You can eliminate the gap you speak of (the gap between what one thinks is true and what is really true) purely by coincidence. No thinking required. Just throw a dice and if you’re lucky enough you may discover what is true. That’s why Plato said that knowledge is justified true belief not merely true belief.
The idea that there has always been a gap between what we think and what is and that it will always be there is simply unbelievable; in the general sense, of course.
This just mimics our discussion of Communism. There are interpretations of various quality regarding that too. And the manner in which objectivists of you ilk differentiate meritorious assessments from mere blather, is to insist that there are two kinds of people in the world:
1] one of us [who grasp what Communism really is]
2] one of them [who don’t]
No, that is what the objectivists do. I’m the one suggesting that interpretations in the is/ought world are derived existentially such that a definitive interpretation does not appear able to be pinned down.
You know, assuming any of us at all have any capacity at all to do anything at all of our own free will.
That encompasses your rendition of a sophisticated probe?!
In other words, bitching about me again.
I don’t throw away the tools of philosophy. I suggest only that, in a universe in which we do have some measure of free will, they are of limited use value and exchange value in regard to assessing particular human behaviors as [morally] either necessarily good or bad.
The stereotype of "objectivist. Again.
It remains black and white so long as you don’t bring out the shades of grey. And you don’t. You don’t go into any detail.
To explain why discussions with you don’t go anywhere, one has to say what it is that you are doing.
Then you are not using them.
They have value to other people.
Again, someone either believes that their own assessment of Communism or stories from the Bible reflects the most rational frame of mind, or they don’t. That’s just a fact.
Instead…
If noting one’s assessment of Communism as the embodiment of “I” being an existential contraption rooted in the manner in which I construe dasein in my signature threads isn’t bursting at the seams with the potential for ambiguity, confusion and uncertainty…what argument is?
And, in my view, one will never go into enough detail with objectivists of you ilk until they share your own details.
In other words, if I really were using them, I would think like you do. I get that part, but: when are you going to get it too?
Then we are back to the components of my own moral philosophy in assessing those values.
So it’s a “universal truth”. Good to know.
Words and sentences have the potential for ambiguity, confusion and uncertainty.
You’re just stating a trivial observation.
Where is the meat?
You don’t go into any detail. 
I don’t see you using them at all. And I’m not the only one who has noticed that.
You assessed it and they have no or limited value to you. Others have assessed it and they do have value to them.
It can end there. There is no reason for you to be here insisting that they have no or limited value to anyone.
Two things.
1] Around and around we go. I suggest that, until either one of us comes upon something new in the other’s argument, we just move on. Bottom line: If I appear to you as obtuse as you appear to me, we are entirely wasting each other’s time.
2] this is a thread devoted to grappling with determinism. Of which our own exchange of late [compelled or not] barely touches on.
Practically everyone has stopped talking to you and now you are relegated to posting quotes from books and articles and reacting to them.
If that’s what you want, then add me to the list.
Nope, nothing new here.
I’m glad that’s over. 
The idea that life’s determined is, at least at the highest levels of mind power, a choice of God. If God needs to create a certain, envisioned future, he can pour out all of his power to make the future that way. But, if all of his goals are achieved, then God may go for unnatural, warped futures, ones that bend the laws, or make miracles in random forms possible. And then, with many folks of a lesser soul radiance, the devil may completely take over, and make most events in the world bad.
There are philosophical systems aimed however at the liberation of the will that, if followed to their ultimate destiny, can shatter the crystal glass, and give us free will potions and elixirs at every corner.
Well, it could be if you’d let it. Over and again you reach that point with me when you swear off ever responding again. I’m just not worth it. But now, on another thread, you back off again. As long as I commit to bullshit in my posts, you are going to call me on it.
Of course what makes it bullshit is that doesn’t overlap precisely with your own.
I lose more and more respect for your intelligence with each passing post. And I can only now assume that you are but one more objectivist I have managed to reduce down to the level of the retort. To huffing and puffing about me.
Look, I’m sorry, but I grow weary of shooting fish in a barrel. And since the days of yahoo groups and ephilosopher and ponderer’s guild are long gone on the internet, I can only move on to those I at least feel challenged by.
And, of late, you ain’t one of them. 
Not that this isn’t but one more existential contraption in turn.
And how do we know this? Because you believe it. And how do you go about demonstrating to us that this God does in fact exists? Well, you don’t.
Let alone offer us a substantive argument regarding how God and determinism function for all practical purposes in the lives that we live.
You take your spiritual leap of faith to a frame of mind that comforts and consoles you. This thread merely speculates on whether or not nature compelled you to do so. Thus bringing into focus the relationship between God, determinism, nature, the human brain, the human mind and “I”.
Still, there’s what you believe about this relationship “in your head”. And, if we do have some measure of autonomy, the sophistication of your argument in regard to that which is of most interest to me: human interactions given the existential interaction of identity, value judgments and political power.
Care to go there? If so, and we do have some measure of free will, you choose the context.
Free Will Is An Illusion, But Freedom Isn’t
Ching-Hung Woo says freedom is compatible with choices being determined.
Right, another so-called example of arguing that a drug addict has no free will, but is still the embodiment of freedom. Even though in viewing his addiction as a part of himself, this reflects the fact that in a wholly determined universe he lacked the free will not to.
Then we’re back to the aliens in that part of the universe where free will prevails, observing a drug addict compelled by nature to tell the court his addiction is not a part of the “real me” and the jury in turn being compelled by the laws of matter to either believe that this is true or not. Finally, the judge being compelled by her brain matter to pronounce the only sentence she is able to if the man is found as he was ever able to be found. In this case guilty.
And if his addiction was caused by a prescribed medication from his doctor, what here is not destined to unfold given the assumptions that the hard-determinist are themselves compelled to believe?
We have to envision a system where choices can be selected that were invisible to us immediately but, with penetration, can explode into view. If we go by the physical and experimental, the testable, then we are in bondage to laws, like gravity, or brains over souls, and so forth. True liberation can only be found in the elusive, in the unknown regions. We can’t be afraid of the darkness, even if that’s where our leap of faith leads. Because 1 thing is clear if we don;t conquer the darkness - we will fail.
Free Will Is An Illusion, But Freedom Isn’t
Ching-Hung Woo says freedom is compatible with choices being determined.
Wiggle room? What possible wiggle room could there be in a world where these very real Frenchmen and Styron creating the fictional character Sophie were never able to not choose what nature compelled them to choose.
What does it mean to absolve anyone of anything if everything that anyone ever does is “set in stone” by the immutable laws of matter?
Ever and always: What are the compatibilists saying here about “freedom” in a determined universe that I keep missing? What am I but compelled to presume that I am compelled to keep missing.
How were Nazis and the French Resistance, Nazis and the very real Sophies at the camps not interchangeable in a universe where the Big Bang is said to have set into motion these laws of matter? Again, unless in a way not fully understood, the matter we call the human brain is somehow the exception. Re God or re the very nature of matter itself in a No God world.
Right, like we are any more free to adopt the absence of coercion than the absence of determinism. We may think “in our head” that we have gotten out of the conflict, but that is only another manifestation of the psychological illusion of freedom. At least insofar as I have come [compelled or otherwise] to construe hard determinism.
Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”
No, it’s not a main trend, some insist, but the only possible trend. In fact “trend” itself is a misnomer. It implies one path chosen over another in a world where all paths are derived from and lead to the same explanation.
You know, if that is the only explanation.
On the other hand, given some degree of human autonomy, the path I am on will almost certainly never trend. After all, it’s the path suggesting that what many deem to be their own “free choice” in regard to moral and political value judgments, is really more a profoundly situated existential “self” rooted in dasein.
Which is more perturbing, right?
On the other hand…sigh…wouldn’t the “central beliefs of behaviourist pschology” not in turn be but a necessary component of the laws of matter? Or was B.F. Skinner the lone exception?
You think that you are free. You feel that you are free. Your gut instinct tells you that you are free. But any and all of these identity fonts are just manifestations of the forces that set into motion existence [and then self-conscious existence] itself.
And here everything comes down to whether or not we have the capacity to grasp that of our own free will. As a species on this planet. With or without an existing God.
And then the part where the conscious mind gives way to the subconscious mind gives way to the unconscious mind gives way to most primitive of all brain functions.
I know: let’s not go there. Really, to go there introduces all the myriad factors that makes it harder and harder to be, among other things, an objectivist regarding the behaviors that you have convinced yourself that all other rational and virtuous human beings are, like you, obligated to embrace.
Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”
Of course Kierkegaard, Sartre, Maslow and Rogers were in the same boat back then that we are in now. Having to assume that what they thought or felt about human autonomy – along with everything else – involved some measure of free wiil. They chose of their own volition to think what they did rather than opting for something else. On the other hand, it is also true that, to the extent we are free, this freedom in and of itself can become something that, in any particular context, we’d like to, as Erich Fromm once suggested, “escape”. And, indeed, who knows how many embrace determinism today as a way to absolve thermselves of all responsibility.
Period.
But: how do we go about determining here if nature itself is not determining everything?
My point however is that even to the extent this is not true, there are so many thousands upon thousands of variables that go into the making of “I” from the cradle to the grave, there is no realistic possibility that any one individual can pin them all down and configure them into a rational explanation as to why they believe this and not that.
I merely note how much more problematic this is in regard to “I” acquiring moral and political value judgments in the is/ought world. Here, even to the extent determinism is able to be demonstrated as not a factor socially, politically and economically, “I” is no less an existential contraption.
As for language, same thing, Given a world where human autonomy does exist, there is only so far that ones family and ones community and ones historical times can go in sustaining self-serving semantic structures relative to the either/or world.
Iambiguous said,
“My point however is that even to the extent this is not true, there are so many thousands upon thousands of variables that go into the making of “I” from the cradle to the grave, there is no realistic possibility that any one individual can pin them all down and configure them into a rational explanation as to why they believe this and not that.”
Yes, but from a cradle to a grave, more and more reification enter, and the deterministic sphere overcomes gradually with the players of appearent freedoms driven by free will.
That makes sense, because, finally the two spheres almost completely encompass each other.
My point is that determinism is no longer an either or situation, since WW2, when ( and this is the philosophic dynamic behind it, 3 political situations struggled to achieve a solution: social communism, national socialism, and capitalism.
The reduction into logical exclusion, is pairing the communist and socialist framework to defeat the synthetic-national socialism.
That exclusion, absolutely trying to exclude one from the other- reduced socialism and capitalism from an absolute interior national from international perimeters.
The ideal of inferiority of nationalism presented the pure dialectic toward materially relevant conflict between capital and the modes of producing the social antithesis of it.
The search for meaning then, took center stage, utilizing the ideas which would dominate modern philosophy, replacing dialectical European significance, and transferred it to the Victor-the Anglo Saxon apology, which has very little elements of doubt.
It was a transcription of political philosophy toward the question of which process is most significant.
The signifiers became the two surviving competitors, the communist international, and the so called western democratic nations.
Utility and pragmatic function against social dialectical materialism remains arch rivals.
Einstein’s Morality
Ching-Hung Woo looks at the many facets of Albert Einstein’s approach to ethics.
Here we go again, he thought. He being me of course. Is this what folks like peacegirl are aiming to communicate to me? My point then being that we distinguish them only as we were ever able to distinguish them. Given that the human brain is just another necessary component of the laws of nature.
Is anyone at all actually foolish enough to believe in “absolute free will”? This would seem to entail one comprising the only entity in the universe. You and nothing else that could possibly impact on what you think, feel, say and do. On the other hand, in a wholly determined universe as some [compelled or not] posit it, feeling a loss of freedom is just another inherent manifestation of the psychological illusion of freedom.
As though “I” over time and the immediate “I” are somehow two different entities in a universe where “I” is of, by and for nature inside and out. From the cradle to the grave. And then all the way back to star stuff.
And this deepest, most profound, and sacred of cosmic connections, tying us all the way back to elements spanning eons of years of evolution should make us feel gratitude and awe towards the supreme creative powers of the universe.
The constants of life are positioned in exactly such a way that we can be forged. Alter this absolute stunning elegance in physical laws only slightly, and the blueprint for life gets sucked into the black hole of oblivion.
And you would have to think that, 1 day, before the big chill, that we will go back to brane stuff, wouldn’t you say?