of Dreams.
In both of these types I see a lot of motivation to pursue utility, rather than truth. It comes across as an exercise to improve their lives, with the extent to which they need their lives to improve manifesting as the extent to which their means “override” their acceptance of what’s actually true. The distinction between the “can’t” and the “won’t” that you are making can all but dissolve as the depth of the psychological need becomes great enough - to persuade others and themselves that they are free and powerful agents, who can and will overcome their difficulties. Most aren’t arguing that hard, but the ceaseless re-iteration and self-reassurance that is going on by at least one of these parties really betrays a lot, and communicates the exact opposite message to that which seems to be intended. This case brings to mind a religious zealot who will insist that doubters and non-believers simply lack the ability to understand their belief in Santa Claus.
But this is where the Motte and Bailey really comes into play: we attack the Bailey, they retreat to the Motte, and construct an extensive strawman of the kind that attacks their Motte. Nobody attacked the Motte, not one. So as you were saying either they can’t or won’t see the distinction - and whether it is “can’t” or “won’t” is unclear in the more extreme of cases.
The Bailey that has successfully been destroyed held that the causation of choices into actions is only a one-way street, when simple observation and reason show it is not.
The Motte is that some people are creative, risk-taking self-sacrificers and challengers of authority who think outside the box, and others are merely weak-willed, enslaved victims and conformists who are afraid to live and don’t even know what it is to live.
As should be obvious, the two have absolutely nothing to do with each other: one can subscribe to either the one-way or two-way causation between choice and action, and equally be either weakly or strongly driven: the two are completely independent.
And yet to attack the Bailey with both empirical and logical evidence, because both the Motte and Bailey are different definitions of “freedom”, the attackers are taken to be attacking both definitions equally, and if one attacks the Motte, they are likely envious or lacking in that definition of freedom which they never attacked in the first place.
The best way to communicate Motte “freedom” is not to go on and on and on endlessly about how much of this “freedom” you have over those who don’t simply agree with your Bailey “freedom”, labelling them conformists for not conforming to your views, and to confuse and conflate distinct and independent definitions of “freedom” whilst claiming higher intelligence and capacity in general.
The reason why you’re wrong that nobody appreciates you is that you understand the above - and in the wake of too many fools mutually reassuring each other, who can’t understand the above, this is appreciated.
And yet all champions of determinism have languidly wallowed in their refusal to give even a glimpse of what they consider to be a verifiable causal chain that explains the existence of matter, or life, or themselves.
I hold that there is no contradiction between free will and determinism - the will is just one thing which determines much of what is going on. But two of determinisms main advocates havent even looked in the direction of their own burden of proof.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what is called “free will”. They are under no ontological obligation to logically respond to challenges or to use any relevant resources (like experience) to defend their postion. They can just decide that it stands and argue from there.
I’ve not been aware of any such refusal, never mind a languid wallowing in one.
I am to gather, however, that any deterministic modelling known to you is regarded to not be verifiable? What would you consider to be verifiable, if not the results of centuries of applying the scientific method to all walks of life that have been considered this far into human history? To perfectly erroneous accusations of an appeal to authority here - the whole point of the scientific method is that anyone is able to replicate the same tests and results - it’s independent of the person who performs the experiments, formulates the deductions and inductions and extrapolates their implications into further realms of testing. The whole point of anyone being able to replicate the same results is to prove previous deterministic modelling flawed, and to then come up with a better modelling that can likewise be falsified and improved in a continuous process. This continuous dialectic between nature’s empirical evidence and nature’s modelling of said evidence through humans, is the most democratic process ever constructed and thereby the least authoritatian one.
You can go out into the world yourself and test any deterministic theory you like to explain the existence of matter, life, or yourself. Do you need someone who understands and respects this process to do it for you before you are convinced of its superiority, or won’t you verify or falsify these causal chains yourself? Don’t trust what I have to say, go out and find out for yourself.
My primary aim is not to show the absolute perfection of Determinism, only to prove that Free Will is absolutely wrong to all extents (in the “Bailey” sense, not the “Motte” one). So before I am yet again fallaciously accused of being against freedom in the sense of not being constrained by what others say, and try to do that could be resisted by someone with a strong will, I say again that this is an incomplete definition of freedom that I have in abundance. But a complete definition of freedom, where the will itself is subject to causation by the four Fundamental Forces (which as above can be tested in any legitimate way you like, whoever you are) means that even the strongest and most individual and capable of wills is not free from physical laws - and is thus unfree whether anyone likes it or not - as even the strongest, most individual and capable of wills can test scientifically themselves.
I’ve even heard it suggested that going beyond orbit is “escaping” gravity - the most hilariously ignorant statement I’ve ever heard.
But stupidity aside, no degree of Free Will (in the complete “Bailey” sense) is possible no matter how much “freedom” (in the incomplete “Motte” sense) that one might have for the following reasons at the very least:
In the confirmed absence of Free Will, as above, and with all the Deterministic technological innovation in the world, alongside all the scientific experimentation into the Determinism of even the will itself working in the favour of Determinism - whatever flaws you might think Determinism has, it is continually proven as vastly superior if not perfect every day, and you are more than welcome to try and formulate an experiment that proves all this overwhelming evidence and reasoning was in fact all just illusion after all.
Anyone can be a scientist, Jakob. Design your own experiment to prove there is no gravity after all. Show indisputable proof that the electro-magnetic force was all just “free will”. What experiment do you think you could conduct to show that stimulation of the brain actually has zero effect on your thoughts, feelings and choices - if you simply “will” the four fundamental forces to bend to your desires?
The floor is open for you, champion of “free will”, and always will be.
Incidentally, someone could equally be determined to decide a theory stands and argue from there - and without you believing or confirming the experimentation yourself - it is ironically you who is being determined to decide that free will stands and arguing from there.
I’ll confirm one last time, I am arguing in favour of the determinism of the will, not that some people are more creative, individual, strongly and capably willed than others - that is obvious. The point is how free are even they, from Determinism and what the four fundamental forces model?
i just took a look at this ‘bailey/motte’ thing, and to be honest i don’t think they knowingly employ this tactic. i say this because i think they think the bailey is the motte; they aren’t able to distinguish the difference between an ordinary, non-philosophical and commonsense use of the word (e.g., i’m free to go grocery shopping or i live in a free country or i pick freely among choices) and a specialized understanding of what the word strictly means in terms of metaphysics.
so it’s a difficult situation here because while they don’t really understand what’s going on, they still feel more ‘comfortable’ with believing they have freewill. these two circumstances sort of compliment each other and make it more unlikely that they’ll ever get it.
i think this proceeds from the incredibly important desire to want to think one’s in control… which is strange because determinism does not relinquish control… it only changes the center of it. or i should say, it eliminates the center, the ‘self’, as some kind of self perpetuating prima causa.
i’ve also stated before how i believe that an inherent part of human nature - at least pertaining to those who can’t understand that there is no freewill - is the insatiable desire to try and exhibit control over others indirectly where they can’t do so directly (physically and forcefully). this attempt to control and essentially manipulate (so to make someone useful) is exercised through the moral judgement… to impart the feeling of guilt and remorse so to debilitate and weaken. and what is so unique about this is that this tendency isn’t something that results, in all cases, from some kind of pre-meditated ‘evil’ intention. this tendency is quite literally hardwired in the human being… a kind of evolved power for an animal forced into socialization. it’s not ironic that nietzsche called morality the most immoral of all human idiosyncrasies.
Silhouette, you post and, I realize now, your entire position relies on the assumption that determinism and scientific method are the same thing.
I think you would benefit from rereading without-music’s thread more than from me explaining why science is not remotely adequate to philosophy in this sense. At least, it would spare me the trouble of dispelling such an immense straw man.
holy shit i just had an insight. it was the civilizing of the animal man that created the demand to have this idiosyncrasy (mentioned above) as a kind of accidental side-effect of the effort made to try and prevent it. the very existence of ‘law’ forces man to exhibit his will indirectly… instead of busting a nigga in the face, he has to follow codes of conduct in repudiating. this, in addition to forcing the will underground, actually generates a greater tension through frustrating both offended and offender. now, rather than a score being settled, nothing is ever really resolved, but continues to linger. why is this so? because both the conviction that morality is objective, and can it be recognized, and can be acknowledged by those who are repudiated, compounds the problem threefold. but now see the irony? the very purpose of civil law and codes of conduct was to prevent such tension and resolve conflict peacefully. it does not. it only either further complicates and/but makes undetectable, or forces people into agreement about what actually does not exist. one emerges more angry, or more stupid.
jakobson has a point, sil. the thesis of determinism is not something we reason a posteriori. we infer it, but we can’t confirm it. nonetheless - and here is where freewillists strike me as silly - we experience and witness such consistent contiguity of events in the natural world that we’d (they’d) be rather unfounded to assume that our choices merely correspond to neural events rather than being causally contiguous with/to them. in short, why would an exception be made for me when i move about in the world… but i’d not hesitate to say the fire caused the heat, or gravity caused the ball to fall, or magma movement caused tectonic shifts, or carbon emissions cause the greenhouse effect.
this seems unfair to the heat, the ball, the plates, and the greenhouse effect. i feel obligated to say these things too have their own freewill.
It was this:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn9biSvN44U[/youtube]
People in castles. Being like wtf. They didn’t care an iota about no tension. Except to the extent they had to to, you know, keep something from making it hard to do their than thang.
The video is awesome and the sound on the one I used is lamentable, but I can’t abide by censored rap.
That’s also the difference between laws and codes of conduct.
Codes of conduct are adopted by castlemen willingly, to make doing the thang thang not so hard. The moment the tension disappears it becomes pointless.
Laws are imposed on people considered not to have enough of a stake in anything worthwhile to willingly determine their conduct.
the above (wu-tang incident) is a simulacrum and therefore a depreciation of the symbolism it attempts to stand for. a hyperbole, in a sense. modern, histrionic theater to reproduce metaphors that were once rich with meaning and substance. it used to be that people could and did have real, ruthless power. today, however, what we have are variations of a charade. the rapper, minus the opportunity provided to him by the capitalist simulacrum, would be nothing of the sort of symbol and/or archetype presented in the simulacrum. he’d not be the superhero on the poster in every black kid’s room… but an unknown working at taco bell and driving a 1998 corolla.
but back in the day, the hero did not become what he was with assistance, with the opportunity being given to him in the form of a gimmick. he was a hero under any circumstances, not the ‘presentation’ of one.
capitalism through revolutionizing the entertainment industry has brought about the necessity of the simulacrum in order to sustain it’s profit motivated commodity production. it eliminates any possibility for heroism and then reproduces symbols of it which it then sells to those who can’t be heroes. but it doesn’t matter that they aren’t heroes. all that matters is that they think they’re heroes. the mesmerizing power of media and art in the modern world is the machine that keeps this charade going.
the simulacrum then becomes a simulacra; what the image seeks to duplicate loses its origins due to the nature of the image as a charade. finally the symbol itself gives way to a bastardized image, and the copy is mistaken as the real… as the thing that is exalted through the image.
Try to tell me, in no more than two sentences, what that was a refutation of.
This is a moment I appreciate. I withheld my indignation to Sil and merely flat out stated my objection. Result is that Promethean accepts responsibility and at least acknowledges the facts.
“the thesis of determinism is not something we reason a posteriori. we infer it, but we can’t confirm it.”
Thats all I think anyone can accomplish here, both parties acknowledging the basic facts.
Beyond that, it really becomes philosophical modelling, and there question is largely of what value is your position to yourself. In this sense some pertinent things have been said by the deterministic part, Ill gladly acknowledge that now that the epistemological point has been recognized.
Thank you, Jakob, for offering the source to try to help me out + “withholding any indignation”. However, I read the opening post and a few more further down the first page to find nothing I did not already know, and searched for the word “Determinism” in the whole 11 pages and came up short… As such, I’m not certain that trawling through 253 posts is necessarily going to enlighten me as efficiently as you might have thought - as to any assumptions of mine about Determinism and the Scientific method. Maybe since you had the advantage of having contributed to the thread on various occasions, there’s certain points, posts or pages in particular that you can point to, to waste my time less.
Fortunately though, it’s not true that I assume Determinism and the Scientific Method are the same thing in the first place. So no need, though I understand why you might have thought that I thought this - because they are so intertwined.
Determinism is more what one looks for in applying the Scientific Method - or rather it is correlation that is being tested and causation only hypothesised after extensive tinkering with variables to make sure no fallacies of Questionable Cause emerge. However that’s not to say that causation (what determines what) cannot emerge with such statistical significance after extensively testing all these hypotheses that we can come up with a theory - and by now many theories are firmly established, even to the point of some things having such ubiquitous prevalence as to earn consideration as physical law. But even then I am not about to say any of this induction is ever perfect - which is my entire philosophy.
I would have thought that I would have communicated this to everyone here by this point: that models of Discrete Experience are imperfect quantifications and qualifications of Continuous Experience. I am not saying that Determinism is IN Continuous Experience like an absolute, I am saying that it’s amazing how any discrete modelling of Continuous Experience works at all - nevermind to the extent that Determinism does so much more than anything else. I am not in the business of proclaiming direct knowledge of “the really real”, to use without-music’s term. I am in the business of evaluating how relatively well indirect modelling maps what we experience. Whatever Continuous Experience “is doing”, it’s describable by Determinism to far greater effect than Free Will, which has some serious problems that I listed in my last post on this thread. So relativity is the key here - not any “Ontological Tyranny” that you seem to be under the impression that I am thinking in terms of.
The thing about Ontology is that it’s inextricable from Epistemology. You can’t say anything about “what is” without having a justification about how you know it is, and you can’t proclaim knowledge without it being about “what is” and without knowledge being something in the first place.
So with Epistemology so central here, you have to establish what the rules are for something being knowable.
It just so happens that the Scientific Method was adapted solely and expressly for this very purpose - things have to be testable, repeatable, falsifiable etc. - and said “things” are connections between discretely isolated variables that amount to causation only after we are very sure of the nature of the correlations: what determines what. Determinism is what is being looked for as the very foundation of Epistemology - we want to be able to describe, explain, predict and thus manipulate. This is the bit that you will like: our values are similarly inextricable from Ontology and Epistemology. What “is” must be known, what’s known must “be”, what “is” is what is valuable, and our knowledge of it is founded in what is valuable.
So we see Determinism is a central value to what we know about what is - the most valuable, the most knowledge about the most of what is: the more we have the better. The Scientific Method is how we make sure. So not the same thing.
Free Will, lacking a sufficient degree of Determinism, falls behind.
This isn’t to say something cannot emerge that isn’t Determinism that does what it does, but better. But the lesser degree of explanatory power that Free Will has will not replace it. This is what is meant by Popper’s Falsificationism: that something can come along and replace an inferior theory like Determinism did to Free Will, and Einsteinian relativity did to Newtonian physics.
So I still am not convinced that Determinism is unfalsifiable.