If the meaning that we either choose or get is the only meaning that was ever going to be chosen or gotten, what does it mean to speak of meaning then at all?
If the person setting up dominoes to topple over into a particular design was never able to not set them up to topple over into a particular design, what does it mean to praise him for this accomplishment when there was never a possiblity that we would not praise him?
If someone says “horse”, I interpret that to mean the animal we call horse. But I don’t feel like I’m choosing to interpret it that way, as if I could choose some other interpretation like turtle or cat, I feel like that’s just the meaning of the word, and the one who uttered the word meant precisely and only that.
But all of this is unfolding only as it ever could have. That’s the part I keep going back to.
Imagine, for example, that you and I are just characters in some fantastic Sim world. We are doing what we do only becasue we are required or programmed to given the intention of the entity that created us as characters in the Sim world itself.
Just as the brain creates characters in our dreams. Characters that we interact with as though it were not a dream at all. As though “in the moment” this was really happening to us. Meanwhile we are sound asleep in our beds.
And besides, even if I did feel like I was choosing the meaning, how is that any different than the feeling of choosing an action (like raising my arm)? Is raising my arm not really raising my arm if I’m actually determined to do so?
If what determines you to think or to feel or to do anything is wholly [and solely] in sync with the manner in which, say, the character in the Terminator thinks and feels and does things, what then does that mean about our choices?
If Jane freely chooses to have an abortion and Jan freely chooses to believe this means she should be arrested for premeditated murder, that’s different [for me] than Jane and Jan behaving as they do and then reacting to those behaviors as meaningful only in the way that they ever could have.
That’s meaning qua implication (as opposed to meaning qua content of language); but still, same arguments apply. If I believe that seeing lightening means there will be thunder soon, does it not really mean that if I’m actually determined to believe that?
If our reaction to Jane’s abortion and our reaction to the bolt of lightning is all in sync with nature – nature designing us to react as we do only because we were never able to react any other way – then “determination” is just another domino to me.
“I’m determined to do this” in a world where determination itself is just a frame of mind in sync with the evolution of mindless matter into mindful matter. But still no less matter embedded in what some insist are “immutable laws”.
Unless “mind matter” is a very, very different thing.
The difficulty I have here is that your point is entirely abstract. Let’s consider your argument as it relates to the recent spate of bombing scares here in America. From your frame of mind was there ever a possibility that the bomber could have chosen to do something else?
It depends on what you mean by choose. For the sake of this argument, I’ll say no. The bomber was not free to do something else in the sense that choosing implies violating the laws of nature.
By “choice” here I mean the distinction between choosing to mail bombs given a capacity to choose not to, or the illusion of choice in a world where he was never going to not mail them.
Is there the possibility that how each of us initially reacted to what he chose to do might reconfigure into a different reaction because we are able [autonomously] find a different meaning in it all?
no… again, in the sense of choice implying the violation of the laws of nature.
But that seems to be precisely the situation if we do live in a wholly determined universe.
We make choices. We note the choices of others. But there was never any possibilty of choices other than those being made without violating the laws of nature.
We’re now in the mind of the person creating and mailing the bombs. How is your point above relevant to the choises that he makes?
The bomber did what he did without any thought to whether he was doing it freely or being forced by the laws of nature. He just did it. If in fact he was totally determined by the laws of nature, there is no reason to assume that fact had to be present in his consciousness at any point. Being forced doesn’t entail feeling forced.
What does this matter if everything that we think and feel and do is only that which we are ever able to think and feel and do? Whether the bomber thinks that he is choosing to do what he does because it’s the right thing to do or because he sees Trump as a father figure or because he just likes to terrorize others, there was never any possibility of him not doing it. What unfolds inside his head was never able to not unfold as it did.
Same with the dark room. Whatever is in or is not in it and whatever we think is in or is not in it, the illusion that seems to revolve around the belief that we have some measure of autonomy in a universe in which in fact we don’t, is that anything we think, feel and do here was something we could have chosen not to think and feel and do. That we have the capacity to shape meaning here “freely”.
As for the role of the brain in all this consider: philosophynow.org/issues/127/Fr … modulation
How then does the science here factor into what we think we freely choose to think and feel and do?
If we just “do it” only because we could not just do anything else, what does that tell us about meaning then?
Then [for me] we’re back to whether this acknowledgement was ever going to be anything else.
And that negates it? Let’s say your acknowledgement about the fact that mind seems to have evolved from matter was never going to be anything else. You’re still acknowledging that mind seems to have evolved from matter (if anything, it only makes it more emphatic).
Sorry, but I keep coming back to the fact that in a wholly determined unverse, anything that I acknowledge was the only thing that I was ever going to acknowledge. The only thing I was ever able to acknowledge.
Well, that just begs the quesrion. What does it mean to be coherent given the gap between what you think you know about existence “here and now” and all that would need to be known about it in order to attain a fully coherent understanding of it?
And how coherent will the arguments proposed by the “really smart guys [and gals]” in the physics community today appear to those in the same community 100, 1,000 or 10,000 years from now?
Given all the things we are still really fuzzy about regarding QM, dark matter, dark energy and the multiverse?
And other stuff like this: livescience.com/34052-unsol … ysics.html
From the introduction:
In 1900, the British physicist Lord Kelvin is said to have pronounced: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” Within three decades, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity had revolutionized the field. Today, no physicist would dare assert that our physical knowledge of the universe is near completion. To the contrary, each new discovery seems to unlock a Pandora’s box of even bigger, even deeper physics questions.
Science does indeed crunch out, from time to time, some bizarre mind-warping secrets of nature. But even if one day scientists announced: existence did, in fact, come into existence at a time before which there was no existence, I would still regard that as an incoherent notion.
Yes, but your regard here is no less profoundly embedded in the gap between what you think you know here and now about existence and all that the human mind is capable of knowing about it. Thousands of years into the future.
Acknowledging in turn that the evolution of matter into mind may well never have that capacity.
It still comes down [for me] to whether redness and softness are seen to be more preferable than bluenss and hardness because someone believes they are able to freely make that choice. And that in fact given the actual existence of human autonomy, they were able to.
So what does that mean to you? That you are not able to experience red unless you can choose to experience it as blue? When you look at a banana, you see it as yellow, right? But are you not really seeing it as yellow because you can’t will for it to become blue in your perception?
What it has come to mean to me is less the point [mine here] than whether what it has come to mean to me is something that was in my capacity to freely choose.
If not then everything – including this exchange – is subsumed in whatever existence turns out to be. In a universe governed by laws such that it could only ever have been that.
Once we do go to the grave is our access to the whole truth here gone forever? Or is this eternal mind of yours somehow able to keep us in the game?
No, I think it would throw us into a totally different game (an afterlife). I imagine that experience would continue but our individuality would dissolve; all experiences unique to the human mind would fade–experiences like sensations, memories, emotions, concepts, pains and pleasures, etc.–and give way to a whole set of new experiences. We would essentially become one with the universe.
Here then we are back to speculating about whether whatever it is that does happen is within our capacity to freely choose or was never going to not happen given whatever “I” becomes as matter when the brain decomposes back into star stuff.
That and your capacity to demonstrate that what you do believe above can be reconfigured into actual evidence that goes beyond the assumptions in the argument itself.