Determinism

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.

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

What this denotes of course is how tricky it can be for philosophers in grappling with human autonomy. You choose words to assess this but you don’t have any substantive capacity to demonstrate that you could have chosen other words instead. You choose to take the free will pill only because somehow the laws of matter were able to reconfigure the human brain into creating a pill that reconfigures the laws of matter themselves into actual volition.

Then the part where we move beyond these thought experiments into an accumulation of actual experiential data we can use to pin down a definitive conclusion.

We always seem to get stumped here because sooner or later the assumptions we make about the assumptions we make themselves can only be anchored to the definition and the meaning we give to words that we are unable to demonstrate we opted for of our own free will. We profess our own subjective accounts here in a world of words that we can never actually attach to a comprehensive empirical understanding of how the brain functions as matter apart from how mindless matter functions given the laws of matter.

And then there are those hard determinists who argue that the words above are inherently, necessarily part of the only possible reality there could ever have been. Such that what he thinks he means by them and what we think he thinks he means by them are inherently, necessarily subsumed in that.

But: whatever is “behind” that “universal plan” of his is necessarily beyond being encompassed by any of us. At least on this thread.

So far.

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

As usual, a part of me must acknowledge that, given some measure of free will on my part here, I am not understanding his point.

He must be assuming that he himself has some measure of free will in order to note this here and now given the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, a free will pill has not yet been invented.

Instead, he seems to be presuming that we do not have autonomy now but that somehow in the future nature will compel the human species to invent a free will pill. And some [more privileged] will be compelled by nature to obtain this pill giving them the free will that the underprivileged will not have access to?

So we will live in a world there some can afford to acquire free will giving them an advantage over those not able to afford it?

I’m having difficulty grasping how for all practical purposes this plays itself out in particular contexts.

Okay, John buys and sell stocks after acquiring free will pill. Jane and thousands more like her buy and sell stocks the old fashioned way: as nature compels them. Meanwhile those throughout the economy who manufacture, market, sell, and/or purchase the commodities that encompass the economy are as well, either in possession of the free will pill or are not.

Same for the is/ought world. Some take the free will pill and argue of their own volition that buying and selling stocks embodies moral or immoral behavior. Meanwhile the majority of folks unable to afford free will argue only as they are compelled to given that their brains are still wholly in sync with the laws of matter.

A little help here please. How in more detail might the free will folks go about reconfiguring the old adage, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” when capitalism intertwines the autonomous and the compelled in this brave new world.

who said that… your homeboy satyr? sounds like something he’d say. well if he didn’t say that, he’s said the same thing in so many other words. i’ve been tellin this dude since what, 2010, that there is no ‘determiner’ in a causal system, no single individual who possesses some agency called ‘freewill’ that acts as a cause, and certainly no transcendent ‘god’ that determines what’s going to happen in the system. this is all to say there is no intent for, or reason why, anything happens. it just happens because it has to.

but you can see here how these freewillists are so deluded about causation that they can’t imagine it being even possible without some directing agency. if a determinist denies them their freewill, he must then be granting the determining power to some ‘god’. see what i mean? but it’s the freewillist who insists that there must be a ‘determiner’, not the determinist.

the fact is, the delusion of the illest of the freewillist runs so deep he begins to see himself in those he argues with… and presto, becomes his own strawman.

I’d like to see this argument used in a drunk-driver manslaughter case.

“It’s not my fault because there’s no single individual who possesses some agency called free-will that acts as a cause!”

In fact, we may as well start releasing all prisons of all criminals.

the concealed premise here is that in order to justify ‘punishment’, it has to be believed that the punished had freewill. this rests on the lack of honesty and power on the punisher’s part. we are still in the stage of human history where forces that deter, repress and control find it easier to do so through lying… which is understandable… because the ‘truth’ isn’t a priority here. order is the priority, and the means to keeping this reveals a particular idiosyncrasy about society. what it has to do to keep order.

and there’s an ongoing dual-history to the usefulness of this freewill lie. on one hand, it makes managing social order and criminal justice much more efficient; make an offender ‘feel guilty’ and half the work is already done. he’ll do anything you say to clear his conscience. on the other hand, along with that continued belief in freewill, attention is always paid more to the individual rather than the environment from which he came. and this distraction compliments western democratic capitalism; the environments that produce criminals are, by and large, direct results of capitalism’s effects. so to begin placing more restriction on, and demonstrating more control of, those conditions, would put a damper on the freedom of capitalism and what it indirectly causes.

This is where it all gets particularly problematic. For some, determinism encompasses everything and anything that we had ever thought, felt, said and done in the past, everything and anything that we think, feel, say and do now in the present and everything and anything that we will ever think, feel say or do in the future.

Nothing is excluded. Not the drunk-driver manslaughter case, not the Holocaust. Not even Trumpworld.

And it certainly doesn’t exclude me typing these words or you reading them.

Think about it. In a wholly determined universe [as some understand it], the fact that promethean has been telling satyr since 2010 what he thinks about all of this and the fact that he might take satisfaction that satyr is still unable to grasp it and the fact that satyr might react to this over at KT tomorrow — none of it is exempt from the laws of matter. It is all only as it must be.

But: We have no way [that I am aware of] of determining and then demonstrating beyond all doubt if it is in fact only as it must be.

People are not “free from” their causes though, and can cause without intent or even awareness.

You can deny that you’re self-responsible. That’s not justification for avoiding blame/justice/prosecution.

Law is justified by society as a group. It doesn’t even matter if you were right/correct/rational or had some greater philosophical point. It’s not going to stop the mob coming after you. So, philosophers, thinkers, intellectuals, moral leaders, long ago agreed that it’s best to have some form of social judgment that’s fair to some small degree, hence Western (Common) Law, Judges, Juries, Rights, and Due Process, etc.