I know you think I’m a dickhead but I swear I’m not trying to hassle you, dude.
Is that what I think? I find it hard to dislike my doppleganger.
When you abstract ‘Will’ beyond biology and organic life, then I would call it “Force”, “Energy”, “Law”, etc. You’re going to the chemical and Elemental level. Rocks and stones, seem to have their own ‘Nature’. Rocks are heavy and they fall down. Rocks are massive and dense, Earth. Water is less heavy, fluid, and in movement. Air is “freer” still, moving all directions and the phenomenon of wind. Fire is “freest” insofar that it is gaseous, hot, moving all directions, chaotically.
Life is a different phenomenon, and ‘freer’ than non-living matter. A bacteria cell is ‘freer’ than a rock, water, air, fire. A tree sapling is freer than that. A fish is freer than that. An insect is freer than that. A bird is freer than that. A mammal is freer than that. Consider it a degree of motion. Motion proves the obvious. By using a standard of motion, to ‘decide’ or ‘determine’ what is free and what is, all life is freer than all non-life. Organic matter is ‘freer’ than non-organic. Because life has degrees of Agency.
Outside of Life, there is No Will. Life is the barrier of Will. Will is, essentially, Desire, and an extension of the survival instinct. It is common to all life.
Based on these simplifications, my positions do not change. You, and other Determinists can claim that “all life and all things are Determined/Caused”, but that doesn’t really mean much at first. Again, it’s an epistemological argument. How do you know what is Caused and what is not, what is Determined and what is not? Silhouette has to balk and ignore, dodge this question at all costs. Because if admits that he doesn’t know, then he cannot then claim that “All is Determined”.
You can step back much further. “All physical objects, with mass, are aspects of Causality, and therefore Determined”. But this is a weak argument, and it is not coherent with Science. Because Science revolves around the Known, not the Unknown. Science revolves around Evidence, and what can be Proved, and what can be Repeated. If you cannot repeat a Phenomena, if it is “one-time-only”, if it is in the depth of space, then it’s not “Science”. It’s theory, and faith, no different than Religion. Proper science revolves around methods of determination. If you cannot prove something, then it is not Scientific.
If a proposition is not Falsifiable, then it is not Science. This is why “All Causality” is an Appeal to Authority fallacy, when you try to throw Science into the mix.
Basing Determinism and Cause on what is Known, is fine. I’d call that “Soft Determinism”. And you have made a good case for it, on sporadic occasions. All things appear to have shared and common causes; all things appear to follow “Natural Laws”, patterns, flows. All matter, for example, is effected by Gravity. And Gravity is caused by the massiveness of planets and other forces (motion x mass).
But insofar as such physical forces are unknown and unaccounted for, they are obviously Undetermined.
If forces are Undetermined, then so too are some, or many, or most of the aspects of life, are also Undetermined.
Is life more complex than non-organic matter? Clearly, it is. A rock cannot move of its own accord. But it can be moved.
Agency is the Paradigm shift. Once you add Agency into the mix, the Will is Undetermined.
Therefore it is Free.
So all agency acts or representations and propositional evaluations of freedom and determination can only apply to organic materiel and systems.
The application of freedom or determination are equally uncertain, except from the point of arguability.
One would expect the whole difference partial to humam understanding ,- therefore the freedom of strict causality in inorganic sub stance- are equally falacious. Or, am I misunderstanding You? Probably! Tell me why or is it close to an approximation.
dude, you’re still equivocating ‘freewill’ with physical movement, ability and complexity. none of these quantifiable values change the quality of what the ‘will’ would be if it existed. you merely have an increase in the expression of the ‘will’… not a change in the quality or nature of the ‘will’. this means that a living organism does not possess a different kind of ‘will’ which governs it’s behavior, than the kind of ‘will’ that governs the behavior of rocks and trees and shit. of course, a living organism has more freedom of movement, but this fact in no way means some other kind of ‘will’ is responsible for it, or that it is ‘free’.
and ‘desire’ is hardly a point of origination of this new kind of ‘will’ you think exists, for the same kind of forces responsible for the movement of those rocks and shit are responsible for the physiological processes and states in your body that produce such desire. i’m not talking about the intentionality of the thinking and anticipating and planning and foresight involved in the commission of a desired behavior, either. these things are the last stages in a series of physical events in your body that you have no control over, much less any knowledge of - except for correlating mental events with physical events as a neurologist might do when observing regional activity in the brain.
i don’t know, but based on the evidence i’m making the reasonable inference. we’re at a stalemate, if you haven’t noticed. only i’ve got more pieces on the board than you do, so i scored more points. you’ve got a queen, bishop and five pawns left. i’ve still got a queen, both rooks and a knight.
hell will freeze over before you convince me that anything is random or chaotic in nature. random in that you can’t perceive any pattern or order, or chaotic in that you can’t predict any future state… but these are problems of observation, not nature. verily, i say ‘indeterminacy’ simply can’t exist.
but this isn’t what your arguing… or rather you’re arguing it accidentally by implying there is no causation. in fact, you need causation in order to present an argument for ‘freewill’ because freewill is not a theory of indeterminism. your problem, which has already been pointed out to you by sil and myself weeks ago, is that you are relying on a kind of substance dualism in order to define your ‘agency’ here, because you insist that what causes joe to go to the neil young concert is something different than what causes an earthquake. 'course i don’t know why joe would want to go to a neil young concert. after the dissolution of crosby, stills, nash and young (or who i like to call ‘crosby stole the hash and neil sang’), neil young became an incredible bore.
do you wish to have such extravagant pride as to maintain the peasant simplicity of such nonsense, you raper of logic? no, because you’re better than that, urwrong. cease and desist with such tomfoolery at once and take your seat at the table with the real philosophers.
You do know that most of the definitions of the will are regarding expressing right? That the will is expressing? Thought/thinking being expressed by choice.
Not sure which definition you’re using or thinking to use, but Will is exactly that of which you say choice or expression has no effect of demonstrating or showing it is free in use. When will literally stands for expressing and choice of expression.
Yes! And how delightful that you should mention this. A modal verb turned into an entity by philosophers… and then all the nonsense follows. The whole thing is a gynormous category mistake sans Gilbert ryle (bless his positivist heart).
So if one has more available choices or options out of will than another, what’s that? No freedom still? There’s a higher and a lower, which end of the spectrum are you on? Be wary, your thoughts and choice, determine what happens next with and to your will.
If will is expression or choice of experience/expression and if everything has a basic will and is alive by instinctual experiencing, then what is a free will? The ability to act past instinct, control over and for individuality.
We are the entity that makes language, the entity that uses language, the entity that makes choices that language derives out of for explanatory purposes.
Alexa, explain to artimas and urwrong what a category mistake is so they’ll stop thinking of ‘will’ as an ontological noun and/or faculty/agency…
Yes and very much in line with the Natural Selection of naturally selected choices. And that, that is differentially entrusted to create larger and more encompassing powers to will, delimited, de-integrates prior assemblies of self valuation.
But, … Wars and breakdowns as a result do occur, even mathematically, as witnessed by someone who did not invent the idea but simulated it with Mathemagical means, & then?
The last few lines may merely lackluster escape routs from the pressures of imminance, strictly the middle negotiating peace dunno, most cases should abandon entering there…
So rebellion led by you know: who? Is as overwhelming as the pretty picture of will’s equiminity of choosing the most demonstrative. But I am surprised, Artimas, to day the least about existence in general, and peculiarly here and NOW.
Sorry Alexa pretend my invisibility is real.
Please!
The will isn’t a noun, an individual body is, a person.
The will is the functioning of that (noun)body with/by expression(verb) into the physical world around it.
Which is a noun using a verb which this verb is an aspect to it’s being a complex living noun.
We can go language all day if you want. Alexa doesn’t have to describe to me a categorical error because I am not using it as a categorical error. Our language is evolving.
Movement is the basic quantification for freedom.
But only organic life, Biology, has “Will”. Non-living things, mass, matter, earth, water, air, fire, none of these have “Will”. As Promethean already admitted to himself, to say otherwise is an Anthropomorphic Fallacy, which I agree with. Only Life has Will. And because of this, only Life has Agency.
You can posit abstractly that “only life is free” insofar that “only life has will and agency”, but I don’t necessarily think or agree with that. Freedom is a characteristic of Nature. The heavier/denser/massive an object is, the less ‘free’ it is conceived to be.
Thus Freedom is metaphysical. “Will” is not. Will is biological, hence this thread…
That’s not true. Organisms that can move of their own accord, have Agency, and therefore Choice. You can step left, right, forward, back. You can do a back flip. None of these actions are ‘choices’ or possible to non-living matter. A rock can never ‘choose’ to go left, right, forward, back. It is completely un-free, by comparison. Neither does water, or air, or fire “Choose” where to go. Only in life does ‘Choice’ appear.
It seems to me you’re conflating the organic quality of life, Will, with the elemental forces of existence. You can claim that a rock and a human are subject to “all natural and universal laws, of causality”, but that doesn’t help your position here. Humans still have Agency, and Choice, thus exponentially more ‘freedom’ than any non-living thing or object.
That’s the whole point though, that these conversations have been heading… Silhouette couldn’t endure this far.
You can claim that humans or life in general is on some pre-determined ‘path’ or Fate. But it’s not based on Science. Your belief in Pre-Determined Fate is no different than a belief in Free-Will. This is why I explicitly repeat myself, many times now, that the next step is to figure-out, understand, or “determine” all of the ingredients involved that lead one individual to believe this way, and another individual to believe that way. What is the qualification for these beliefs?
For the answer, I point to Master-Slave Dialectics. Some people are freer than others. Freedom is rarer. Most people are happy and content to be Un-free/Determined/Controlled by others. And furthermore, such Controls are representations of the Will-To-Power. Power directly corresponds to “Freedom”. Thus the “Freeing of the Will” can be compared to an “Empowering of the Will”.
Except in 20 moves, my pawn will clear a path and become a Queen… perhaps you can’t see it yet.
There are no inherent causes in existence. You seemed to have slipped in the past. Haven’t you admitted before, or would now, there is no “inherent purpose” to life???
If you agree there is no “inherent purpose” to life then you must also admit that life is as Un-determined as anything and everything else.
I don’t believe in a priori truths. Every “truth” is a Choice, and you always, always put up a risk with every Choice. There is no absolute truth. And so, Existence is Un-determined.
There is no Universal Law. There is no ‘force’ that applies to all matter. So you can interpret that as “many different categories of matter” if you like.
The Periodic Table of Elements essentially disproves Spinoza’s Monadology, and has disproved Ontological arguments, for centuries now.
I’m very specific when I use ‘Will’ as a verb and as a noun. Obviously, “Will” is a verb first, and a noun last.
What is meant by “Will” as a Noun, as a thing, as a “Soul/Spirit/Self”, is a a long and complex set of moral, ethical, and political values by which every specific individual human consider, evaluates, and then determines the choices they make throughout life.
Thus if you know somebody’s Will, then you understand their moral-values, and can begin to predict the more complex choices they make throughout life. Some people choose to lie. Some people choose to cheat. Some people choose to steal. Some people choose this vice over that one. Some people choose this virtue over that one. Etc.
All that combined, added together, summed-up, is what embodies their “Will”.
However, the greatest simplification of “Will” is that, Will = Desire/Want/Need.
Is a “Want”, a Noun??? Is it an adjective? Is it a description of what a person is, or who a person is???
There is no Universal Law. There is no ‘force’ that applies to all matter. So you can interpret that as “many different categories of matter” if you like.
What about this?
This means that two objects will reach the ground at the same time if they are dropped simultaneously from the same height. … When air resistance plays a role, the shape of the object becomes important. In air, a feather and a ball do not fall at the same rate.
Course with my uncertainty., principle factored in , I may be seen pernicious, or ok I may be wrong.
So, will is someones valuing. The total of their valuing structure.
So if you want to know someones will, the best thing to do is to map their values.
To Meno,
Yup
To Jakob,
Yup
Conscious valuing/values i’d say. This is where semantics gets tricky as well, one can have values but the values not being aligned with them deep down, for example. A child being brought up a certain way to have certain values, if they don’t align with that individual, which a lot of times they don’t, then those values become an entrapment of their identity. We call that byproduct of indoctrination through environment… which we all have to get out of to understand ourselves as individuals, the disassociation of what is not necessary to the identity one wishes to portray themself as.
So it is very important to be fully conscious of oneself and ones values and attribution.