Determinism

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

This is where determinism can get downright spooky. Someone hurts you. But you have thought yourself into believing that they could never have not hurt you. And, furthermore, whether or not you hurt them back back is also entirely compelled by nature.

In other words…

Yeah, that is basically what it comes down to until we are able to actually ascertain for certain 1] whether we do possess some measure of free will and 2] what for all practical purposes that actually means.

We go back and forth here with our own assessments. But we have no capacity to go beyond the assessments themselves and link them definitively to philosophy, psychology and neuroscience.

How is this not the case?

No, some will insist, given the manner in which the human brain is the embodiment of matter that has evolved here on planet Earth, it is no less entirely in sync with the laws of matter.

So, what one need understand, they suggest, is that what you think you understand about determinism and free will is just another manifestation of that. Just as would be the choices that revolve around the behaviors of John and Mary.

There is no “normally” given the manner in which some construe “hard determinism”. There is only what must be. That some deem it to be normal and others not normal is only as they were ever going to deem it.

Regarding an autonomous human mind there would seem to be some measure of “dualism” involved or everything gets reduced down to the immutable laws of matter. We just don’t know what that means going all the way back to a complete understanding of existence itself.

Clearly, if you are dealing with free will as a concept then the understanding of it revolves around the definition and the meaning that you give to the words that encompass it as a concept.

But how is that then entertwined in a complete and thorough understanding of human behaviors themselves?

With more concepts?

I am trying to understand what you’re trying to say and in order to do that I need to understand the manner in which you define words that you use.

What you seem to be suggesting is that whether the universe is deterministic or not is not something that can be decided empirically. I strongly disagree. In fact, I think that’s the only way to answer the question. The universe either obeys strictly deterministic laws or it does not. And the only way to verify this is to make as many observations as possible and then generalize from that.

Indeed, you can predict pretty much anything, even random events, just by throwing a dice. The sole requirement is luck. However, the mechanism of prediction that humans use is not random, so it cannot be used to predict random events. It’s safe to say that you misunderstood what I said. When I said “the ability to predict with 100% certainty” I meant “the ability to predict with 100% certainty using the mechanism of prediction employed by humans”. The human mechanism of prediction, largely a black box, is based on the premise that the future mimics the past. It can only perform well in relatively stable environments.

Well, if Descartes says that free-will transcends material causes, in the sense that it is not affected by them, then that would mean that he’s speaking of “the ability to make decisions independently from what happened in the material realm in the past”. Pretty similar to my definition of free-will, isn’t it?

What I am trying to say is that for some particularly hard determinists, neither you nor I have it within our capacity to demonstrate that what we are trying to say includes the option of choosing to say something else instead.

I’m writing this and you’re reading this only because whatever set into motion the laws of matter has over billions of years evolved into brain matter that is now able to create the psychological illusion in each of us of having an actual option to write or read something else instead.

I can only acknowledge that my understanding of “I” here is wrong. And that one day I will experience something new or meet someone new and come into contact with a new idea that changes my mind.

But that still entails an obligation on my part to demonstrate to others that they are obligated in turn to think like I do because I have in fact demonstrated that some measure of free will is in sync with the brain properly understood.

An understanding that encompasses human biology, human psychology, human philosophy and human science.

Free will encompassed in a TOE that overlaps our lives for all practical purposes.

In other words, I am far more interested in approaching this from the other direction. Define your words and then take the definitions themselves out into the world that we actually live in.

Depending on what they mean by “the option of choosing to say something else instead”, we may or may not be in agreement with each other. And that’s why definitions matter. The first step is to understand what the other is saying, and in order to do so, one has to understand the way they define the words they are using. Only once it is established that we are in fact disagreeing with each other does it make sense to consider demonstrating to them that my position is correct and theirs wrong. We have yet to establish whether we are disagreeing at all.

“Hard determinists” are incompatibilists, aren’t they, and that means they think that free-will and determinism are incompatible with each other, which suggests to me that they define free-will as “the ability to make decisions independently from what happened in the past”.

Personally, I don’t care whether such an ability really exists or not. What’s interesting to me is that so many people think that moral responsibility requires such a thing. A person, they say, must possess “the ability to make decisions independently from what happened in the past” in order to be morally responsible for their actions. Sounds like a criminal trying to evade punishment by playing word-games. “Look, I didn’t do it, the Laws of Nature made me do it.”

On the contrary, some might argue, depending on whether what they/we mean by anything at all is within their/our reach as matter in possession of some measure of free will. In other words, everything in the known universe may well be within the capacity of nature to compel.

Our agreeing or not agreeing about it is merely another aspect/manifestation of a wholly determined universe.

But how on earth would any of us actually go about demonstrating it one way or the other?

It seems reasonable to me that you and I will both go to the grave taking our assumptions [and definitions] with us. Then it comes down to whether or not nature [or God] provides for an afterlife in which to continue the debate.

All this works fine when what we are defining is encompassed in the either/or world. Unfortunately, we have no way [that I am aware of] to discern definitively whether we do or do not have free will. Instead sets of assumptions are bundled into “general description” arguments like yours, the truth of which are entirely predicated on the definition given to words that you are [to the best of my knowledge] unable to determine [scientifically, philosophically or otherwise] were yours to freely choose.

Okay, but the hardest of the determinists would seem to embed everything – everything – in the universe [including the human brain] in immutable laws of matter that compel all material, phenomenal interactions. Determinists, free will advocates and compatibilists are entirely interchangeable in an existence where nature ever and always prevails only in sync with its laws. We just have no capacity here and now to explain what that means. Let alone to demonstrate why it either is or is not true.

Again, merely making the assumption that you were free to opt to care about something else instead. That “what’s interesting” to you is entirely within your capacity to choose. Why? Because given the manner in which you define the words in your assumptions that makes it so.

If, in a wholly determined universe as some understand it, the criminal was never able to freely choose anything that he thought, felt, said or did from the cradle to the grave because the laws of nature embodied in his brain compelled him to choose only what was ever able to have been chosen, nothing is independent of nature. Not in the past, not in the present, not in the future.

What the laws of nature as some understand them suggest is that the criminal was no less compelled in turn to argue that “I didn’t do it, the Laws of Nature made me do it.”

Nothing is excluded here unless somehow someone is able to explain how brain matter is able to transcend the laws of matter themselves. And to actually demonstrate why all rational men and women are obligated to believe this. Then going all the way back to how human autonomy fits seamlessly into the very ontological understanding of existence itself.

i dunno if descartes would put it that way, and i’m not sure if both you and he would mean the same thing with that statement. descartes called people ‘free substances’, and he meant that ontologically in that people (i should say ‘mind’) are an altogether different kind of ‘stuff’ than things of/in the material world. without getting into a huge post which will be forgotten in two days, i can tell you that he’s confused in what he means by ‘mind’, which is likely a conclusion he arrived at after getting his ontology wrong. if spinoza wrote before descartes, descartes might have avoided these mistakes. but on to your statement.

you have to be exactly clear with what you mean by ‘independently’, here. this can mean many things; not happening as material causes/effects occur, or succeeding material causes/effects but not influenced by them and happening regardless, or not at all succeeding material causes/effects and happening regardless.

and you’d have to be explicit about what you mean by ‘decisions’, too. what is a decision? a state of affairs, an event (mental or physical… and are these fundamentally different?), some form of qualia, a process of description of some state of affairs and/or events? i hate to be pedantic dude but this is what these discussions involve if they are to be done right. frankly i don’t wanna do em and i’ll probably drop out soon (you’re forewarned), but for the moment you have my attention.

the laws of nature did make him do it (because there is no freewill), and yet this doesn’t mean he won’t be held responsible. but what do we mean by ‘responsible’? expected to comply with the consequences is all we can mean here. therefore accountability/culpability, while packed with moral connotations, is nothing more than a description of that state of compliance.

the role of ‘blame’ and ‘guilt’ is like a form of operant conditioning. it has no other effect than that of provoking a feeling or remorse, which has as its purpose to modify future behavior. what it isn’t is a quality assigned to a ‘self’ in the body of the criminal that ‘freely chose’ to commit his crime. there simply isn’t anything to blame, unless you wish to charge nature in its entirety. and imagine doing that. like how could you fit nature in the defendant box? do you realize how big the courtroom would have to be?

what we are experiencing post-enlightenment period is a breakdown in the old superstitions, superstitions that were largely responsible for the fable of freewill and objective morality. back in the philosophical days the intellectuals actually believe freewill was real. today, the intellectuals know better and only the mentally challenged still believe in it. anyway this slow process of breakdown is causing a schism in the social and legal fabric of the western world… forcing more attention to be paid to the environment rather than the individual. it’s no longer as easy to say with honest conviction ‘he knew it was wrong, your honor, and he had the freewill to chose not to do it.’ a decent defender who was up on his game could destroy that statement (i know i could) and throw the whole courtroom into a nervous fervor. and that’s where it really matters… whether or not there is freewill… or what freewill exactly means if we all agree to say we have it and proceed accordingly.

i tell ya what i love about the freewill debate. its delicate uneasiness… a kind of philosophical danger-zone that’s as intimidating as it is frightening. i’ve found that the more one fights tooth and nail for the theory of freewill, the more unnerved they are about the consequences of it being an illusion. and as an anarcho-nihilist, i quite enjoy this spectacle. i should add that it never occurred to me - or stopped occurring to me after my transition into stirnerism, rather - that i don’t rely the least bit on the truth or falsity of freewill in my discourse with men. i take/do what i want and ‘pray that they do the same! (S)’. i pay no attention to any ‘could have done otherwise’ and judge men only according to their degree of tedium or charm. ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are not in my vocabulary.

The Free Will Pill
Taylor A. Dunn asks, if free will were a drug, should you take it?
From Philosophy Now magazine

Here we go again. The part I must be missing. It would seem ultimately pointless to speculate about how we would react to something like this because we could only ever react as we must.

The news would only be construed by particular individuals as good or bad if it was determined that we do in fact possess some measure of free will. In other words, if you want to be convinced that your own generally exhilarating life was of your own making, it’s good news. But if you want to be convinced that your own generally miserable life is beyond your control, it’s bad news.

Right?

Same thing. If we live in a wholly determined universe, developing new ways to alter brain chemistry and designing a “free will pill” could only unfold solely in accordance with the laws of matter.

Then we would be confronted with the mind-boggling reality of nature’s laws having evolved into actual free-will. Which is basically what many free will advocates today suggest has in fact already happened.

Sans God in other words.

And, no, I have no way of demonstrating that this is not in fact the case. But where is the demonstration that it is the case. Where is the definitive proof regarding how the brain [through the evolution of life on Earth] has accomplished this? Again, from my frame of mind, we just don’t know.

Bizarre, exactly. But then the existence of existence itself can be seen as bizarre. Just as the evolution of mindless matter into mindful matter into human consciousness into “I” can be equally beyond being pinned down once and for all.

The crucial fact here still being that until science gets considerably closer to making this thought experiment a reality, you and I are left with taking a “leap of faith” to one set of assumptions or another.

But isn’t there a simpler way then waiting for science to catch up?
Would it be more sensible to rely on the expressions of ex-cons, who seek to break the law again again , to feel freer , more at home in prison then out of it?

That may ‘proove’ a sensible objectivity to which there may not be a constant need to jump into?

Is not sense and sensibility connected to objectives which are in modal difference, consciously or not?

Is this not a modal difference more approable then trying to put one’s feet into a shoe of another?

Such another may merely regarded as a type of person which can not generally suppose. particular people in specific situations?

The Free Will Pill
Taylor A. Dunn asks, if free will were a drug, should you take it?
From Philosophy Now magazine

Bingo!

Right?

Here however [over and over again] I always come back to my dream reality. I no less want any number of things in my dreams. And I no less either get them or do not get them. And “in the moment” [fast asleep in my recliner] the reality – a very, very vivid reality – seems no less real to me then the reality I am experiencing now. Either that or my dreams are very different from the dreams of others.

So, if the brain is creating one reality why not both?

Only here I subsume the Big Bang itself in whatever the explanation is for Existence itself. Scientists are no less stumped in resolving how and why, if the Big Bang exploded into existence out of nothing at all, this can actually happen. And then the part where an infinite number of additional universes are intertwined in an infinite number of additional Big Bangs. And then the part about God.

Nothing.

The Free Will Pill
Taylor A. Dunn asks, if free will were a drug, should you take it?
From Philosophy Now magazine

On the other hand, anyone familiar with the advancement of scientific knowledger down through the ages knows in turn there is still an enormous gap between what is known, what is still be known and all that there actually is to be known.

And how is this any less the case in regard to QM?

Here I ever and always come back to this:

[i]It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe.[/i]

This from NASA.

How on Earth can he possibly assert something like this to be true as anything other than that which “here and now” he merely believes to be true in his head?

Right, like he grasps ontologically the relationship between cause and effect going all the way back to how this is to be understood in regard to the existence of existence itself.

In other words, even in the seemingly either/or world it is more important to convince yourself that you know what is true than to actually demonstrate how it can only be true. And then from that another gigantic leap to the assumption that the human brain itself must possess at least some measure of “uncaused” freedom.

Well, my gripe of course is that until we do have a comprehensive understanding of existence itself, who is to say what either does or does not constitute a coherent argument? In other words as long as the conclusion itself is supported only by the assumptions that are made regarding that 5% of the universe comprised of “normal matter”.

Indeed, imagine explaining the laws of matter going all the way back to the Big Bang…culminating in, among other things, this:

It must be God, right?

Iambiguous,

I’ve told you many times that what’s true for all possible beings, transcends subjectivity and is necessarily objective.

1+1=2: true for all possible beings

Nobody wants their consent violated!! True for all possible beings.

Now, I keep encountering these people who think they’re real badasses, and that ANYONE WHO HAS THEIR CONSENT VIOLATED UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE is just a pansy not deserving of life , “grow up!” They say.

To which I reply, “so if your mother is brutally tortured, raped and murdered, while you are strapped to a chair watching it all, your consent wouldn’t be violated ??”

To which I say, “it may not be your mother, but to some mother and child, this is happening all around the world every day”

Yes. My consent is violated if anyone has their consent violated !!

People try to sound so badass, like urwrong, who says these are just weak people unfit for survival …

Urwrong is giving permission to have this done to him, and that’s a VERY SICK FUCK!!!

Nobody wants their consent violated, and that includes (except urwrong) more than me, myself and I …

That’s objectively true.

Urwrong demands his mother be raped …

I hope you’re not the same.

What does this have to do with freewill?

We discover proofs.

They transcend all possible being.

In a “subjectivist stance” non freewill (what everyone believes or states is true) we’d have no possible will.

I have a will so I know this isn’t true

There has to be something for a will to be for

both aggression and compassion are evolved traits which in some relevant way, served a function of survival. ‘consent violation’, therefore, is a necessary consequence of this, and produced some kind of advantage for some group of people in some kind of context.

the task humanity is faced with now in the modern world is how to express that vitalizing aggressive drive that is so important in strengthening and improving us - something proven over our entire course of history - without causing others to suffer. what is slowly dissolving is that atavistic concept of ‘us and them’; part of our material evolution is the integration of all people into a system beneficial to everyone at nobody else’s cost, and the first step into this transition is the recognition of the superfluous nature of the present system that so gratuitously ‘violates consent’ even at the most general level; economically. the first step in resolving - in ‘out-evolving’ - this earlier human stage of evolution we are stuck at on purpose (as it serves the advantage of the elite) and beginning the project of designing a world in which our aggression can be expressed with minimal ‘consent violation’, is to get rid of this notion of ‘us and them’. such a concept is embarrassingly primitive and crude. we are no longer playing cowboys and indians or nazis and jews, and it’s time to grow up.

what we need is an outlet for our aggressive instincts, a common enemy or obstacle we can unite against and delight in our aggressive natures. this is what i was alluding to when i said months ago ‘the consent violation to end all consent violations’. once this omega of all consent violations takes place - the complete overthrowing of the capitalist system - a magnificent shift will occur in the ways in which we express that healthy and aggressive element of our nature. it will be channeled into much more productive forces that involve a very minimum of consent violation at such a trivial level (what we experience today in the petty quarrels of the class war) and focused on more futuristic ideals. the extraordinary challenge set before us to colonize space, to develop technologies that decrease the requirement of manual labor, and the development of the arts/sciences. these are the obstacles to be conquered… the thing which we direct our aggressive energies at.

like i said before, the planet i come from (my ship wrecked here years ago… long story) makes your miserable rock look like a bad sitcom. it is difficult for us to even feel sorry for such a joke of a world. you people have been cavemen for 200,000 years, and still are. how could one from the vulcan worlds do anything but laugh at such a travesty?

Consent violation is destroying our food, our water, our atmosphere and our environment.

There has NEVER been a selective advantage for it.

You’re trying to apologize for consent violation as a necessary evil, or even a good …

Did you read the message I sent to iambiguous and urwrong !?!?

The message you replied to !?!?!?!

The Free Will Pill
Taylor A. Dunn asks, if free will were a drug, should you take it?
From Philosophy Now magazine

Some no doubt will read this and be torn 50/50 as to whether or not they agree with it. Or torn 50/50 as to whether or not they were free to make this as opposed to that assessment at all.

Now, if neuroscience is one day able to definitively determine that we do not have any capacity to choose freely [in any context] then that would seem to suggest that it is also able to grasp the ontological nature of existence itself. Going back to why there is an existence rather than no existence at all.

Then going all the way back to a definitive account of existence in relationship to God or to No God.

Right?

How on earth would we encompass “for all practical purposes” what it means not to have a “satisfying degree of freedom over our choices”?

Let’s try to imagine how this might work given our interactions with others from day to day. And, in the either/or world, excluding the part about dasein and conflicting goods in the is/ought world. After all, even if you reach the 50/50 mark in opting freely for one or another behavior who is to say which behavior [morally] is the right one?

So, here, what would constitute a free choice? What would constitute a determined choice?

What here “in principle” would constitute developing a free will pill? As opposed to in fact developing one?

How could we not be dissatisfied unless we were able to pin everything down as either this or that?

biggs, relax man. take five with brubeck and harris. you’re gonna give yourself an aneurysm messing with these other guys.