Right. Sticking a label on alters nothing about life. But that seems to be the view of the minority on this site.
Right. Sticking a label on alters nothing about life. But that seems to be the view of the minority on this site.
[/quote]
I can imagine deciding one or the other, or believing one or the other, might affect one emotionally, even in ways one would not really notice.
One thing I realized in relation to peacegirl is that there are places in the world where determinism is believed in general as a part of the culture. I don’t think they have avoided abuse, violence and war in these places.
But this seems to presume that the assumptions embedded in the arguments of those who champion free will and those who champion hard determinism are equally compelled by nature’s material laws.
And, if that is saying something meaningful [and, say, actually true objectively] then this very exchange is entirely beyond our control as actual autonomous beings.
Or, again, I am either compelled by nature to misunderstand your point or I do possess a capacity to reason these things through freely by I am unable to match your own reasoning skills. Or my reasoning skills fail to fully grasp the point that you are actually making.
Well, if nature compells me to say that, it doesn’t really matter if it is deemed to be “useful” by yourself and others. Why? Because nature’s laws compel you no less to react to it only as you must.
Right?
But how on earth are we actually able to pin that down?
Thus:
Again, the sort of thing someone convinced that the choices we make are derived from free will, would make. Whereas particular determinists are convinced that in “choosing” to change one’s approach, one is only under the self-delusion that they were free to opt not to change their approach. Human psychology itself being just another embodiment of nature’s laws.
On the contrary, the more you delve into the complexities involved in mindless matter evolving over billions of years into self-conscious human brains the more you come to recognize that gap between what you think you know about all this and all that there is to possibly know about it.
After all, that’s why there are objectivists on both sides of the divide. All of these complexities get reduced down either this or that. They can then claim to know all that they need to know in order to comfort and console themselves.
With or without God.
Okay, note how, “for all practical purposes”, the latter understanding of determinism comes into play regarding your own interactions with others.
Nature’s laws determine your choices but there is a part of what you choose that allows you to be an “agent” that is, what, somehow outside of nature’s immuntable material laws.
Maybe, through this God you believe in?
And how do you go about determining that how you have come to look at it is not in and of itself compelled by nature?
A wholly compelled existential leap, right?
Right, like the assumptions you come back to over and over again in turn does amount to those details.
Let’s try this: In detail, note them then in a particular context in which you choose one thing rather than another.
No examples, of course, just another nudge toward the general description we call “psychology”. In which it is assumed that in regard to your own, some parts of it are embedded in nature’s immutable laws while another part of it revolves around you being an “agent” perfectly able to choose some things…freely?
Are you saying that those who believe in free will are somehow beyond material laws? Or that free will is beyond material laws?
How is that possible?
So what ought to be done now?
If you are compelled not to understand then I have few options … try to explain, ignore it for now, stop talking to you, etc. Decision time.
If you feel that saying “nature compels you” is enough then so be it.
So what if someone calls it “self-delusion”? If you change your approach then you end up on another path. I care where I am, not what someone calls it.
So just to be clear … you recognize a gap, then you “delve into the complexities” and you end up recognizing the gap again and again.
Well, don’t let me hold you back. Carry on.
Who says that it’s “somehow outside of nature’s immutable material laws”, FFS? I wrote in the same post : “Everything is a manifestation of the laws of matter.”
Why do I need to do that? I don’t see you doing anything besides saying “compelled by nature” about everything.
Feel free to present your “explorations”.
Apparently you think that ‘agent’ means not bound by material laws.
I didn’t say that an ‘agent’ is not bound by material laws.
KT,
Am I not being clear about what I mean by ‘agent’?
Am I somehow suggesting that the ‘agent’ is outside of the physical laws of the universe?
“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine
Consider this regarding Libet and his experiment:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_ … xperiments
So, it then comes down to the extent to which this can in fact be confirmed as “the science behind the things we choose”.
The science in other words.
There are, after all, the “reactions of the dualists”: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_ … ilosophers
So, how is it finally to be determined/demonstrated once and for all what is really going on “in our head” when we choose one behavior over another in any particular context?
The problem embedded in what some note to be the ambiguities that revolve around “the timing”.
Who is able to show beyond all doubt what plays out when, say, someone enters the voting booth and pulls the lever for candidate X instead of candidate Y or candidate Z.
Is everything already scripted in our brain by the laws of matter, or, instead, is there some “variable” that in fact, does allow for a choice – a real choice – predicated on actual human volition.
In other words, was it nature that ultimately compelled the Russians to hack the 2016 elections in America? Was the outcome already rigged going back to, say, the Big Bang?
I don’t see that you are. My experience and analysis of this dynamic is this.
There is an issue X (conflicting goods, afterlife/no afterlife, determinism/free will, suffering being fractured and fragmented (no ‘I’ or ‘i’).
I see no difference between them in the pattern of dialogue.
Every sentence you write can be treated as you making a failed attempt to refute the existence of the problem
or
as you saying that you have the answer to the issue.
So, if any sentence you write seems to or does disagree with or even frames differently any point he made: you are denying either 1) the importance of the issue 2) the issue itself 3) or are claiming to know the solution.
This allows repetition.
Determinism, as issue, is the closest to an instant short circuit because any conflict or misunderstanding may be compelled.
Even the mere act of trying to explain something to him will be taken as a denial that he
might
be
compelled
to
not
understand.
Or you might not be.
Or as an example of you saying you are free from the laws of the universe.
I’ve wondered what is going on for a long time, since never once does he ever admit that perhaps another person is seeing something in any particular instance of his thinking or interpreting was incorrect, what this was.
I think you are basically talking to his addiction. He is suffering, presenting these issues that cannot be resolved to others, and getting them to try to solve them and having them fail over and over is what he is addicted to.
I used to think this was denied rage. But I just think he is hurt.
He will never admit that he reasoned poorly - in the abstract he will say this is possible, but never once will he say ‘oh, yes, there I reasoned incorrectly’ or ‘there I misrepresented you’. He will always respond slightly askew what you have written. And he will always frame your responses as you making claims you are not making.
Anything else would mean that some other process might make him feel better, that something else is actually causing his pain.
I mean, for years his pain was caused by conflicting goods, and look, that’s gone, at least for weeks now. Now it is determinism. ‘What could possibly be more important?’ The exact same interpersonal dynamic with a new topic. The exact same patterns of misinterpreting other people’s posts.
This dyanmic is the addiction.
Perhaps it will change, someday. Perhaps, not.
But it is exactly the same right now.
Thanks for responding.
Yesterday I sent about an hour and a half driving to various places. I got to where I intended to go and I didn’t hit anybody or anything.
What sense would it make to say that it wasn’t I who controlled the car? Or that it wasn’t I who wanted to go to those specific places?
What do you get by saying that I (and the car) were “compelled by nature”? What’s the point of looking at it in that way?
Well, it was a tangent.
Well, it could be useful to get a third person perspective. Not arguing for deteminism per se, just saying that one could look at the reasons you chose to travel and the places you when and what made your driving such that you hit no one. So, now you are looking at yourself, in a sense as an object or process unfolding. This could be useful, for example, when comparing you to other drivers. What are Phyllo’s qualities that lead to him not having accidents. Or psychology, what led to the choices he made. This could be within a deterministic perspective where we view it as inevitable (compelled) or black boxing that, but looking at causation.
So, I can see a potential use for essentially assuming implying determinism - or black boxing it - but focusing on the causes.
It seemed like one of your problems with Iamb’s use of the phrase compelled by nature is that is was the full story. That seemed to be the end of the discussion and the end of possible exploration. Not that he would say it was the full story, but that’s as far as his analysis went. Which is not very useful. It also seemed like another problem you had with it was that it was as if this explantion contradicted or was contradicted your explanations, which as far as I can tell it wasn’t.
In a discussion of determinsm, when the only issues are ‘is determinism the case’ and ‘what does this entail’ then it could make sense to say you were compelled, but the next step would be to go in and explain how it should be looked at as compulsion and other ways of looking at it are wrong. I don’t think they are wrong, even if determinism is the case.
IOW even if determinism is the case, it can be useful to speak about things using other frames.
My point is, first of all, that I am not able to be convinced one way or the other if we have free will. If we do then in the either/or world the laws of nature would seem to be no less applicable to all of us. In the is/ought world, however, The value judgments of “I” would seem to revolve more around dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. Considerably more subjective in other words.
But: “I” groping about out on the end of the metaphysical limb [re questions this big] encounters considerably more confusion, uncertainty, ambiguity.
Whatever I think I mean here is beyond doubt far removed from all that I would need to know in order to demonstrate that what I think I know is what all rational men and women are in turn obligated to know.
I merely suspect that this part includes you too.
Yeah, we grapple here with these relationships “philosophically”…but over and over and over again, it’s “decision time” out in the world of actual human interactions.
Thus:
Sure, shooting the shit around dinner table at home, or shooting the shit with friends in a bar, that can certainly “work”. But in a philosophy venue, there are always going to be those who wish to take it further. Maybe even to actually figure it all out. As other philosophers have been grappling with it now for millennia. Let’s face it, you never really know for sure [in an autonomous world] what you might encounter in the next post here.
Is the belief by some that they are in possession of free will just a psychological illusion? Are my moral nihilism and your objective morality merely two sides of the same necessarily fused coin? The coin we call nature?
I don’t know. But something embedded in my own particular “I” brings me here to explore the question with others. Now, in an autonomous world that revolves [for me] around the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein. And, in a wholly determined universe, what “I” opt for here is never more than what I must opt for.
And then [for me] this part…
Yeah, of late. On the other hand, for most of my life, I was convinced that, through God or through one or another political ideology, the gap was closed. Not only did I possess free will but it was anchored to actual Meaning and Purpose in my life.
Just not anymore.
Still, my “fractured and fragmented” self here and now is no less embedded in the mystery that is existence itself. Whether I’m compelled to feel this or not.
Let’s just say that we react to these words from different points of view. This strikes me as the sort of “before I choose” “agency” that peacegirl champions. Until after a choice is made…when free will finally collapses that agency; until the next choice must be made.
From my frame of mind, if “everything is a manifestation of the laws of matter” that includes anything at all before, during and after you choose. Nothing that we think, feel, say or do would seem to be excluded.
If only from our conception to our death itself.
The irony is that you are staying with the static “compelled by nature” while I’m trying to go beyond that. IOW, you’re the one who is not taking it further.
Life is irreversible. It’s expressed by Lady Macbeth as “What’s done cannot be undone.”
There is no “collapse of agency”.
I wonder how many philosophers have been damaged by quantum mechanics.
Here are two classic examples of those who advocate free will, and then predicate it on that which they construe to be “natural law”.
They agree basically that an understanding of nature unfolding historically [organically] allows them to attach their autonomy to something bigger than both of them. In other words, “I” is only truly free to the extent that it is properly aligned with the one true understanding of natural law.
For one, it’s the class struggle revolving around a “scientific” understand of political economy; and, for the other, it’s the proper understanding of natural behavior as that relates to, among other things, race and gender and sexual orientation. Or on being either the master or the slave.
But make no mistake about it, they are both bound together by the conviction that unless others concur with their understanding of class and race and gender and human sexuality, their own free will is utterly squandered. Even debased.
Yes, one must be an idealist. And, yes, the ideal is rooted in the one true understanding of natural law. But: Ever and always their very own understanding.
The only truly free will one can have is the freedom to think that which remains completely unknown to any one else
Even here there will be moral or philosophical blockers but they will be imposed from within so will be less restrictive
Once your thoughts become public you consciously or subconsciously are conditioned by what others think about them
You know that the determinists will say that your thoughts are not free.
So the atoms and molecules in those neurons that have to with your private thoughts are not following rigid causal chains like everything else?
I’m not a determinist, but I don’t get why one portion of the universe would be free and others not, unless one does not think it is made up of the same kinds of stuff. Or there is some emergent property. Or…?
And since our innner thoughts can guide our actions, in fact they generally do affect what we do and how we do it, why would it only be ‘inside’ that we can be free. If deep down,w here no one case sense it, I love a certain person and this leads me to move towards her, why isn’t that a free action in the world? I don’t see how there can be this partial freedom, deep inside, only, since this deep inside affects actions that should then be free also. IOW this sound noble and idealistic and romantic rather than based on any worked out ideas in ontology.
No, the ultimate irony is almost certainly embedded in the gap between what we venture to opine in venues like ILP about subjects like this, and all that we clearly do not know about our own existence in relationship to whatever is behind the knowledge needed to grasp an understanding of existence itself.
And what could possibly be more static in an exchange like this than the fact that the laws of nature may well compel both of us to move only in a direction that we could never not move in?
Now, assuming some measure of autonomy, note what you construe to be the clearest example of how you are moving the exchange beyond everything being “compelled by nature”. What on earth are you talking about? As this might be ilustrated in an actual context in which men and women make choices.
And how might Lady MacBeth have actually demonstrated this as it relates to peacegirl’s “agency” before, during and after she makes a choice?
The point isn’t undoing what has already been done, but of grappling with the extent to which human “agency” is able to participate autonomously in what is about to be done.
Is there a part of the human brain that allows for any measure of human “will” at all? In other words, at the instant a choice [any choice] is being made?
That is the question, right?
…going to be embedded in a clear demonstration someday that the human brain is capable of producing thoughts and feelings and behaviors derived from the actual option to choose something else instead.
Until then we take our own existential/subjective leaps to one set of assumptions or another.
Then it becomes a matter of whether any particular “I” is able to accept that sort of uncertainty.
And of whether or not nature compels them to inist that, no, objectively, it is either what we believe or what they believe.
Like many things freedom exists on a spectrum so it is wrong to think of everything as being equally free
The Universe might be made up of the same stuff but that stuff can manifest itself in very different ways
The neurons firing in my brain will not for example produce the same thoughts as the ones firing in yours
Not all phenomena are going to produce identical results just because they share the same basic structure