This is typical of you in retort mode. I try to explain myself but that’s not the reaction you are looking for. Or are demanding. Instead, I have to agree with you that had I taken the “chrysippus-cylinder-agency-in-a-material-universe” argument seriously, I would have gotten, say, what you got out of it?
All the while still more convinced that my reaction was compelled by nature more than as a reflection of a “free will” I have no capacity to actually pin down.
It has nothing to do with “free will”. In a deterministic system, the entity (you, me, a black box, a cylinder) is exposed to a multitude of inputs. It ignores some and it processes some. Then it acts on the results of the processing.
Again, depending entirely on how someone has come to understand – given some measure of free will – the meaning of “ignoring” here. From my frame of mind, determinism subsumes all matter in a future that unfolds only as it ever could have. The multitude of inputs, whether pertaining to me, you, a black box or a cylinder, are all inherently, necessarily embodied in the laws of matter.
We act and we ignore differently from the box and the cylinder. How? In that we consciously “choose” to. But that is only a manifestation of matter having evolved into a human brain that is not yet fully understood by science. There may be an element of actual volition embedded in the chemical and neurological interactions that unfold in our brain matter. And, sure, it may be traced back to one or another God; or to one or another understanding of living matter itself that makes it profoundly – qualitatively – different from the mindless matter in the black box and the cylinder.
Okay, you tell us what that is. Demonstrate it to us such that there can be no doubt whatsoever that human beings are able to freely opt for one set of behaviors rather than another.
Instead we get this:
For example, when a person leaves work, gets on a bus, gets off the bus and walks home … he sees, hears, smells and feels trillions of things. He might overhear someone say that “the seawater was very warm today” which may prompt him to decide to go to the beach the following day. Thus his actions change as a result of a random input.
Saying that he has to have “free will” in order to decide to go to the beach or that he has no choice but to go to the beach, completely ignores the process that we witness happening in us and in other people.
In other words, we are simply to assume that the seqjuence of choices made by the man in this example, like the sequence of choices made by you to bring it to our attention, “proves” that how you understand all of this is more rational than the way I have come to understand it.
But: How does this demonstrate that what appears to you here to be random inputs really are random? Why, instead, can it not be argued that this is but an illusion of randomness. That all of these inputs are intertwined wholly in sync with the laws of matter.
We could be watching a movie of a man leaving work, getting on a bus, going off the bus, walking home, etc… These acts aren’t random if they are entirely scripted. Right? Well, why can’t it be argumed that nature itself is the director here. Only we have no idea how that came to be because we have no kidea how to understand nature going back to existence itself.
Let alone, teleologically, figuring out if there is any meaning or purpose “behind” what nature and its laws entail. Instead, that’s where your God comes in. Assuming of course that you came to understand God as you do freely, of your own volition, and in the manner in which you understand the meaning of that.
Really, what did the Stoics know about the human brain back then…compared to what neuroscientists today have learned about it?
By that logic, I guess it’s pointless to read anything written prior to 1989 when the internet was “invented”. Prior to that, people were a knuckle-dragging morons who didn’t know or understand anything.
Logic? It’s just common sense that the Stoic’s understanding of a functioning human brain was considerbly less than our understanding today.
Note to others:
What on earth is he trying to suggest here about the internet? There is what was known about computer technology before 1989 and after.
On the other hand, image taking a trip in the Way-Back Machine and explaining the internet to the Stoics. Assuming some measure of human autonomy and/or volition and/or free will of course.
Actually you can understand human psychology and behavior without knowing much about the brain. Just like you can live, learn and prosper without knowing much about your body. Or drive a car without knowing how it works beyond understanding the cause and effect of the controls.
If you actually do believe that one can understand human psychology without first having a comprehensive understanding of the human brain – compelled or not – I have no illusions about ever changing your mind.
To answer your question … The Stoics probably know very little about the brain but they knew a lot about being human.
Right, like what they knew about being human was enough for them to demonstrate definitively that what they knew was not wholly compelled by the laws of nature. Like these laws were different for them back then.