a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Bianco Luno

“You make a clever joke of anything serious.”[/b]

Which explains why so few of us are laughing.

The image of my upended dignity (which doesn’t consist of anything but a kind of algorithm) is so frightening to me that I think I will go to my grave shirking all the costumes of sentiment except perhaps one, a stately sadness.
I forfeited the rest when I decided I would not cry as an infant, when the angel told me what was up.
What faces were left to me?
But the very face of distraction: a wandering eye, unsteered but by pretense and will.

Yet here he is ever intent on distracting us from whatever works in distracting us from what we do not want to hear.

The Devil’s refrain: I would gladly see the truth but for the person telling it.

And how is this not God’s refrain too? And [of course] mine?


[b]Bianco Luno

At the funeral of a girl who committed suicide, a man with a video camera, trained on the mother in mourning, captures on tape another man approach and fire a gun directly into the head of the woman and continue to fire on her body as she collapses to the ground.
The frame reels, the man who controls it makes noises “like a wounded dog”.
The television news anchors are visibly uncomfortable showing the tape.
The woman probably deserved to die, according to her ex-husband, who shot her: she was the cause of the daughter’s suicide.[/b]

Gaps between what unfolds inside our head and what unfolds inside the heads of others reacting to what we do when what unfolds inside our head…snaps?

So many of us deserve death—not because of anything in particular we might have done, but because we did nothing to deserve being born—and continue behaving as though this were not true.

On the other hand, words like “deserve” were invented in order to distract us from all this. And if it does then it worked.

The real scandal was the camera man’s squeal and the news anchor’s squirm.
The crime was committed against them; for the rest of us can repose in all of the little that we really are in private: the tape showed discernible pieces of flesh splashing from where the bullet entered…

Or, one might argue, the crime was committed for them. For them to see. For the world to see. For, perhaps, God to see.


[b]Bianco Luno:

The boy in his cell took his excrement and smeared it across the wall.
He tried to make something beautiful but could do nothing about the smell.[/b]

He’ll get used to it. In time he will not even notice it is there. But he may never be able to stomach the reaction of a cell mate who insist it is not beautiful at all.

It is the only thing going for the truth—that you can call it that—as it is, in all respects and at all times, painful.
What can function so well without this concession scarcely needs it.
If no blossom were ever truly beautiful, but only seemed to be, what would change?

Exactly. Whatever reality [truth] works. And right up to the point where it stops working.

[b]Bianco Luno

Rereading the chapter13 from The Brothers Karamazov where Ivan nervelessly continues to lament the suffering of innocents…
The children and the animals perhaps didn’t suffer: the girl of five, beaten into one large bruise, locked in a privy, excrement smeared over her face and stuffed into her mouth by her mother, all the while crying “dear kind God”; or the feeble little nag whipped on its “meek eyes” for not being up to its burden; or the boy of eight, shredded by hunting dogs in a display before his mother for having injured the retired general’s favorite dog’s paw with a thrown stone—
perhaps none of these suffered in a sense appreciable by us.
True suffering implies an awareness we exonerate these victims of in the same act of according them that innocence so endearing to us.
We suffer more than they in contemplating what happens to them.
This is how it is.
Merely consider that it is not evil that cries for explanation, rather the awareness of evil in the notions of harmony, justice, kindness, a benevolent God, a perfectible species…
The innocent, though our best victims, still do not suffer like we do.[/b]

That is one way to think about suffering. But there are so many other ways as well. How do we make calculations about such things from the one true perspective? We suffer by enduring what they suffer at the hands of those who might well take pleasure in inflicting it.

And if we think about these things long enough we begin to sputter. Especially when evil begins to grin.

We become outraged. But that means nothing to evil. And we would confront it boldly if we were not innocent too.

[b]Bianco Luno

“A cynic is a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
—Oscar Wilde
Wilde, like many, confuses the cynic with the pessimist.
Diogenes would have quoted you the price joyfully and marveled over how impossibly valuable nothing really is.[/b]

Being realistic, the price is what it is on the sticker, the value is what it is in our head.

Not between a rock and a hard place, but between a rock and something that will turn the rock into powder.

And that is before we get to the quandary imploding me.

[b]Bianco Luno

Ayer, for instance, relieves the stress
from the freedom/determinism impasse by showing us how freedom, as we commonly use the term, implies an absence of constraint, not a dearth of causation, a clear requirement for avoiding freedom’s devolution to sheer chance.
The terms, ‘determinism’ and ‘causation’, are given a threatening cast by our fear of being forced, brought to heal by others or circumstances when all they suggest is that it is possible to provide an explanation in the light of past events for present or future events.
His critical distinction—that cause is not constraint but an observable enabling regularity—intended to soothe our alarm and give the determinist her or his minimum, itself, however, too facilely assumes we will compromise with fate.
All along we could have done that with less ceremony and stilled this inquietude and many others were we willing to live within the small boundaries of facts.
It is hardly accidental that we allow the figurative grime on our terms the reign we do.
What you so coolly, offhandedly, offer me as a facilitating circumstance I choose to view as blackmail because I want to read meaning in excess of what I would attribute to you if you were a stone.
It is from a kind of love that I accuse you of the greatest crime in the world: impersonating a stone.
But my hatred, too and not less, would honor you.
Ayer surely jokes.[/b]

Surely then, that settles that.

Eyeballs spooned out, impalings through body cavities, genital mutilations…
A few of us engage in this sort of thing and worse; the rest delight (and not even secretly) in hearing about it, reading about it, expressing offense.
This is supreme love.

And yet, depending on one’s point of view, that may well be the least of it.

I think Ayer is right in a way. Most people are not going to go in deeper and will be satisfied to know they do not have contraints, when free.

But that’s really meaningless. They don’t have a they. In what sense are they even separated out from their environment. It’s just dominoes. Sure, there are internal dominoes and external ones. Like, whoopie.

I know that’s true.
I know that’s not true.
Then what?

[b]Bianco Luno

I know that what I entertain here shall be construed to the least effect.
It shall stand as evidence of a disabled character or illness on my part.
And the children of your flesh and dreams, your ever-fearing love will shield from this.
“What a waste!”
Not that what I say isn’t eminently forgiveable—for I know I have already been forgiven: you think too highly of yourself not to.
Just that the waste is unnerving.[/b]

Been there, done that: I can’t go on, I’ll go on. And how do you forgive someone who, as Joan said of Bob, “is so good with words, and at keeping things vague”?

My ex-wife: it must have been for her like it was for Bardamu (Céline) when he left Molly.
She was an uncommon female fan of the writer.
I have no doubt that in her own way…

What? We will never know will we? Fortunately, I don’t have any fans.
Or, on occasion, unfortunately.

[b]Bianco Luno

Have I found “what scares those bastards so” in the darkness at the end of the night?[/b]

You may find it, sure, but there are plenty of antidotes. And, absent those, there are even more distractions. In the end you wind up in a venue like this one telling yourself things you don’t want to hear.

And feeling compelled to anyway.

What is not absolutely horrible is desperately sad: the forms of happiness sketched against this field.

Then plow it. Again and again and again. Like Sisyphus

I hear a poet say, “Poetry puts us back to how it was with the first people, when everything was God…”
Through the fear and the knowledge that followed there must have been tremendous evil perceived, and demons everywhere, and this, as well, might have caused their words to twist and bend backwards.
A newer face of arrogance, attempting to recover primordial stupidity, emerges as the apposite form for the honesty remaining.

Is the nihilist more or less arrogant still? Oh, and how does one approach that honestly?

I’m not sure which parts or if you mean all parts of what I wrote.

Then what? Well, let’s say my response to Ayer was correct. The first thing is that Ayer has fooled himself into thinking he has made the idea of determinism non-threatening. (basically I was agreeing with you but coming at it my own way). This does not make the situation nice. I have not defended free will. But perhaps at least some of the people who think they think it is really OK are simply telling themselves stories and then passing off these stories to others, often with some implicit condescension. IF what I wrote is correct, perhaps either 1) some would realize this and join us in the dismay, if we have it or 2) we would at least be able to ignore voices that do not know how to address us, because they are involved in, on some level, fooling themselves.

And this is not a small thing.

Someone is raped. This is a horrible experience in an of itself. Then they are counseled to view this as a ‘learning experience’ (solely) or an act of God to test their faith and that they should feel good or OK about the experience.

This is a double victimization.

And let me make it clear, I am not accusing Ayer or something on that level. I am using and extreme example to show how damaging explanations of how it is really OK or even good or doesn’t matter can be.

If you and I or one of us or someone comes to believe that these explainings away are inadequate at best, then perhaps we are more ready for some other step. But this in itself is no small thing.

I mean, it is all very nice for the ‘I have no self, I do not persist through time, I have no free will, there is no meaning, we are all separated by filters from reality and others. (etc)’ camp to say ‘and I am just fine with that.’ they ‘are not like the deluded religious or the believers in selves or freedom or others weak enough to be bothered by this.’ Fine. I think this is likely much less true then they believe. I think they often confuse their little mental thinky opinions with what they believe. But who knows, perhaps they really don’t mind. In the end however skeptical I am, I don’t really care. and the more that noise is moved out of my own head - one can see them as mirroring back ideas already present in my own mind - perhaps I can discover something new.

The parts about going in deeper, constraint and being free. You can make an argument that concurs with the manner in which Ayer, Luno, you and I find them meaningful [together] and an argument that does not. But the relationships themselves are so complex and intertwined in the problematic nature of “existence” how would you really be able to resolve it?

This sort of discussion fits right into Rorty’s conjectures about ironism.

Determinism [if true] is threatening [dismaying] to some but not to others. As is autonomy. We have particular narratives we pick up. Why? Because we encounter some sets of ideas but not all the other ones. And what we think we know about the ideas becomes intertwined in the experiences we have or do not have.

So, how does anyone really know if they are fooling themselves about the extent to which this is something they are doing because they chose freely not to choose something else.

These are ways to stay on the surface. It happened because [for some reason] it was meant to. The determinists just take that argument, ratchet it up and take it out to the very end of the limb: everything happens because it could not not have happened.

Or so it seems to me. But I will be the first to admit the problem here is me: I really don’t know what the hell I am talking about. It’s just over my head.

For me, however, the next step is rooting all of this in dasein. And in conflicting goods. And in a world where there is no way in which to determine [philosophically, scientifically etc.] how one ought to live, how one ought to behave around others.

Well put. But: Our ideas about these things will always be situated out in a particular world—one that we actually experience from day to day with more or less happiness, contentment, fulfillment, satisfaction etc… The idea is to live your life using whatever works. Until it bumps into the lives of others and there is conflict.

Then you have to try to figure something out.

The parts about going in deeper, constraint and being free. You can make an argument that concurs with the manner in which Ayer, Luno, you and I find them meaningful [together] and an argument that does not. But the relationships themselves are so complex and intertwined in the problematic nature of “existence” how would you really be able to resolve it?

This sort of discussion fits right into Rorty’s conjectures about ironism.

Determinism [if true] is threatening [dismaying] to some but not to others. As is autonomy. We have particular narratives we pick up. Why? Because we encounter some sets of ideas but not all the other ones. And what we think we know about the ideas becomes intertwined in the experiences we have or do not have.

So, how does anyone really know if they are fooling themselves about the extent to which this is something they are doing because they chose freely not to choose something else.
[/quote]
Well, a determinist by being a determinist really cannot claim they know the reasons they have for their beliefs. Not that someone who believes in freewill can therefore claim they do - or doesn’t have other problems.

I just need to be very clear, my example had nothing to do with determinism. Perhaps one could tie them together, but that was not my intent. I was simply drawing an analogy between a person experiencing something unpleasant - the potential truth of determinism, being raped - being told why it is really OK or doesn’t bother someone else.

I actually see no reason to believe determinists would be more likely than anyone else to try to explain away the naturalness of reacting very negatively to being raped.

I know, I think, what I am talking about, but I am avoiding many areas of the debate. I would think of trying to demonstrate free will, for example.

I don’t see how determinism or free will being the case actually changes our choosing how to live. It may depress us or scare us into suicide, respectively, I suppose. But I can still strive to be kind and good, regardless of whether this has all been determined in advance or the world really could go in a number of directions and from some uncaused place I can choose.

If I was utterly convinced determinism was the case, I would not then decide to act meanly to children.

so how does this relate to free will and determinism? To me, in terms of relating to other people, its like the difference between living on a world without the color blue as opposed to a world without the color red. The issue has ramifications for how I feel about life, but in terms of how I want to relate to other people, it really doesn’t matter. I think, at least.

Can you tell me how the lack of resolution on the issue affects how you interact with other people or your moral code, etc.?

They can claim to know but the fact of the claim itself is not something they chose freely. Their beliefs are only what they must be.

But how does the proponent of free will get around the arguments the volchoks make about matter being the same “stuff”; and all rooted in the laws on physics?

I don’t know. And I don’t know how we can know. It’s an antinomy.

If determinism is not true, I root reactions like this in dasein. And in the evolution of psychological defense mechanisms. We rationalize [or explain away] many things in order to make them less painful.

But the determinist necessarily sees everything as “natural”. Being raped or not being raped is merely human dominoes falling in one direction and not another. Same with our reactions to rape.

Human biology is what it is. And human mental, emotional and psychological reactions are what they are. These, in my view, are the implications of determinism the volchoks don’t really own up to. They keep harping about how we choose and the dominoes don’t as though it really makes any difference if we cannot choose to choose something else instead.

I just don’t get “compatibilism”.

If that works for you, great. But if I believed that choosing to be kind and good is something I could not not have chosen then I recognize that those who choose to be rotten sons of bitches are in the same boat. I’d like to believe instead that “I” had something to do with it. While acknowledging the manner in which “I” is always embodied in dasein—and in all of the things “I” do not understand or control.

Here you lose me. If you are “convinced determinism is the case” then you are deciding only what you must decide. It’s only the illusion of choice.

If we have some measure of autonomy in the things we choose we have some capacity to decide what brings us happiness, contentment, fulfillment and satisfaction. Is it music? is it a career? is it raising a family? is it believing in No God?

But this is always deeply embedded in dasein—in the particular life we actually live [existentially] out in a particular world that, up to a point, shapes and molds us.

I interact with others ambiguously, precariously. I see good reasons for endorsing many conflicting sides in most moral and political issues. I make my leap knowing that, had things been different in my life, I might not have.

As, in other words, an ironist.

[b]Bianco Luno

The price of clarity.
The number of premises of my life, as though it were a good argument, are few and too elegant to be undangerous.
If I lost my cat or O. I would come to a conclusion.[/b]

Let’s not leave out the value of clarity.

Eventually, of course, we lose everything. The cat, for example, is almost certainly gone. And O. is approaching 70.

You can find another cat though. Or another philosophy.

I don’t know that violence ever actually happens.

How many different ways are there to understand violence and things that don’t happen. Even when they do.

[b]Bianco Luno

“Is there anything that makes you happy or at least content?”
Humming seems to have this effect on me.
Whether it was the drone of an oscillating fan on a steamy Gulf Coast afternoon of my childhood as I lay on the cool linoleum floor, or Glenn Gould’s vocal accompaniment to keyboard Bach, or the irregular motor sounds my cat makes sitting on my chest… Wittgenstein’s feeling of being ‘safe’ (for the time being) and still, in a world of tyrannical displacement and alarm…
“But is it possible that a purposeful human act be pleasing to you?”
No, I can’t right away think of any.
“Yours is a passive, one could say, negative vision of what is humanly possible.”
One does say that.
“Do you feel this is sufficient, comprehensive enough? That maybe more might be demanded or expected of the world?”
The world brazenly volunteers so much, I can’t imagine what might still be held out for.
“The things you mentioned seem so undeliberate, incidental, auxiliary to the main business of…”
These sorts of ornament offer me some pleasure.
“Would a useful, constructive act ever?”
To the extent it failed and became beautiful.
“It seems your attitude would curtail investment in the world. You seem always to be cutting your losses.”
Goodness abounds.
My losses?
My shortcoming is that my own industry is too susceptible to a seriousness that real accomplishment will never confirm.
Confining my attention to the few steps ahead of me, I notice progress, but the feeling that purposeful movement is somehow desirable is undercut by a glance at the ever receding horizon.
Even this dialogue with you, as far as I appear to be defending a point of view, is frivolous; it is sophistry.
“But you once said that the point of life lay in focusing on those few steps in front of you.”
I did.
?
It was a lament, as, for instance, Aristotle’s moral philosophy, interpreted in the best light.[/b]

You need to read between the lines and imagine a purpose that anyone might bring to a discussion that begins with Wittgenstein’s feeling of being safe and ends with Aristotle’s moral philosophy.

Sure, they can claim to know, but basically for all they know this claiming is like your leg jumping when the doctor does a knee reflex test.

I don’t have an argument for the best versions of these. I have repeatedly said that ‘physical’ is a meaningless term and also that we are in the middle of the history of science, not the end, so final proclamations seem weak to me.

Basically the determinist has to argue that there are two possibilities: random and completely controlled events. Or what is basically a combination in stochasitic processes. We use deduction from here and decide free will is not supported by either. Fine. But science has thought it understood the range of possibilities before and then found out this was not the case.

Sure, the determinist could ARGUE like this. But as social mammals I see no reason for them too. And, in fact, non-determinists, for example religious ones, have justified rape either openly or indirectly with victim blaming coded messages.

It’s just not my experience that determinists are less sympathetic here. In the abstract, they could be, using some line like you say, but I don’t find that they do. Whatever the weakness of the rationalist determinist, they seem less likely to certain kinds of mental manipulation - such as the kind that can justify rape.

I find that most people do not actually try to see what ideas do in situ. What is actually happening, not what should happen given the words in the mind and the logic in the mind, etc.

I find Stanford’s online philosophy resource generally very clear. Here is their article on compatibilism.
plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
However I suspect that what you really mean, or will end up meaning, is how compatibilism will satisfy your concerns, even once you ‘get’ it. It probably does not.

But notice what your focus is on here: your focus is on how you feel about the whole situation. You have not argued that you would no longer strive to be kind. Or to put this in determinist terms. You are not arguing that believing in determinist would CAUSE you to be more cruel or less caring. And this was the issue. I absolutely agree about the emotional effects of the non-existence of free will, but that I would end up being meaner, I don’t think so.

So we change the language into determinist. I don’t think that if I was convinced determinism was the case, this would cause me to treat children or anyone else less well. How bout you?

I interact with others ambiguously, precariously. I see good reasons for endorsing many conflicting sides in most moral and political issues. I make my leap knowing that, had things been different in my life, I might not have.

As, in other words, an ironist.
[/quote]
YOu mean if you became convinced determinism was true you would no longer be an ironist, no longer see conflicting sides in moral and political issues, etc.?

[b]Bianco Luno:

Glibness indicates the liar.
But how can this be when it is all our ears can pick up?—when whatever we would call the opposite of a lie is heard only at frequencies within the range of beasts, small children and the occasional idiot?
What Kaspar Hauser (in Herzog’s film) gathered from the sound of the wind in the grass, a rolling apple, the testing puzzles of an examining academician, and in the tinny hammers of an ill-tuned clavichord.[/b]

We all have our own such intimate liaisons with the things we hear. Fortunately [or unfortunately] what is true is always what we think we hear. Even this.

It used to be like the sun which would blind you but now it seems like the horizon which you must either see as beautiful, in itself, or avoid looking at altogether and never think that it is some appalling place you personally will visit, howevermuch it is our destiny.

Death, perhaps? Or life?

For all any of us know. To wit:

That is basically my point to volchok: just because I don’t have a definitive argument now doesn’t mean there isn’t one. And science is just beginning to explore this particular characteristic of the human brain. And the brain is surely the most complex matter around. Sans God.

How does consciousness grapple with explaining what consciousness itself is? What does it even mean for “I” to know this?

Yes, the determinist has to argue this. As for a random universe I simply cannot wrap my mind around it. Even the quantum folks are still baffled over this. And that, perhaps, is just in this universe.

But doesn’t reason enter into it here only as an inherent manifestation of matter evolving into it per the immutable laws of matter? The “mental” is merely matter that has been manipulated [molded] by nature into imagining it is not manipulated at all. That it is “free” to choose its own way.

And non-determinists like me root rape and our reactions to it in dasein—in daseins rooted [in unimaginably complex ways] in nature intertwined [in unimaginably complex ways] in nurture.

I get stuck on the idea that, given determinism, to choose one thing as opposed to something else is just an illusion. What is happening actually is what actually must happen. “I” have nothing to do with it other then in having acquired matter in my brain that evolved to the point I can note this. But I cannot not note this.

But where does how I think about the whole situation stop and how I feel about it begin? Or the other way around? I can imagine someone raised in an environment where being kind and good [at least to each other] is the functional norm. But I can also imagine an environment in which you come to assume it is basically a dog eat dog world and being kind and good is a weakness you just cannot afford.

These things are always situated [for each of us] in a particular world rooted in a particular time and place. Evolution [human biology] provides us with the capacity to be either kind or cruel. Does it provide us with the capacity to choose one over the other? Does it provide us with the capacity to encounter new experiences, new relationshipos, new points of view…and change our minds?

Yes. But to what extent is any of this done autonomously?

I don’t understand the “determinist terms” here. If determinism is true, I am kind or cruel per nature’s design. Just as the tides ebb and flow per nature’s design. What is the difference other than, unlike the tides, I embody the illusion of being able to freely choose one over the other?

To wit:

You:

If I was utterly convinced determinism was the case, I would not then decide to act meanly to children.

Me:

Here you lose me. If you are “convinced determinism is the case” then you are deciding only what you must decide. It’s only the illusion of choice.

If I was absolutely convinced of determinism – if science demonstrated it beyond all doubt – I would think: I may be kind toward children, I may be cruel. But my choice to be one or the other is mine only in the sense that a lightbulb chooses to be on or off depending on the position of the switch.

In some ways that might comfort me, in other ways it might not. But so what? My reaction is also just a manifestation of the ineluctable law of matter.

Again, “compatibilism” here is still illusory to me. The bottom line: what happens must happen.

Yes, but I would be like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s terminator. I would make choices but only as I was programed to by nature.

Some “choice”, eh?

[b]Bianco Luno

“But in everything you are trying to eschew some responsibility.”
And why not?
It is you against me.
The intervening order that your notion of responsibility supports is what I seek to topple.
“To what end?”
The End in general: I want to act, in all respects, as instinctively as you, with the same disregard for ends in general.
I am compelled to face you and view every truth you do, but what is in the shadow of the light emanating from your eyes is what I see.
My eyes are intimate with darkness; it is what I see as clear as day.[/b]

I don’t know the extent to which this all takes place inside his head. I don’t know, in other words, the extent to which it has anything to do with the world he lives in. And the extent to which that has anything to do with the world I live in. What do I know of his own enigmatic truths?

So, how do I know if this exposes it or disguises it [all the more] as something else?

Over against Hume and the moral sense theorists, I can vouch for a depravity of my own: this is how I understand Nero and the crowd of cheering Romans or the teasing mob at the suffering of an animal.
Just as crowds can view public suffering with ecstatic pleasure to the point where you wonder where human sympathy could so thoroughly hide, there arises in me a rancor at the sight of the frenzied horde at some athletic event.
Witnessing such unbridled public pleasure elicits an ugly bile from my guts and installs a kind of murderousness in my eyes.
The injustice of its vastness—that pleasure could be anything but furtive—is intolerable to me.
The mechanism of empathy is as fully capable of operating inversely.

What makes sense to you morallly? Isn’t it always what does not make sense to others? And the mob mentality is more a psychological construct. And that has been millions of years in the making. As has empathy and it’s inverse.

Me:

NO, not for all any of us know. That description comes directly from their beliefs. Their beliefs essentially support the idea that their acts of claiming are like that.

That is not the case for all of us.

Yes. I think there is a great urge out there to silence anything that implies mystery, confusion, potential large scale paradigmantic problems, etc. So scientific knowledge gets spouted as if science has finished.

There are Eastern Practices that have an empirical process - one requiring a rather huge investment of time - to investigate this issue.

Though the QM universe is probablistic. Hence there would be many kind of order and not the chaos of the random. Some things are (vastly) more likely than other things in QM.

Yes, in a physicalist determinism the mental is really matter with new emerged but still physical and determined qualities.

I suppose one could describe my beliefs around it this way.

The man - I assume - iambiguous - that body will do this and not that. The causes may include calculated preferences. In a physicalist determinism these preferences and the process for arriving at them - which would be in that conception some mixture of nature and nuture - is of course determined. But that body cannot be taken out of the equation. It is not like the whole of you has no effects, that is what V is trying to point out. You have effects, you go through a process of choosing (and many sub-processes of deciding, for example what is true, good, etc.) but these are all determined, yes. Whether consciousness has any effect, the conscious ‘I’ is an issue within physicalism - see epiphenomenalism.

But yeah, sure, if determinism is correct, you choices tomorrow were well determined already in the first seconds of the Big Bang. Of course, QM says they were not, but QM, so far, does not offer a version of free will. Unless, perhaps, the self/consciousness hops from one universe to another, riding different bodies along different lines of choice.

Sure, and any theory based on dasein will say the same.

Determinism doesn’t eliminate nature. It seems like in the paragraph previous to this last you focus on nurture, culture and then in the second express a concern about the loss of nature in determining actions. Well, the development of new things seems to be determined, if determinism is correct. And humans, unlike other animals, can as individuals change due to an incredibly wide range of factors. We tend to have more flexible learning systems.

Yes, the nature in you and outside you. To put it in crass determinist terms, your genetic make up and the stimuli from the environment.

WE don’t know that waves do not have consciousness or sense of choice.

Sure, but it seems to me part of your concern was that if determinism was true people would be more cruel. Your rape example - or was it mine. I do not think this is the case. I understand how the idea depresses you, but I don’t see yet why determinism being true and/or your belief in it would make you be less moral.

Yes.

No, notice your confusion here. You would have already been doing this all along. I understand how it is a depressing idea, but you have seemed several time to have implied that it would cause you to be different ethically, or here around irony.

Try to separate the two ideas: in one we are talking about how your view of what was happening would change. In the other we are talking about how you would act differently. I understand that determinism means certain things, but it seems like you are asserting that what it means would end your being an ironist and perhaps cause you to be more likely to be cruel. I don’t see any support for this.

Some “choice”, eh?
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If determinism is true, everything we think, feel, believe, do etc. is just a knee jerk reflex. It’s natural. It’s natural in that it comes wholly from nature. The fact that some don’t believe it is doesn’t change that. Our problem is we don’t seem to know for certain if this is true.

Then I am not clear on what might be construed as a non-physicalist determinism. If minds are a kind of matter and matter is a kind of energy and all three interact in space-time per the immutable laws of nature then this entire exchange we are having is only as it could have been. “I” either have some measure of autonomy here or “I” don’t.

In other words:

I understand that I have effects. I understand that I choose what I do in order to generate these effects. But if I could not not have chosen these things how is that really different from the effects falling dominoes have on each other?

Two scenarios:

I choose to shoot John and he dies. Or, John gets drunk, passes out on the beach and, as a result of the incoming tide, he drowns. I am not like the tide in that I chose to shoot John. But I am exactly like the tide in that I could not have chosen not to do what I did. Either way it has been determined by the laws of nature that John be dead.

Or, maybe, as you suggest below, the tides themselves harbor the illusion of choosing to ebb and flow.

You say:

Which is why some subscribe [cling?] to the idea that it is not correct. They have a deep-seated intuitive sense of “choosing” between alternative effects.

Determinism here would seem to be a way in which to describe the methodology of nature. Nature unfolds as it was determined to unfold given that all the “stuff” in nature interacts in accordance with laws that do not exclude us. Nurture then is just the way nature unfolds [must unfold] for each of us postpartum. Dasein therefore is merely something I was unable not to embrace as an alternative approach to understanding why I chose what I did. It’s just the illusion I harbor about my alleged autonomy.

If determinism is true cruelity and kindness would seen to be interchangable. John raped Mary. John stopped Joe from raping Mary. What difference does it make if Joe could not choose freely to do one thing rather than another? We can react as we do…and the legal system can prevail and John or Joe gets locked up. But none of this could have been otherwise.

And here is where it really gets surreal [for me]: What does it mean for a conscious mind to know this when it could not itself have known otherwise?

Mind is the mystery here. It always has been. Why? Because, volchok’s declamations aside, it really is matter of an entirely different sort.

Unless, of course, it’s not.

My being more or less moral is like the tides ebbing or flowing. It is what it is because it could not have been otherwise. And my being more or less depressed can only be understood in the same thing. If determinism is true it happens because it could not not happen.

And you and I and volchok knowing this in the manner in which we do is the only manner in which we could have known it.

I don’t understand this. I can only be different ethically if I have the autonomous capacity to choose to be cruel or kind. And this will be embedded largely in dasein. But then others who are also able to choose autonomously [as dasein] will reconfigure the world such that the ripple effect might impact on me such that I choose to change my mind.

If determinism is true everything that happens, like my reaction to everything that happens, will simply be what happens. End of story. Nature prevails as it must. And not even nature has a choice about it. It’s just that somehow matter has evolved into consciousness—consciouness able somehow to be cognizant of this. But not able to freely change it.

My view of something can change. And, as a result, I change my behavior. But, if determinism is true, they are just different sides of the same coin.

If, for example, volchok were to reconfigure his argument and suddenly I saw why I was wrong to embrace the one I do now, that is only what would [could] have happened anyway. He figured it out before I did. But he could not have done otherwise.

Or maybe I will reconfigure my argument about dasein and ironism and he will suddenly see the light and admit that he is wrong.
But, in the end, to me, if determinism is true, this is really no different for all practical purposes than the tides ebbing and flowing.