Biological Will

I have to disagree twice, then. Not only do values have nothing to do with freewill, but value statements are non-cognitive and incapable of expressing truths. Attitudes, preferences, tastes, opinions, yes, … but these are what non-cognitivists call ‘non-declarative speech acts’. Such statements are equivalent to and amount to something like exclamations. A couple examples:

‘Killing is wrong’ = ‘boo you suck, you murderer!’

'Loving your neighbor is good = ‘hurray you are so awesome!’

(See the ‘hurray/boo theory’ or what’s formally called ‘emotivism’)

It’s the availability, intent, universal truths and ignorance.

Yes. Thankfully when one awakens, the reality is so overwhelmingly beautiful that one tends to forgive oneself for not seeing it before. The magnificence of truth cleans the soul.

sure they’re choices. are you saying it’s logically impossible for a soldier to decide that deserting his post is what he should do, or a supermodel to decide she wants to eat a big 'ol slice of blueberry cheesecake?

but again, ‘choices’ are acts of freewill. instead, the same forces that influence the commission of an act also influence the formation of the intentional structures that correspond to the act. the soldier might suddenly begin thinking that the war is wrong, and bail. the supermodel might suddenly begin thinking that being a fatty is not so bad, and order that cheesecake. and notice that neither of them ever begin or initiate their changing of mind. the ‘thought’ comes when it wants… not when they want it. one does not decide to change their mind. or rather, one does not think ‘okay now i am going to begin reconsidering my decision’. a freewill act of changing one’s mind would involve an infinite regress; in order to prevent my decision from being formally determined (caused) by something other than my own agency, i’d have to choose to choose to choose to choose to choose, etc.

The “Original Cause” of any choice is never fully known by anybody, therefore not a matter of infinite-regress, and so it is also never fully known whether a choice is freely-willed or fully-determined.

Again, this is the Epistemological argument/fallacy of Determinism. If you don’t know, then the choice is, at least, a matter of belief. The soldier believes it is a choice, or it is not a choice. The supermodel believes it is a choice, or is not a choice. So then, logically, what are the bases for these beliefs? What (Causes) “lead” one to believe in free-will or determinism. And furthermore, what is the difference between a “freely-made” choice versus a “determined-choice”?

For the examples I gave, answers can be given. The soldier, by definition of “Being a soldier” or moreover “Being a GOOD soldier”, does not have a choice to desert. Just like “Being a GOOD supermodel”, does not have a choice to dessert.

By definition of the label, the identity, you MUST do certain things. And this would be the basis of your “Determinism”.

alright man. i see a rock rolling down a hill, or a branch blowing in the wind, or a grasshopper jump off a flower. i see things moving in space. then i see my hand raise up. i see something else moving in space. now what is it about my hand such that what makes it move is something different than what makes the other three things move? let’s say the movement of the hand comes after mental event ‘choice to move hand’.

what is that mental event like, and what comes before it? is it like one of the fundamental forces that governs the movement of the other three things… or is it a special force? and is there some other event that comes before it that is not mental event ‘choice to choose’? or, if there is an event like this that causes the choice, who or what is making that choice?

you have to either assert that everything in the universe ‘chooses’ to move (which makes you something like a panpsychist), or, things that ‘choose’ are not the essential causes of the actions and movements that follow a choice. if you don’t assert this, your only other option is some variety of cartesian dualism.

you know a neurologist can hook you up to a machine and with the push of a button, not only make you laugh, but make you think you chose to laugh. well i don’t know about that second part but the first part is real shit. there’s an old black and white video of the experiment. chick just starts laughing as soon as he throws the switch. and there is a natural switch (cause) for every event that happens in your brain… even the event that consists of you thinking you’re choosing to do something.

i’m almost beginning to share biggy’s concern that maybe a lot of this is just an exercise in irony? shirley you can’t still believe there is freewill. or maybe you’re still confusing freedom, free speech, free sample packs, right of the free press, free estimates, freeways, and buy one get one free, with freewill, i dunno.

We can backup a few more steps.

The source of “believing” in choice, or that you can choose any course-of-action, is Control. People believe they are in-control of “themselves”. Arguments can be made for-or-against. And those arguments also apply to any other organism, or possibly, all existence and non-living matter. So, why do (some) people believe they are “in-control of themselves”? Is this not moral agency? Is this not self-identity, your self-consciousness?

If you don’t know when you are, or are not, in-control of yourself, then “choice” is a moot-point. As the Determinist would say, Choice is an “illusion”. (but compared to what?) A Hard-Determinist must say that moral agency, self-control, is not even possible. There is no means by-which a person could ever be “in-control” of his/her own actions. Because: Control of what by Whom?

I’ll go all the way back here… what is “Self-Identity”, except, as defined by the set of choices (or actions) that any person or individual has taken throughout life?

You can call all actions “Choices” insofar as a person is also “willing to take responsibility for them”. This is the sophistication and complex part. Animals don’t need to “take responsibility” for themselves. Animals live in Nature. And if an animal fucks-up, makes a mistake, makes a “wrong choice”, then it is usually injured or killed (by a predator). So, in-Nature, Choice is do-or-die, and the very factor of “survival of the fittest” and “evolution”. Evolution is only “right choices”, leading to survival and increased reproduction.

In Humanity, “Choice” is abstracted to a higher level, and doesn’t necessarily represent immediate-survival, but rather projected-survival. In other words, let’s say you could make superior choices for the next 20 years of your life. So you choose the “right choices, course-of-action”, and such choices lead to a superior state or elevation of life, by your own definition.

Humans have the ability to project “Choices” far into the future. If you do this, then that happens. If that happens, then you do this. Etc etc etc. Choices are means of “selecting” a future.

A Projection of the Will.

vocaroo.com/i/s1kHoiIqJk6M

Observe the subtle difference between ‘event causation’ and ‘agent causation’. I made an allusion to this difference in my last post about the rocks and grasshoppers. You’ll see how to argue for agent causation is to claim that a person is something more than an event, and that it is not enough to allocate causation to events alone. This is a mystery at best, and nonsense at worst, as pete will explain at length.

… and believe me, his concession that he doesn’t understand the position of agent causation is only a polite gesture. I can promise you that if he can’t make any sense of it, you can’t either.

pray tell, distinguished sir, how the ‘decision’ of a raccoon to attempt to walk a fence-line without losing his balance, thereby avoiding injury, is at a ‘lower level’ than the decision of a bob to take that job in dallas which pays considerably more than his current job, thereby securing his financial future. for if we are to speak only arbitrarily of ‘projected-survival’, we must concede that the raccoon’s decision is qualitatively no different than the bob’s decision, as both are toward the end of survival.

it is not without surprise and disappointment that, as i observe much of your reasoning, i must hastily conclude that such a person, who gives passage to such clumsy and tedious reasoning in even the simplest of conjectures, should be able to begin the difficult task of examining the freewill/determinism argument. i should not expect a shopkeeper to be competent in matters of military affairs any sooner than i should expect a novice thinker to take up the profession of the philosopher. i would therefore extend my efforts to advise you in obtaining an x-box 360 or a hobby such as surfing, provided that you are in close enough proximity to a beach which would serve to facilitate such an endeavor.

sincerely yours,

promethean75

It’s not my fault that you’re too lazy to read Advanced Freedom or that you can’t understand the basics.

The decision-making process of any organism is directly a product of its Intelligence/IQ/sophistication/evolution. The more evolved an organism is, the more sophisticated its ‘Choice’ is. Even if Choice were “only-survival-based”, which gets fuzzy with Altruism, Selflessness, and Sacrifice, that still doesn’t mean that “all is determined” or “choice is pre-determined”, because you still can’t correct the Epistemological fallacy. As far as anybody knows, a choice seems “Determined” or not. You, or Silhouette, never investigate the basis or source of this “Determinism”.

I can’t remember if I admitted as such in the Advanced Freedom thread or not, but evolution of specie leads to abstractions and projections of decision-making/Choice. Survival too, when almost guaranteed in a converted/adapted Environment (Human Domestication, Civilization, Feminization), corresponds to these abstractions and projections (of Choice). For example, a human can imagine, conceptualize, and test a “Choice” that no other animal can. A human uses more intellect, logic, science, technology, rigor, patience, wisdom, etc. when applied to critical choices. A human Chooses to build a rocket-ship and fly it into space, to the Moon or Mars, or beyond…

Now if you want to boil it all down to a raccoon walking on a wire, then that’s your prerogative, and quite simply, embarrassing.

Animals that are not self-conscious, also have a low level and capacity for ‘Choice’. A Raccoon cannot build a rocket-ship and fly it into space. It is obviously less free than Mankind.

Now if you need your hand-held with this… I genuinely feel bad for your philosophical prowess.

You can’t reason with someone with devout tunnel vision focused on their confirmation bias, ironically a prisoner of his own device in his safe space echo chamber - I wasted the better part of a year trying.

Literally everything he says has already been covered, 10s of times over, by yourself if not by me. But not answering him in the way he wants to be answered is no answer to him, a refusal to answer even.

The only way he can justify this to himself is to conclude that we don’t understand how some things have a larger quantity of realistic options open to them than others, even though you quoted me summing up this and the entire thread right at the start - both in full acknowledgement of this obvious fact. Isn’t it amazing how the thread didn’t move an inch from this opening prediction, despite your laudible efforts? And so hilarious how he speaks of such things as “advanced” freedom… The Motte and Bailey continues, still invisible to him.

I don’t want to speak for you, as I can’t recall your position on this, but Determinism is a description - a model of whatever reality appears to be doing. Even if nobody believed in it, it would still describe and predict reality with astounding fidelity, even if it could be confirmed that there was absolutely nothing essential to reality that was deterministic, and even if Determinism turned out to be necessarily “wrong” somehow in spite of this. I have no emotional need for Determinism to be by far the most successful model of reality, zero religious devotion to this contemporary fact, I have nothing invested in the way that choices are entirely susceptible to it - I’m sure you’re the same, and yet the guy can’t see beyond his own approach to “truth”, which seems to be that you can simply “choose” to believe whatever you want to be true as though all versions were equally applicable and whichever you choose is nothing more than a reflection of the quantity and quality of your will - even including whether or not your choices are free from whatever it is that Determinism maps so profoundly well, even when the only objective grounds for knowledge that we have available to us prove consistently that it is not free. It’s like he thinks that’s the fault of the objective methods of determining truth, because half of it is judging the present and future on the past, and conveniently forgetting that the other half is successfully testing the future based on the present and past - or at least complaining about the problem of induction, of which we have both been repeatedly and openly cognizant - as though this removes the validity of objective grounds for knowledge, in spite of the overwhelming success and everyday application that the resulting deterministic modelling has. There’s a name for this: the Nirvana Fallacy.

Quite a few years ago now it occurred to me after a lifetime commitment to stringent skepticism, that at some point you just have to admit, no matter how nihilistic and/or post-modern that it can seem to be reasonable to be, whether you like Determinism or not, there’s something about reality that sticks to its modelling and predictions like glue.

Since I take responsibility to choose out of appeaewmt contextual qualification, I may assure myself of the kind of glue, which is more genetic then behavioral, in particular, extend Peace Girls theme as tied into some interface, in-between.

If so, and is exempted from existential gestures and indications of meaning, then I would

There are two main presumptions of Determinism here that are grossly fallacious, that Silhouette if-not-Promethean are both guilty of:

  1. Determinism is an Epistemological theses, and bases its presumptions on what can be known–however all is not known, therefore much is undetermined.
  2. Determinism cannot predict the action of organisms or animals, or even physical objects, to a sufficient degree–therefore determinism is relative, not universal.

Since Silhouette cannot address these arguments, and Promethean can only do so insufficiently, the resolution is not over, unless you two want to give up.

I understand if you give up. Philosophy is not for everybody. :smiley:

Urwrong: you’re fired

Meno: I want you to practice saying things people can understand. Here are a few exercises for you.

The brown cat was on the mat.
The leaves are very colorful in autumn.
I like pumpkin pie with whipped cream.

Sil: if there is any debate worth having here, it would be between hard-determinism and indeterminism… but freewill is entirely out of the question, yes.

youtube.com/watch?v=ZNZNwGVP8LU

Free-will is a product of human intellect and creativity.

Not Out.

All in.

  1. Obviously Determinism is an Epistemological thesis, except things “not as yet fully determined” does not equate to “undeterminable”. Already covered, many times over. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence: Argument From Ignorance fallacy.
  2. Obviously Determinism is relative - already covered many many times, except it can predict the action of organisms/animals “sufficiently” - just not “necessarily”: Modal Fallacy.

That grave you keep digging yourself can never be deep enough, keep going.

Like I said:

It’s fucking groundhog day with this goldfish.

Entirely agreed. My position all along as in my former debate with Ecmandu - I’m also intrigued by the idea I planted in my own head about the possibility of Determinism being replaced by something superior, like Determinism entirely did to Free Will.

I think if anywhere, such a thing would be at least born from Indeterminacy, to become who knows what. Are you familiar with the Chaos Theory concept of “order emerging from chaos” - examples I gave in said former debate were the “Lorentz attractor” and Jupiter’s “Great Red Spot”? I’m intrigued by the possibility of reality as fractal (non-integer dimensional), which interestingly is relative to perception - in the absence of absolute existence - as all improvements in knowledge frameworks are turning out to be. Nothing in the world is ever truly Euclidean.

Back to Square One? Not my fault…it’s yours.

Free-Will is falsifiable; Determinism is not. The core fallacy of Determinism is Post Hoc. “It must have always been despite what humanity can possibly know.” If you can’t figure this out by now, who is the goldfish???

If there is a lack of certainty in terms of what is “Determined” then it’s not Determined, and especially not Pre-Determined. Let’s analyze “Determinism”. What does it mean to be “Determined” except by Whom? Determined, according to what or who? Silhouette will say “Determined by Physics/Science”. This is another fallacy (Appeal to Authority). Scientists do not “Determine” reality. Scientists try-to “Determine” the rules, laws, and patterns of Reality. This is not to say that Science is Pre-Determined, because it’s not.

Science relies on experiment, falsifiability, records, and replication of results. If a test cannot be replicated then it is not Scientific per-se.

Can existential “Determinism” be replicated? No it cannot. Grand Theories of the universe are only that and nothing more, A Grand Theory. Could it be wrong? Yes, and it almost certainly is wrong. So to Silhouette,

You’re wrong a thousand more times.

3

I get what You are saying , but between the in and out there are more than burgers. There exist all kinds of categorical assumptions nothing that pits anyone in or out absolutely. Logically, yes. Bit the logic of language depletes phenomenally reduced items , objects, drastically at times, whereas it can also blow them out of proportion.

One may need a clever geometrician which form or modeling fits best on application.

Application may determine both usage and preception; and at times it is gross presumptive ideas , benefiting the ideal state of being , which not only should determine it, but there may not be any choice for those who stick to the language as it is applied.

The word did not originate familiarly or in families , but through real wars , the through slow evolutionary traits of approximating an advance or a pull back.

And animals used this meta logic , and it has since a few hundred years, reappeared as a recurrent idea.

Where the line or border is drawn, has left in it’s wake a gravitational pressure of loss of symbolic content.

Thanks guys , but topical interpretations ofnthe phenomenological current use of those kinds of typical currencies currencies, involve very stretched out logical notions, where aesthetics preempt the autonomously determined , prior state of understanding.

I will understand Your passing this poi t up, since it feels absurd on it’s immediate face.
u
The realistic imminance of the unquantified present, has this power to disqualify any other approach.

Sorry , the above comment only reiterates conventipnalllt types of arguments.

It is not that it is wrong, but it’s meaning has to change corresponding to where the entry and exit position are noted.

Erasing this perfectly well positioned observation, may enhance or detract from the thesis or the anti thesis which looms between will and determination.

I ommitted ‘free’ , because freedom , well, is just another word.

Therefore determinism and indeterminism are like being and nothingness, one exists and the other is defined as the negative of the other.

That separate discussion also still rages on.