Determinism

I’m supersonic.

Well, if we know you’re velocity you’re location can’t be determined, re:Heisenberg.

obsrvr524

Determinism is the philosophical belief that all events are determined completely by previously existing causes.

If we take out the words ALL and COMPLETELY then I can certainly say yes as I personally see that there are events which were caused by events which went before, though it may take awhile for them to catch up.
For instance, and I may be wrong here, would the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor as it did if we had not bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which in my book was also imfamous).

Aside from that, Will or free will may not be perfect but we do have the power to change history and to change our personal history. We can develop more self-awareness, we can change or let go of certain of our embedded patterns from childhood through self-determination. There does seem to be a lot of randomness in the world which some might argue is also pre-determined but I suppose it all depends on how one sees things.
Is it possible that if determinism IS our belief, then we have already re-created the world as such, for those
who do?

I am agnostic but if there is possibly some creator god does this mean that we could not have evolved into creatures of free will? Are we already pre-determined creatures? Looking at the world the way it is, it hardly seems to me that we can be so pre-determined based on how we rise up and struggle and fight at certain events and try to change them.

Of course, at the same time, I can also see how easily influenced we can become by situations and circumstances but this does not mean that we do not have the power to change things albeit some things may be quite difficult to change - but still we go at it.

So, we are both pre-determined in ways and self-determined also…a harmony of opposites.

So the answer to my question was “no”.

I think the rule is that if everything isn’t determined then it isn’t determinism.

That answered a lot of potential questions.

Thanks for your input.

Do you mean retro-causation?

Like would Japan not have bombed Pearl Harbor if the US wouldn’t have been going to Atom bomb Hiroshima and Nagosaki? The future event causing the past one?

“this atheist believes in free will”
James Kirk Wall from the ChicagoNow web page

No, according to what the hard determinists claim to believe given the gap between this claim and a demonstrable proof that is verifiably true and not able to be falsified.

Similarly regarding the arguments that free-will advocates claim. Claiming free-will is not the same thing as providing demonstrable proof that it exists.

Instead, most of these discussions and debates take place in a world of words.

In my view, the part encompassing factors that influence our behaviors is embodfied existentially in dasein. It then becomes a matter of 1] assuming some measure of autonomy and 2] recognizing “I” as an existential contraption confronted with conflicting goods and political economy in the is/ought world.

See what I mean? Has he demonstrated empirically, experimentally that this is so? Such that a prediction might be made as to which of those 10,000 decisions is the one made unimpeded?

As for, “hard determinism is dead, and every instance of the 100 word scenario has a different human civilization”, I’ll need that explained a bit further.

Yes, assuming that we are able to establish that she chose B instead of A in a manner that was not compelled by nature.

On the other hand, as always, I’m left with the feeling that [in an autonomous world of whatever measure] I am simply not understanding the point itself.

You’re the objectivist. So there is only one explanation that will suffice. The one that coincides with your own, uh, contempt for me here?

And to demonstrate that I am worthy of this contempt, you insist that you just know that I did not think through the argument above. How do you know this? Because had I actually read the argument carefully and thought it through, I would not have reacted as I did.

But my point is that until it is able to be demonstrated that this very exchange is not entirely in sync with the laws of nature, all we are left with are the assumptions we make about determinism. And, indeed, the assumption that you make is that I do have the capacity to understand your position if only I would exercise my free will and make an actual effort to understand it.

Instead, that you merely believe this to be the case “here and now” becomes all the proof that you and your ilk need.

Thus…

Again, I have the actual option not to reduce all human decisions down to being “compelled by nature”, but my “lame and ineffective” thinking is the reason that I don’t.

Really, compelled or not, I get that part.

This is simply preposterous to me. Until we come to understand definitively how mindless matter evolved into living matter evolved into conscious matter evolved into self-conscious matter grappling to understand the relationsdhip between “outside the black box” “the black box itself” and “inside the black box”, we are always going to be dealing with all of the “unknown unknowns” embedded in questions this big.

And to argue that the gap between the Stoics understanding of the human brain and that which neuroscience understands about it today isn’t of fundamental importance is, well, preposterous.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the Stoics being “idiots”, and everything to do with the explosion of scientific knowledge we have at our disposal that they did not.

On the other hand, I might be lamely and ineffectually misunderstanding your point again.

As though what you need to understand about building a cathedral is on par with what you would need to know to resolve once and for all whether human beings have freedom or volition or autonomy or will to power or whatever you want to call it.

Just for the record, my own argument on this thread revolves less around what any particular individual might believe about determinism, and more around what he or she is able to actually demonstrate is in fact true about it.

“Here and now”, based on the assumption that the human brain is matter going back to whatever explains the existence of matter itself, it seem reasonable [to me] to suppose that the laws of matter are no less applicable to it.

At least until 1] the existence of God is demonstrated or 2] there is news flashed around the globe that science has finally pinned down a complete understanding of the relationship between the brain, the mind, and “I”.

Or, sure, until a philosopher has concocted an argument in which, theoretically, the demonstration revolves entirely around a world of words.

Thanks for your support.

I’m not going to talk to him any more.

It’s a waste of time because I’m not getting anything out of it and he’s not getting anything out of it.

Who needs the acrimony?

Well, if you mean me, you have crumpled in exasperation like this before. On other threads. Vowing never to respond to me again. But then you can’t sustain this frame of mind and are back at it.

So, why not just save face and admit that, sure, maybe it’s been nature all the time compelling you to…expose me? You know, like KT is so adept at.

Look, KT and I more or less agreed to pull back from each other. He has no respect for my intelligence and I have no respect for that. We simply ignore each other insofar as we don’t respond to each other’s posts. And, so far, it’s working great.

Let’s do the same, okay?

In other words, really mean it this time.

Just to clarify, when I asked this:

I meant to be asking merely for a guesstimate number of how many, not individual arguments.

I do not believe that things are intrinsically determined, no.

Just to help you out a little… Fixed Cross, Jakob, and Barbarian Horde are all the same person. And I have DM’d Maia your post, in case she hasn’t read it or even logged on here lately.

To have any sort of will, you ALWAYS need constraints. This is kinda like James S Saints affectance.

Now, we’ve been through this on these boards before:

If you know every reason why you know what you know, and ALL of those reasons are external (absolute determinism), then, you know no reason why “you” exist, as 100% of everything (absolute determinism) because EVERYTHING is EXTERNAL to YOU!!! If all of those reasons are INTERNAL (absolute creationism), then you have nothing outside of yourself with which to distinguish yourself from. Both states mean that you cannot exist.

The left over is what I call, “the remainder from the limit” - this remainder is “not freewill”, it is self will.

Free will assumes absurd things like me being able to smoke a cigarette without lungs!!

Self will assumes that we make executive decisions compatabilistically with the laws of nature, not that one is more powerful than the other.

It seems as we were set up to become embroiled until the skeptics including Descartes played that well rehearsed play of the evil genius , then the set ups were set down, and now they are just sets, sets within which ultimately all game players will again reattain (retain)lfreedom of choice.

That entails an undeniable fallacy, if not blatant contradiction.

Hi, Mags sent me this. What are you asking? If I’m to give you an answer from my own life and experiences I need to know exactly what the question is.

I could be added to the list probably. But I don’t not believe determinism exists, I just think freewill comes of it and that things only grow more free inevitably, determinism has determined itself free by its own mechanism/existence of functioning.

So freewill and determinism kinda both exist like two sides of a single plane that’s looping around itself. Holy shit that’s like a mobius strip, dude.

You just gave me a breakthrough, art. Both are possible in euclidean space because it’s impossible for there to be a surface normal vector at every point!

We’re going to co-publish a paper bro, so get your shit together quick. We’re about to make history.

It wasn’t me, it was another poster…

I assume you were on the list he posted of people who had posted on the topic.

I think that she was referring to my question.

I can see that I would make a lousy pollster.

Maia, if you could just state your favorite number between 0 and 30, inclusive, you will give the closest thing to an answer so far.

I checked my suspicions about what “determinism” means. The American Heritage dictionary (the first one to come up) agrees that if a person believes that even one event anywhere throughout the entire universe was not caused by other events, having absolutely no casual associations, then that person does not believe in determinism. That person would be a “non-determinist”.

American Heritage dictionary says (if I can make this quote thing work right):

In addition, non-determinists don’t believe in science either because one of the most, if not the very most fundamental principle in the physical sciences is that energy cannot be created or destroyed. And so far I have read up to the point where James Saint explains that for anything to exist, it must have affect upon something. I can’t argue with that and what that means is that if something suddenly, without being caused, affects something else, energy has been created from nowhere.

So the conservation of energy rule requires that any and every event must stem only from other events in order to get its energy to have any affect and thus to exist.

I really had no intention of entering this debate or discussion. Honestly, I just wanted to get a quick idea of about how many of the current posters are non-determinists - what kind of audience has been here at this board. I’m learning as I go.

At this point, due to the responses to my question, it appears that from 90 to 100% of the posters here are non-determinists and thus don’t actually believe in science either.

The average internet board sock-puppet population used to be around 15% so if he is the only one out of 30 (about 7%) this board is better than average. But then perhaps over the last decade the internet average has dropped.