There’s only really one main offender, and oh boy he really doesn’t know much of anything - not least that he is committing fallacy after fallacy, not only the Motte and Bailey. There’s also his proof by assertion, intentionality fallacy, false dilemma fallacy, ecology fallacy - it’s probably easier to list the fallacies he doesn’t routinely commit. And it’s so adorable when he tries to call fallacies in those who disagree with him and he fucks it up so hard… You know that image of the child with the saucepan on his head hitting it with a spoon and shaking a tamborine? I just can’t shake it on the rare occasion I actually waste my time reading the same reiterated post of his - and it sounds like he’s really trying his best, bless him. But as you’ll have noticed, in the same way that the US army allegedly didn’t accept those with an IQ under 85 because the costs didn’t justify the results in training recruits, after extensive testing on my part I concluded that he is unable to learn and I no longer speak with him even though he’s so desperate for my attention. I figure he’s free (in his incomplete sense) to tantrum away and project his frustrations on others, he’s doing no harm so I just let him be to soothe himself through repetition. Other Free Will advocates are fine in comparison, it just seems like there’s a lack of familiarity with the scientific method from what I can tell.
But yes, you’re absolutely right there’s a general feel of simply being more comfortable with the belief that they have Free Will. On the subject of control, I made the ironic observation that - given misguided accusations of Determinists being “slaves” and Free Will advocates able to be “masters”, that the reins of causation bring to mind being controlled in the slave and they bring to mind the ability to take control to the master… so basically it’s an inverted analogy at best - but again there’s only really one poster special enough to be trying that one. Causation gives control - like you say it just eliminates any centre to it. The self is still just as present as it is for the Free Will advocate: a decision making agent that can be creative and individual, that can take charge and get things done, just not out of nowhere, or circularly - as if the self makes the self into itself somehow. Influences influence - the self included - it’s not intellectually difficult, but the emotional component gets in the way. You just need to realise that you lose no control, you’re just part of the chain of control, with some at the top and others at the bottom, each just as determinable to change their lot as the other dependent on conditions both internal and external. I think there’s a fear that something is lost when you think past Free Will, when in fact nothing is.
I like the Nietzschean comment of yours, about moral judgment - I seem to remember the terminology was something like the religious instinct? A form of revenge taken by the downtrodden, that the winners aren’t ultimately the winners, because they will be morally judged for their oppressing actions and reap the punishment that the downtrodden are unable to exact on them during their time on earth. He wrote Beyond Good and Evil to get past the nonsense of Free Will and other religious concepts that are not worldly - in the first chapter he specifically denounces Free Will.
- How about this one from Part 18 of Chapter 1: “…the hundred times refuted theory of ‘free will’…”.
- Or from Part 21: “…get beyond the peasant simplicity of this celebrated concept ‘free will’ and banish it from one’s mind”.
- He also speaks of the causa sui that I’ve been referring to as this ex nihilo “self” - at the beginning of that same section: “The causa sui is the best self-contradiction hitherto imagined, a kind of logical rape and unnaturalness: but mankind’s extravagent pride has manged to get itself deeply and fightfully entangled with precisely this piece of nonsense…” (and it goes on!) SAVAGE
Interestingly he actually goes on to corroborate Experientialism with respect to “cause and effect” being a mythology, as I describe in terms of Discrete Experience being a model of Continuous Experience.
There is no evil for Determinism, at worst there’s people who turn out to do terrible things due to influences that are totally understandable and preventable, but it’s the attitudes of Free Will and Individualism that just leave people to turn out bad instead of looking into solutions about how to determine such things to not happen. It’s a fact that the Free Will attitude does a great deal of needless harm.