Lessons on Causality

“The verdicts are built on sophistry, censorship, logical fallacies and ignoring to connect the case with causal structures of reality. In court the whole process is about the judge guessing and developing the most probable and verified modell of the past and then applying the law. Causal structures are necessary for this matter.”

Well the whole foundation of the practice of criminal law depends and relies on the illusion of freewill, which essentially makes the whole institution a gigantic farce. But the history of the use of the lie of freewill is far more interesting than examining a few idiot lawyers and judges who try to ease the prosecutorial process by simplifying the nature of causality for a quick win in court. The fact is, few if any of them (save Clarence Darrow) are intelligent enough to understand why and how freewill is not only physically impossible, but conceptually impossible as well, in that there is no way to imagine it being possible in any physical system whatsoever. But, philosophy has no place in a courtroom… so on to the history of the use of the lie of freewill.

Fundamentally, the imposition of guilt upon someone is a strategy used by a person or group who lack the means to physically control and/or manipulate another person or group. It is an attack upon the conscience where brute strength fails. The church, for example, breaks and controls the individual by making him feel guilty, thus making him more manageable. Such a strategy functions at all levels in any civilization; anywhere you find two or more people engaged in a battle of wills, - at home, at work, at school, in public, in the courts, etc. - if there is a dispute about the actions of an individual, the action will be deemed ‘wrong or bad’, and then compounded by the implication of guilt. The individual then losses the thrust and force of his own will, he doubts himself, he regrets, and in this state he is more easily subdued by his opponent.

But this in itself isn’t the ugliest aspect of human intercourse. Hobbesean naturalism/materialism by itself, while perhaps shocking to the weakest of minds, is no argument against the value of human existence. One can always become harder, of course. The ugly thing is that human beings (well most) have no idea what they are doing when they believe in freewill and use it as such a strategy. It would be one thing to know freewill doesn’t exist, but use the idea to deceive when it is useful. At least here you have some degree of competence, and we can say that while this person might be a tyrannical asshole who wants to control, at least he knows what he’s doing. But it is quite another thing to be a tyrannical asshole and an idiot, who genuinely does believe freewill is real.

You might say that the lie has persisted for so long that it has become embedded in human reason, and naturally… or I should say more easily so, because the vast majority of people are as miserable as they are existentially terrified by mortal life and human existence. It comes very quickly and very easily to man to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of causality, partially due too to how is brain works; he’s not predisposed to philosophically analyze the question and nature of the theory of freewill so much as he is immediately and naturally predisposed to use it as a device to his advantage. His concern is not the ‘truth’, but rather to be comfortable and make others less dangerous to him and to those things he holds sacred, through the imposition of guilt.

To put this matter into a cute little irony… it is not that man is a liar (in the case that he knows freewill is an illusion), but that he is so weak he has to lie, and it’s that absence of fortitude and strength that is alarming. The others - those who are both weak and incompetent in matters of the impossibility of freewill - are the general rule and not to be considered. Of course the herd has its institutions and needs them in their little struggles against each other and battles of will… and always has.

Anyway can you imagine how many causes a lawyer or a judge or a jury missed when they take inventory and put their finger on the ‘deciding factor’ of the crime? Lol. For everyone cause they believe they’ve identified, there are ten they did not. But again, it was never about the truth. Only control.

Verily, I conclude my lesson.

p.s. let’s skip the actual arguments against the existence of freewill, since they’re probably a bit too technical for you guys to grasp at this juncture. We can try again in five years maybe.

Just because you’ve never been free in your lifetime, doesn’t mean your experience speaks for others, prom.

What’s your take on this, prom?

How to determine if, as with prom, you are not free:

Do you agree with everything that Urwrong has ever posted here? All 5,922 posts starting with this one:

No, you don’t agree with everything he has ever posted here?

Well, in that case, ontologically, teleologically, epistemologically, deontologically and theologically you are not free.

Though you might still be worth stalking.

The entiure text, from the “one who shall remain unnamed”.

Addendum…

Oh shit here he comes!

Your vacation from reality is over…
My vacation begins.

Good times.

Tell me more about not having free-will, yet blaming judges and police…and capitalists.
Please. Go on. show us that mind that has served you so well, for so many years.

“Just because you’ve never been free in your lifetime, doesn’t mean your experience speaks for others, prom.”

You’re making the same mistake you made a year ago, and two of us explained it to you already. Being physically restrained or not has nothing to do with metaphysical freewill. That you are free to go shopping or grow tomatoes, while I am not, does not mean you have more freewill than me (or any freewill at all). Like this is 101 shit, dude. You aren’t the least bit capable of sustaining a debate about freewill, much less understanding any of it. Neither is your stepdad the parakeet, as the record has shown countless times over the years.

I see choices being made…but no…invisible chains bind me.

Will to Power?
What an embarrassment that was.
It now means god’s will, god’s omnipotent power.
Ego and Its Own, you say?
What ego, whose ego? Who owns what?
How embarrassing.

back to cabinets and woodwork. Not your work, god’s work. Not your talent, god’s talent.

Don’t blame me…I have no choice.

Shopping groceries and growing tomatoes is metaphysical free-will? That maybe an Equivocation fallacy, but I’ll allow it. Was that my argument?

Maybe you should read the thread more fully before critiquing it? I think you missed a few points…

Let him weave the rope…and I’ll hang him.

But not all will see.

“Just because you’ve never been free in your lifetime, doesn’t mean your experience speaks for others, prom”

Okee dokee let’s look at this again. Now what do you suppose someone might mean when they say that? What kind of inference would you draw from that statement? Pretend you’re not you and instead your pretty fluent with the freewill/determinism debates. Wait no that can’t work because… okay nevermind.

When you say ‘haven’t been free’, you have to mean one of two things. Either you are speaking of some kind of physical capacity… to go somewhere, or do something, or have something, etc.,… or, you mean there is some metaphysical quality I don’t possess (having ‘not been free’) that others do (having ‘been free’). Now I reeeeely doubt you mean the latter because you haven’t a clue what that would entail. So, you must mean… and still think (how many years later) that freewill means merely being free from physical restraint, free from some obstacle, free from some commitment, free to ‘do’.

But none of this has anything to do with the question of what causes the thing we call ‘a choice’, the behavior we call ‘choosing’.

Does this make any sense to you? I hope this is just a case of finding a way to explain this to you in a way you’ll understand… but I got my money on you just being… well, a little slow.

Here is your homework.

Get back to me when you have something new to say.

If it ain’t conscious, then it’s not me.
If I’m not consciously aware of my intent…then I’m not responsible.
Why did I show my dick to a prepubescent girl in public?
Don’t know. therefore I am not guilty.

Why does a pastor get a hardon when a well shaped teenage girl with a tight dress walk by?
Don’t know…he doesn’t intend it…so he isn’t responsible
Why do I eat when I know it will make me obese and may cause me health issues?
Don’t know…ergo, it’s not my fault.
Why am I afraid of the dark or why do I instinctively raise my hands when I see a sudden movement?
Don’t know, it’s not conscious, ergo it’s not my fault.

Why did I rape that little girl?
Don’t know…it wasn’t conscious, ergo it ain’t my fault.

I’m innocent dude. It wasn’t me…it was fate, universal order. A primordial will.
All I’m responsible for is what I am cognizant of; what I intend.
If my actions kill a dozen people…it wasn’t intentional. I’m innocent.

Okay here’s a really easy way to explain it which will help you understand what role platonic/Cartesian substance dualism has in the freewill thesis, and how it fails to make any sense whatsoever.

When a person makes a choice to do or not do something, that choice is followed either by a physical action or, in the case of doing nothing, the inhibition of a physical action.

Okay so how does the human body set itself into motion (or not)? Where does this process of moving, begin? That’s right, very good! In the nervous system. And what organ controls the nervous system in its coordination of physical movement? Hey you’re getting good at this. The brain. Okay, so then how does the brain work… how does it communicate with the muscles? Yes!! Jesus you guys are like regular neurologists. I might have to retract what I said earlier about’cha.

Through the nerves. And what are the nerves, essentially? Circuits that carry charges.

Now let’s back up for a second and go back to the brain. Before this communication with the muscles through the nerve circuit occurs, a charge must be produced by ionized potassium particles travelling across and through the membrane of a cool little joint called a dendrite… and these sit on the ends of nerves called axons.

Okay, so, in order to produce communication with a nerve leading to a muscle which will produce physical movement, the dendrite must discharge those ionized particles and send a transmitter across a space called a synapse, to another dendrite. Pretty neat, right?

So what happens is, a dendrite will either fire - if what’s called an action potential is built by the charge - or not. If it does, the transmitters stimulate the receiving dendrite to send a signal down the axon, through the nerve, and to the muscle.

And wah-lah, you stand up from your chair. It’s totally awesome.

Now watch this. Where, and at what point in this chain of events, does ‘freewill’ enter into the equation?

We’ve established that it’s the electrical impulse that stimulates the muscle movement. And we know what causes this electrical impulse; ionized particles travelling across a membrane.

Uh-oh… now we have a problem. If this entire process is physical, beginning with the choice to get up, and the result of getting up, how can we say that the choice is not also a result of the same process… only at a prior time preceding the result of getting up? Does the act of choosing originate in some other way that doesn’t involve the processes we’ve described?

That is to ask again, what is a choice-event, and how does it happen.

A substance dualist will claim that there is an immaterial substance in the body that acts upon the body to generate that electrical process, but which cannot be observed while doing so. This immaterial substance does the thinking, makes a choice, and then presto… the electrical process begins to put the body in motion. Moreover, not only is this immaterial substance ‘free’ of the physical causes that create the organized process of such nervous activity, but it can also act as a causative agent itself, much like a cluster of ionized particles.

Alrighty now let’s do a quick little multiple choice at this point before we go further. Select an answer from the following options:

A) this sounds cool af so imma be a Cartesian. Fuck science and the principle of verifiability.

B) wait let me read this whole post again.

C) why doesn’t prom75 allow me to continue believing I am right. He’s such an asshole.

D) I am a moron who never had a fucking clue what I was talking about when I said freewill exists.

Now just relax and take a deep breath because it’s not the end of the world, even if you are nothing more than an organic computer running on some fucked up software that makes you think you have freewill.

The good news is, we can still have societies and make commitments and promises and hold others to obligations and even call people ‘responsible’, without any ‘freewill’. The only difference is, these items don’t mean what we thought they meant before we realized we were insufferable morons who thought ‘freewill’ existed.

We note immediately that in praxis - that’s a fancy word for ‘practice’ - we don’t stay in bed because we now know we have no freewill. We DO get up, and we DO log in to ILP to ramble on about meaningless crap and insult each other. It’s like we can’t wait around for causality to make us do stuff, ya know? We truly feel like we could have ‘done otherwise’… like we could have stopped, or produced, that synapse by activating Descartes’ ghost. Still we know it’s bullshit, but we recognize this after the fact and can’t go backwards in time to see if we could have done differently. So we keep on trucking, and blaming and praising and holding accountable, etc.

We notice the only real difference here is that we can no longer moralize like we did before. Instead, we now just engage in a battle of wills with other people… some of us still habitually blame and praise and all that stuff because we don’t have the balls or intelligence to be nihilists. We still believe any of this ‘matters’. While others are nihilists who don’t give two shits whether others feel guilty or not, and have our value judgements just the same. We don’t punish, we just modify. We don’t ax for permission to judge… we don’t care if others disagree… we do what we do with others and it is what it is. We don’t need ‘morality’ to be ‘good’, or bad, for that matter. In short, we don’t fuck with spooks or philosophies because they merely make us feel safe, and better, and meaningful. We are not morons. No, not any more. Unless we are Republicans. But that is another story for a later time.

  • Not true at all - who ever told you that nonsense?

Ever have a flat tire on your car? Did the tire intentionally do that to you? Was the tire conscious of what it was doing? Was it the tire’s fault? - Actually yes it was - but I’m guessing you can’t understand that - “Why should the tire get punished?”

Ask yourself what participant in the situational equation is faulty - which part doesn’t perform its duty or task correctly? Often there is more than one - “at fault”.
It isn’t a question of WHY the fault occurred (the “why” isn’t the “fault”)
It is a question of how to best correct for a potentially bad situation
[list]Replace the tire
[/list:u]

The parakeet was being facetious there, Ob.

I don’t think he showed his johnson to a prepubescent girl either. I think he’s lying.

I don’t fully trust science to tell us what we are.
I’m not gonna say science is the same as religion, because science is empirical, but not all of it, a lot of it is guesswork, and in my estimation social control.

I don’t have a scientific worldview.
For example I don’t trust them to tell me what’s on Mars.
They may or may not have found life on Mars, but I don’t trust them to be honest with us about what they found there.
I don’t trust them to be honest with us about UFOs and the paranormal in general.
I don’t trust them on far flung stuff, like what happened many thousands or millions of years ago, or what will happen many decades or centuries from now climatically and geologically.
To me that’s all a bunch of nonsense.

There’s a lot that’s still mysterious about life, like that we’re here it all, how life initially came to be is a complete mystery.
I listen to guys like Graham Hancock and Michael Cremo challenge the narratives we’ve been sold on history and human origins.

How controlled is science?
Ultimately it’s a business, they’re there to make money, and they’re in bed with other corporations and government.
Who owns these universities, how few people?
Whoever owns them, controls them.
If it’s just a handful of guys (Vanguard, Blackrock) who largely own them, then ultimately these people set the parameters of thought, and what’s their agenda, I’m sure they meet in dark places with the rest of the elite to discuss how best to mindcontrol the masses.

For me, science is just one more thing out there, along with the various philosophies, religions and forms of alternative science and medicine, not the be all and end all.
I don’t have a scientific worldview, but I’m not religious either, I keep an open mind.

Now mainstream philosophy is all tied up with mainstream science, to the point where they say, if you don’t accept science, then you can’t do philosophy.
Not for me, philosophy can exist apart from science, it can rely on alternative science or religion to inform it about some things, or no science and religion at all.
Bottom line is, don’t tell me what to think, I’m keeping an open mind about a great deal.

Freewill, causality?
We cannot and never will be able to fully predict what people are gonna do.
Even our best algorithms, centuries or millennia from now, if man and his civilization is still around and continues to advance materially, won’t be fully able to.
And whatever we can’t predict, may or may not be free.
Wherever there’s a great deal of unpredictability, so that there’s no possibility we could predict it all, no matter how hard we try, not just in human nature, but in nature itself, there too is the possibility for metaphysical freedom.
Scientists tend to think deterministically, but some scientists leave room for (the possibility of) freedom, and I think they’re right to do so, chaos can be interpreted either way, as ultimately determined, or free.

You’re boy Sam Harris even took it a step further… just for posts like yours there.

Even granting the Cartesian second substance, that couldn’t have freewill either; it wouldn’t be able to choose how it chose what your body did.