With some philosophers, it is all about what they think they can lasso, and then hogtie, and then pin to the ground…with language itself. Wisdom corralled scholastically [even pedantically] and then put on display here in one or another “general description” that, when situated out in the world of actual human interactions, quickly becomes entangled in all of the countless variables that ceaselessly come at us from all directions.
What particular truth, in what particular context? And how would we go about determining if this truth [like our individual perceptions of it] reflects our capacity to freely grasp it [and defend it] or is only subsumed [like everything else] in the laws of nature unfolding only as they ever do, can, must?
what i’m trying to tell ya is that even if determinism is false, the alternative, what we call ‘freewill’, isn’t ‘free’ either. and being that there is no third alternative here to consider, we have to concede some kind of determinism.
even if mind were free from physical causation, it’s contents, its subject, is structured and ordered in the same way physical things in the world are… so that this ordering reflects and gives rise to the mental qualia we call ‘thoughts’ (inaudible language).
for a mental event such as this to be truly free, it would have to arise without having as its subject matter an idea which is of something in the world. but if this is the case, the mental event has no content. it is about nothing. see how that works?
and what i’m saying is nothing original, either. i’m explaining in a different way what spinoza has already said… which was essentially the end of the debate.
don’t you dare insult yourself an satyr like that!
wuddint difficult for me. easy peasy, man. much easier than rocket science (thank goodness. i have trouble launching my own browser… much less a rocket)
that’s because as moralists their heads are filled with spooks. they aren’t only concerned with what is effective, advantageous, beneficial and useful, but also with what is ‘right’. this is a struggle i don’t contend with, fortunately, so i can’t relate to such difficulty.
With all of the causes, triggers, mechanisms, and random portals that open up everywhere on the battlefield, it must appear to be frenzied, seeing how far wide sweeping and overdriving the potentialities become. And language gives us the blueprint for laying down the battle plans for ideas, to take shape, skyrocket, reinvent, and radically redefine reality.
The truth is in the observable terrain that we live in, the so called empirical view of open endedness everywhere. But I dare say that looking too much for observation for the answers may neglect the powers of our introspection to find more of this Free Will. Spinoza thought that Reason is the rule, that by being determined into action by a knowledge of our virtues, the effects, and with Reason determining us into action rather than external stimuli, that we become more free, that we are a self willed cause, and closer to the Ultimate Free Will that is God’s Free Will.
I developed a little box before about these Spinozist “Virtues”. Here they are:
Okay, but what I always aim to do is to reconfigure intellectual contraptions of this sort into more specific descriptions of the actual choices that we make. Here it’s me typing these words and you reading them. How would your point above be applicable to this?
And [of course] in regard to human interactions in the is/ought world, even assuming some measure of free will, “I” [to me] is always constrained [shaped and molded] by the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
Or what I call “existential contraptions” in regard to particular aspects of particular sets of circumstances.
Nope. Cite an example of now “for all practical purposes” this is applicable to a choice/“choice” that you made today.
I’m sorry but in regard to the point I raised above, we all are. Just as when the Godfather’s opine about “birth, school, work, death” they are including all of us in turn. No getting around the things that “the human all too human condition” dump on all of us. If only from the cradle to the grave.
On the other hand, if my own thinking about determinism “here and now” comes closer to what is actually true, it’s not like they could ever have done otherwise.
Of course, in my view, this is where you are most comfortable: up in the clouds of abstraction.
Again: you are reading these words.
How would you reconfigure your own [and Spinoza’s] “general description” analysis above into an actual empirical demonstration that you are reading them of your own free will rather than being compelled by the laws of nature to think, feel, say and do only that which your brain [as matter] is in turn compelled to sustain from day to day.
oh i can’t do that. you’re shit out of luck in that respect. a brief metaphysical argument against the existence of freewill neither changes the experience of choice or the choice itself, and it sure as shit doesn’t provide any guidance or advice. that’s a subject for ethics, not metaphysics. all this does is state for the record that there is no freewill. philosophers do different things with that fact, but whatever they do, they still experience every choice as if it were free… and everything that comes with that, i.e., culpability, responsibility, what have you.
Matter transforms into energy, and we are evanescent, outstanding, beautiful creatures, of marvelous construction and design.
There’s something out there called “dark matter-energy”. We can feel its presence, but it can’t be directly penetrated. Who’s to say that there really isn’t a God consciousness system floating over our heads that can point and direct us to make miracles happen?
As logical and scientific you get about the forces moving us around, a small act of courage can move mountains.
You know, like when I was dreaming I could fly in Fairytopia.
Okay, that works for you. It doesn’t work for me. Human interactions unfolded on planet earth long before philosophers came along. And they are still unfolding apace long after. And while some philosophers might think it advisable to break the discipline down into such components as logic and epistemology and philology and ethics and metaphysics, etc., it doesn’t change the fact that one way or another everything gets intertwined in the actual choices that we make in interacting with others from day to day.
So, my kind of philosopher never forgets that. And, however clearly futile that is given the yawning gap between “I” and “all there is” , he or she at least makes the attempt to somehow intertwine the essential and the existential.
This thread merely offers speculations regarding whether or not these attempts themselves “are beyond our control”. Naturally as it were.
“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine
Still, we don’t really know for certain if what we know we know is not just another manifestation of nature unfolding only as it does…only as it can…only as it must.
The amoeba is just further down the line when – somehow! – mindless matter became living matter became self-conscious living matter became you and I.
How, exactly, on a biological, genetic, chemical and neurological level did this “layering of representations” tumble over into having actual options to act on this…freely?
And then part where all the memes come in.
Sure, those autonomous aliens could look down at us and describe this communication by noting the things that we choose to do. But then noting in turn that we only think that we are choosing freely to do what we do because nature/matter has evolved into a human brain able to create the psychological illusion of actual volition.
But: How would they go about communicating that to us?
Which merely demonstrates that very, very intelligent people grapple with this and come to differing conclusions. Conflicting wants and desires seem to suggest [if only “intuitively”] that “I” am there as more than just another mechanical component ever in sync with the laws of matter. But how is that then established as in fact true? Or that the establishing of this itself is just another manifestation of nature’s inevitable march into the future.
Dennett insists!
Well, I guess that settles it then. Unless, of course, other very, very smart folks insist that it is something else entirely.
Ok. Genotypes and evolutionary development may not or may foreshadow the layers of representations which may result in consciousness , including that of the self.
However , precognizant waste of life and post cognizant abortion of an overproduction of human beings resulting in overpopulation. to the degree that it endangers human life as a given, does shift the scientific rational into the teleological purpose, if any.
My point is, that because of.lack of stasis, it is not arguable.
But You forgot the Bunny Box!! Boxes are everywhere. Lords of wonderland pipe a well curled shape of Your Meganium. She bathes in a Yugioh pyramid swimming pool with a Marius Florin galactic super civilizations Politoed. Here’s what He says about “Free Will”:
“this atheist believes in free will”
James Kirk Wall from the ChicagoNow web page
All this reflects of course is the fact that our brain is able to come up with things like this in order to “prove” we have free will.
As though we can’t have a dream in which the same scenario unfolds. You walk out the door and go looking for a place to eat. Now, in the dream you think you are doing it freely. Or I certainly do in my dreams.
But, of course, that’s just a dream! In the waking world it’s all different. Why? Because we can think up scenarios like the one above and that proves it.
Quite the contrary insist those who believe in an omniscient God. He can predict what you’ll wind up eating.
Even Wall’s conviction that he chose to become an atheist is only based on the assumption that he might have freely opted instead to become a Christian.
And that you have thought yourself into believing that you are freely choosing what to pick from the menu is really as far as you can go by way of “demonstrating” it.
On and on folks like Hall go creating arguments out of words and then using the arguments themselves as the intellectual’s equivalent of the scientific method.
It is not to decide what to be atheist or Theist, but of the structural integrity between them in stasis, where one can sit back and decide, buy with the coming of attractions of centralized structural AI, the opportunity to distinguish will be anything based but on human recall.
Everything is on line including that of the philosophy and description of ‘mind’