Determinism

Suppose John Doe has chosen to tether the ass to a stake in the ground. Why? Because, in the manner in which I construe dasein, he had become predisposed to take pleasure in watching the animal starve to death. Given the manner in which you construe determinism [re the human mind] can he then be held morally responsible for doing this? In other words, given the manner in which peacegirl seems to embrace the immutable laws of matter unfolding [out of necessity] into the only possible world, could he have ever freely chosen not to do this to the animal?

I suppose not. Why do you ask?

I ask because, as I have noted before on this thread, determinism is of interest to me only to the extent that it is relevant to the manner in which we choose to hold others responsible for what they do. Which, out in the world that we live in, is clearly linked to blame and punishment.

Now, if John Doe must take satisfaction in choosing to torture animals and others must take satisfaction in choosing to punish him for doing so, then we really are no different from the dominoes toppling over only as they must in the only possible world. The one distinction being that the human mind is matter that has evolved to the point of becoming cognizant of it.

Blame and punishment then become merely another manifestation [embodiment] of the mechanism that is the nature of peacegirls “design”. Just as is this exchange we are having. It was fated to unfold as it necessarily must from the moment that matter was fated to unfold per whatever it is that brought into existence the laws of matter.

And, just out of curiosity, what do you know of that? Or, rather, what do you think you know about it?

I haven’t been following along in this thread for several months now. I only posted here because I promised peacegirl I’d get back to her with my feedback on Chapter 2. So I don’t think I have a thorough grasp of what you’re saying–at least not as much as I otherwise could–but what you explain here makes sense. There’s not much to elaborate on what I know, or think I know, about this: if the world is exhaustively determined, then of course we are all, and always were, determined to punish and blame since the first punishment and blame. I’m even inclined to say blame and punishment would continue even if we were painfully aware of how determined everything is. Knowing that one couldn’t help it doesn’t necessarily get rid of the desire to blame and punish.

Not sure if peacegirl will be back. On the other hand, she was never really able to choose freely to come back.

If I understood her.

Somehow she was able to make this leap from blame and punishment in the world as we know it today everywhere] to a world in which, once everyone is able to grasp her father’s discovery/principle about a world sans free will, blame and punishment would no longer exist.

Well, other than among those who refused to become citizens of her father’s utopia…a world where all embody a universal consciousness. Which may or may not include something that may or may not be analogous to God.

But, again, I may have misunderstood her. I may well be the one missing the point.

We discussed this as well. And she acknowledged that our emotional and psychological reactions to the world were also necessarily subsumed in a design necessarily subsumed in the immutable laws of matter. Our desires, in other words, were no less wholly determined.

[b]From “The Information Philosopher” website:

Peter Strawson argued in 1962 that whatever the deep metaphysical truth on the issues of determinism and free will, people would not give up talking about and feeling moral responsibility - praise and blame, guilt and pride, crime and punishment, gratitude, resentment, and forgiveness.

These “reactive attitudes” were for Strawson more real than whether they could be explained by fruitless disputes about free will, compatibilism, and determinism. They were “facts” of our natural human commitment to ordinary inter-personal attitudes. He said it was “a pity that talk of the moral sentiments has fallen out of favour,” since such talk was “the only possibility of reconciling these disputants to each other and the facts.” [/b]

How I translate this:

Even if we are not able [philosophically, scientifically etc.] to pin down the objective relationship between determinism and moral responsibility [out in the world of human interactions] we react to others as though we are in fact choosing our behaviors freely and thus we can be held responsible for the consequences of those behaviors that others do not approve of. And especially regarding those behaviors that others deem harmful to them.

This feels “real” to us and that has to be enough until the objective truth can finally be pinned down.

But it would seem that, however one either talks or does not talk of “moral sentiments”, we are still just groping in the dark. We each of us one by one take a more or less educated leap of faith to a point of view that either assigns moral responsibility to ourselves and to others or presumes this is all just an illusion in a world where everything that we think, feel and do is only as it ever could have been.

My own dilemma moreover goes further still. Even if I do take that leap to free will [and I do] I still land on this:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

Exactly.

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Since I have taken my own “existential leap” to “free will”, the question I always focus on is not whether “I” have some capacity to control the choices I make [I presume that I do] but the extent to which “I” can ever really grasp how much control is really within my reach.

Again, some things that we choose to do are more or less embedded in necessity. We can’t choose to forgo food and water or we will die. We can’t choose to be successful at some task unless we first learn how to do it. We can’t choose to ignore the laws of nature or we will suffer the consequences.

Similarly, we can’t not choose a moral or a political agenda if we wish to interact with others.

But here the choices are different in that they do not revolve around either/or so much as is/ought. It is one thing to make choices when you are a doctor aborting a fetus, another thing altogether when you are an ethicist arguing which choice is moral and which immoral.

That’s the part I focus on pertaining to dasein and conflicting goods.

In other words, some choices revolve around either/or. Either you choose to do the right thing [the thing aligned objectively with reality] or you will not accomplish the task the choice aims toward.

Even if the doctor does presume that she is free to choose to perform abortions, there are particular choices that she must make [of necessity] if she wishes to do this successfully. This transcends dasein and conflicting goods.

But for the ethicist, dasein and conflicting goods are marbled through and through her decisions.

And that’s where my “dasein dilemma” comes into play. Just having free will does not enable someone to choose “the right thing to do” when confronted with the conflicting value judgments embedded in the abortion wars. Whereas one can choose the right course of action if the task revolves instead around aborting the baby.

There is a consequential confusion here, as a result , based on the seeming loss of freedom due to the equivocation of freedom with responsibility. If that identity I usage has resulted in the priority of identifying categorically, why the guy replace the term responsibility for freedom, it would go a long way to enable a rationale for it. Was he justified? or did he simplyy refer to a prior 60’s book, ‘Freedom and Responibility’ by I beleive Rollo May. Maybe it was a realization that was based on increasing number of bad trips among young kids on drugs. Who had no idea how to come down. They couldn’t because they did not understand how they, individually got there in the first place.

Your problem is similar, in that You are looking for a way to retract from Your leap, and there may not be a way to find the source, or the origin of where You Are coming from.

Please do not misunderstand, it is not Your cognition which may be at question here, but the whole package, maybe You are asking Yourself, whether You leapt before You thought out all of the ramifications not all of which may have depended on an analysis of the right thing, or, the thing to do, but,
Overwhelmed by numerous choices with differing aims, did the choice entail the best choice available, or rather, was based on what appeared to be the right, the only apparent choice, based on some thought of bravado, or a need to make a complete break,where only a clearly identifiable choice would or could prevail?

it’s obvious that doing the responsible thing is not always the only, or even the best choice, when that series brings in the sequence of what is best in terms of how one sees it. And this figures on the idea that leaps or breaks are contingent in most part on how one sees or interprets what that is. Within the construct of his own Dasain. That breaks categorically the idea of what one should do, therefore the problem of identifying what one ought to do, with one sees as the best thing to do. The leaps themselves become problematically adverse and contradictory to the sense of what one should do.

Personally, my life, is a chain of contradictions , and like Yours, one can not but love in uncertainty about
The context within which I placed my being. But my rationale consists of a demonstration that my original choices were not really that original, and I was to choose the things I did, on account of concern that others may be effected to a negative degree. Others diminished by uncertainty, by rewarding me with putting them into the equation. But then the dynamic of relinquishing control became a jigsaw puzzle, wherein I had to start a new schematics, of trying to figure out how to retain some control. At least to the degree, that would balance out needs and simply just a power struggle.

Your example of the abortion issue,Mahican I niticed You invariably use as an example has all these elements, except, that the unborn do not have as of yet elements of control deigned to them they are acted upon, and I am not sure, we should not assign to them at least some rights apart from being the products of a pleasurable act. The respect for life, and subsequent responsibility to imbue fetuses with their own possible being, is violated herein. Fetuses were not asked to be borne, as our own children off remind us at times when trouble arises, and we really have no credible way to get out from under such questions, because the question goes way back to the original choice of having respect for the dignity of life. So the leap to nothingness is re, or disqualified by a structural regression from what Freud calls the super ego.

I referred to Rollo May, and found a reinforcement to the above, wherein he did not consider freedom and responsibility contradictory. that answers the ontological problem of being, as not subscribing to conventional thought.

I, the God, appreciate your honesty. Honesty is the first step. My body has urges as well.
The Zs, in all their great wisdom, modified their DNA to get rid of all violent and sexual urges.

However, this was not wise. They see to remodify their DNA to revert to the old ways of sexual and violent urges.
I only seek to modify the DNA to eliminate primarily idiotic and selfish traits. This would benefit your species, whilst still allowing you enjoy hedonistic pursuits.

I have not yet read Peacegirl’s writings but mere writings are not enough. The human DNA is what’s at hand.

Here of course one starts with the assumption that there is an element of free choice entangled in our option to behavior in one way rather than another.

But, from my perspective, what we choose to do is always profoundly and problematically entangled in dasein. In fact, so entangled there is no realistic possibility that we can ever disentangle all of the thousands upon thousands of exitential variables that came to be our life. At least not such that we can pin down with any precision why we chose to do this rather than that.

And even if we could do this [discover our “true self”] there is no way [in a world sans God] to determine which moral values we come to predicate our behaviors on are neccesarily [objectively] the right values.

That, in fact, is when I challenge folks to take these relationships off the sky hooks and bring them down to earth. To discuss “freedom of choice” [or the lack thereof] in the context of abortion or some other issue where there are obvious conflicting narratives “down here” “out in the world” of actual human interactions.

And since I root moral narratives said to be true objectively in the “psychology of objectivism” – viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296 – I make the further assumption that a belief in determinism is just another manifestation [embodiment] of this. I just don’t grasp how a belief in determinism can ever be compatible with free will unless it is expressed as “free will”.

Yes it would seem so, but, breaks are never clean, they always display reggae do edges to some degree, and it goes the same with freedom, the total break on closer examination consists of parts some denied,smoke understood, but the whole is phenomenal, it requires it to conform to aesthetic rules, of distance, proportion and vantage point, and here the individuals are not perceived on,y the aggregates. Freedom is a function of relative appreciation of these rules, if you fly too high to the sun, or too far away from it. the perspective of fallen ness is lost, and the the heaviest objects will appear to fall faster, and Dasein will be re embodied. Who has not occasioned this illusion, even Nowedays among most people? Their children who retain the fear of flying. They have to ground themselves, thus, they can never liberate themselves from the constraints of gravity. They see reality as a pointillistic abandonment embedded by surrounding trees
within a forest, where only the trees are visible.

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Yes, but are they not “natural human reactions” because they are fully in alignment with nature? And is not nature fully in alignment with the inherent laws of matters? And are not the inherent laws of matter fully in alignment with…with what exactly? With God? With whatever brought everything that exists into existence out of nothing at all?

Again: for all practical purposes, what does it mean [in a determined world] to speak of my “acceptance” of all this? As though there was ever any possibility [in a wholly determmined world] that this could be anything other than what it must be.

And yet I always come back to the assumption that, since these are the speculations of some very, very sophisticated minds, there must be something in my own mind that still doesn’t “get it”.

But: Are or are not our subjunctive reactions to the world around us [and to the subjunctive reactions of others] no less subsumed in the design? Necessarily subsumed.

[b]From “The Information Philosopher” website:

From the earliest beginnings, the problem of “free will” has been intimately connected with the question of moral responsibility. Most of the ancient thinkers on the problem were trying to show that we humans have control over our decisions, that our actions “depend on us”, and that they are not pre-determined by fate, by arbitrary gods, by logical necessity, or by a natural causal determinism. [/b]

What often surprises me are the number of occasions I have stumbled on discussions of determinism online and the question of moral responsibility would hardly come up at all.

Personally, I cannot imagine a more important relationship. Whether we are free to choose behaviors pertaining to those things that must be chosen in order to be in alignment with the laws of nature would seem to pale in interest next to behaviors that we choose only because we perceive the world around us from a particular point of view.

And it is in choices of this nature [choices revolving around value judgments] that generate the most problematic consequences. Having or not having free will here cannot possibly be more important. On the other hand, having or not having free will is irrelevant to the objective reality of mathematics and nature and logic.

But to say that today “free will is understood as the control condition for moral responsibility” is to make a serious blunder in conceptual analysis and clear thinking. Free will is clearly a prerequisite for responsibility. Whether the responsibility is a moral responsibility depends on our ideas of morality.

Conceptual analysis. Perhaps that’s my problem. I may well be less concerned with getting this “conceptual analysis” right than in delving into how, for all practical purposes, determinism has actual existential applications with regard to our social, political and economic interactions.

It would surely seem that we cannot be held responsible [re blame and punishment] for doing something that we could not not freely choose to do.

But how does this relate then to moral responsibility being dependent “on our ideas of morality”?

The distinction here would seem to be just shifting gears from those behaviors we must do in order to be in alignment with existence/reality, to those behaviors that seem to be within our capacity to have a choice in. Behaviors, in other words, in which others might ask, “should she have done that?”

No one asks the doctor if she should perform an abortion by going down through the pregnant woman’s nose. Although they may ask if she freely choose to perform the abortion. With moral responsibility though we can ask if performing this particular behavior was the “right thing to do” beyond the extent to which it is in alignment with reality/existence. If, in fact, we have free will.

humans have no free will they are just random thoughts that pop-up.

because a thought says ‘i made a decision’ does not mean it made a decision.

with humans odds of them making a good rational decision is less than 1/6th chance, less than a roll of the dice.

[b]From “The Information Philosopher” website:

In recent years, "free will” has become what John Fischer calls an “umbrella-term” for a large range of phenomena. He says (in his recent 4-volume Routledge anthology “Free Will,” vol.I, p.xxiii):

The term is used differently by different philosophers, and I think that it is most helpful to think of it as an “umbrella-term” used to describe some sort of freedom that connects in important ways with moral responsibility, and, ultimately, person-hood. More specifically, the domain of free will includes various sorts of freedom (freedom of choice, of action, choosing and acting freely, and so forth), and the practices constitutive of moral responsibility (moral praise and blame, punishment and moral reward, and a set of distinctively moral attitudes, such as indignation, resentment, gratitude, respect, and so forth).[/b]

Which would seem to be just another way of noting that there may well be no definitive manner in which to denote what words like this can only mean.

And it would seem to be just common sense that when we take whatever particular meaning is most agreeable to us out into the world of actual decisions being made, the complications begin to multiply expontentialliy the more factors we include: historical, cultural, interpersonal. Nature and nurture. Identity. Emotional and psychological reactions. Etc.

And then with moral and political interactions we go beyond what can be established as either this or that and [over and again] get sucked down into the quagmire that is ought/ought not.

It still surprises me to bump into people who actually imagine they can untangle [or have untangled] all of this in order to assert the one objective truth. Sure, it may exist. But does anyone really imagine it has actually been discovered to date.

Some philosophers do not distinguish between freedom and moral responsibility. Put a bit more carefully, they tend to begin with the notion of moral responsibility, and “work back” to a notion of freedom; this notion of freedom is not given independent content (separate from the analysis of moral responsibility). For such philosophers, “freedom” refers to whatever conditions are involved in choosing or acting in such a way as to be morally responsible.

How exactly would one go about making this distinction pertaining to actual human choices that precipitate conflicting behaviors? You can “work back” from one end of the continuum or the other end. But you will still find yourself making/taking leaps regarding which premises you use.

Where is the set of premises [assumptions] able to resolve it all once and for all?

But then there is only 1/6th of a chance that is true. 8-[

i am not human and alls you need to go into the outside world to verify this stastistic. so argumentative, and the only way your species can learn is if the world is in ridiculous bad shape. if the world was simply mediocre, or somewhat negative, you would be so complacent you would praise it and praise it and praise it. you can only understand extremes and metaphors.

focus on the meaning behind the words not the words themselves. the feels you get from free will is different from 'will". someone has the will to buy an orange instead of killing a goat. someone does not have freewill to kill a goat. its ancient feels.