Einstein’s Morality
Ching-Hung Woo looks at the many facets of Albert Einstein’s approach to ethics.
Providing of course that nature itself is not seen to be “coercing” everything that has ever been described by anyone at all. And what is most intriguing here is the word “coerce” itself. How can one think of it without imagining some entity able to actually do the coercing? And that would seem to entail a reason to. And that would seem to suggest some purpose behind the reason.
Matter ontologically is one thing. Matter teleologically…is that something else altogether?
The conundrum then comes to revolve for some of us around how and why and when matter was able to reconfigure itself into being conscious of all this in and of itself. It’s like trying to imagine the machines creating the terminators with an intelligence different from the intelligence behind the human minds creating the films.
Back again to this mysterious distinction between nature either coercing or not coercing me to type these words and nature, embodied in my brain, either compelling or not compelling me to type them based on the necessary components embedded in prior causes inherently embedded in the laws of matter.
Where is this distinction pinned dlown definitively?
Determinism = code for god’s will.
Many minds have updated the Abrahamic lingo, making them feel enlightened and progressive…as if they’ve grown out of the childish superstitions of the past.
Nature can also be understood as a one-god, i.e., omnipotent, omnipresent, absolutely ordered, absolutely determining.
It’s Abraham’s god without the anthropomorphism.
No need for the primordial sin narrative, to produce discipline via shame.
Markets take over this role.
A more sophisticated method of control.
Shame before the State, your peers. How to live up to the Jonses; how to be appealing to the majority, selling self as another product.
Poverty is the new shame.
This clarifies the relationship between positive nihilists - with their offering of alternative occult realities - and pure nihilists who apply the formidable power of nil to annihilate all that is displeasing.
One fabricates worlds out of nothing - suing semiotics - and the other exposes the word-game, returning to his indifferent cynicism.
Both ignore the world around them, because most of them are enshrined within cosmopolitan, man-made environments, surrounded by man-made fabrications.
Reality is on the periphery - ignored, forgotten…and still unyielding to human mind games.
I can criticize him yet again for taking the discussion back up into the clouds of abstraction. And yet here and now I’m of the opinion [compelled or not] that he was never able not to.
Ever and always I am back to the gap between what any of us think about this and all that would need to be known in order to be absolutely certain. And, even then, only by assuming that human autonomy does exist in some measure.
Isn’t it basically just another intellectual equivalent of Beckett’s, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
Until a definitive resolution is finally arrived at by scientists and/or philosophers and/or theologians, all we have are speculations of this sort. Some of us [compelled or not] more drawn to or repelled by them than others.
Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”
Here what interest me is the gap [if there is one] between Dawkins making his argument and being compelled to acknowledge to himself that he was never able to not make it other than as nature compels it to be made. Or if, instead, there is some component of reality inside his brain/mind that allows him to imagine that this is not the case. After all, what is the point of bringing up our ancestors here when they just like we are all necessarily inherent components of the laws of matter.
Stuck again. To me, this is expressed as though [somehow] we do have some degree of autonomy in making attempts to be attractive to the opposite sex. Otherwise even the argument articulated by Steven Taylor above in regard to this is just one more intrinsic element encompassed in matter doing its thing as the laws of matter compel it to. How in fact can anything we think, feel, say and do escape/transcend its innate, organic destiny? And our ancestors found vistas as they did because their ancestors did going back to the earliest humanoids going back to the first instance of life on earth going back to the manner in which lifeless matter became living matter going back to when and where and how and why matter came into existence itself.
Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”
On the other hand, the part where we are stuck still revolves around the extent to which these natural interactions explain everything that we think, feel, say and do. Ah, but at least we live in an age where we have accumulated an enormous amount of actual knowledge about these brain functions. And yet the more we know, the more frustrating it is in having to acknowledge all that we don’t know yet. For many, this then thumps into the psychological components of “I” that refuse to accept anything less than that which allows them to insist that what they think they know is what all the rest of us should think we know too.
Yep, that’s the way some see it. But then for folks like me, they were never able to not see it that way. Only folks like me are the first to admit that how we think we see it may or may not be how it actually is. And then the depressing acknowledgment that, in turn, we will tumble over into the abyss that is oblivion. None the wiser.
Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”
Some intellectuals, some scientists. Just as some intellectuals, some scientists insist on supporting the opposite conclusion. The impulse however is either more or less under our control. Or is only the illusion of control.
There’s no getting around this for some. We just don’t know if there was literally no getting around it for them. But who hasn’t wished for something like this to explain away a set of circumstances that are pulling them down…that they can then just explain aways as “beyond my control”?
How about the political and economic elite? It is always in their interest to sustain any and all habits that inhibit citizens from actually exercising their political and economic will. And, in the end, don’t we have to roll the dice [compelled or not] and act as though we do have some measure of autonomy. It’s maddening [for some[ not to know for certain, but there it is: the human condition.
All I can come back to here is that only utter fools [in an autonomous world] would/could manage to actually think themselves into believing that the either/or world self is just an illusion.
Of course there is a self here. It eats and drinks and has sex and plays sports and goes to school or work and interacts with others in countless ways that clearly revolve around a substantive and substantial Me.
Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”
Like that definitively refutes Berkeley’s assumptions. Or, “I think therefore I am”. Like that necessarily excludes someone in a Sim world being programed to think that. Nothing is really either established as true or refuted as false until everything and anything is agglomerated into an explanation for existence itself. Yet even here someone convinced that they are cognizant of this may well be compelled to by someone or something beyond his or her grasp.
This merely takes me back to dreaming. I don’t know about your dreams but in mine “I” am utterly convinced I am confronted with a “variety of choices of thoughts and actions in front of me”.
Last night I dreamed myself back into to a set of circumstances involving an old childhood friend, Roger Rasnake. We were involved in some construction project that we were working on for free. I then insisted that we ought to be paid for what we did. Back and forth we went while continuing to work. Everything was vividly real including my confrontation with others in my family.
Yet the whole “experience” was created entirely in my brain, by my brain…for my brain?
Though, sure, there must be an important distinction between my “I” in that dream and my “I” here and now choosing to types these words rather than others.
But who out there in science, in philosophy, in theology has actually been able to demonstrate it such that there is no other possible explanation but free will in the human species.
Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”
Of course one might note that arguing “all of these factors have some influence on our behaviour” is in itself just another attempt at an all-encompassing explanation. But the fact that so many of us do seem compelled [naturally or not] to fit everything into one overarching account speaks volumes regarding how the brain seems to function. And that makes sense. We go about the business of doing so many different things it’s got to provoke us from time to time into thinking about the existence of something that fits everything together into what in some mental capacity is thought to be an ontological and teleological TOE.
It could be God, it could be nature, it could be something that no one has [so far] even thought of as existing at all.
Then back to this: He [like you and I] have no way in which to determine beyond all doubt that the “conscious self” either embodies or does not embody merely the illusion of free-will. Does nature dictate everything we think, feel, say and do? Or did nature’s matter actually succeed in evolving into an autonomous capacity to question its own existence?
This part:
Sure, maybe. But what is this but one more presumptuous assertion that it is so. How does this particular author go about producing the hard evidence necessary to convince the world that there could be no other explanation?
Or, that, even should someone seem to accomplish this, that this too is not only as it ever could have been?
How would we ever be able to detach ourselves from something we a clearly a part of in order to gain that distance said to be crucial in establishing that much sought after objectivity.
Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”
Once again, though, for some, they might point to this in exchanges here to bolster their contention that human brains are capable, on some level, of freely choosing this rather than that. But all they can do is to fall back on their own “experts”, knowing that in all likelihood there are “experts” on the other side claiming just the opposite.
On the other hand, if these folks ever do come to a definitive conclusion that, beyond all doubt, human beings are able of their own volition to embody options, wouldn’t it be talked about everywhere on every scientific and news media outlet?
So: Do we really have control over our brains here or is that too merely the brain “tricking” us into believing that this is the case. Why? Because that is still the only option available to the brain itself as matter inherently in sync with its own laws.
That complex relationship between the brain precipitating experiences and than the experiences themselves precipitating changes in the brain:
Sure, you can start with nurture and work back to the nature, or start with nature and work back to nurture. But how is it determined “once and for” what 1] first set it all in motion at birth and 2] what then sustains it all the way to the grave.
There may well be a team of scientists out there that have in fact been able to fuse the two approaches into an utterly irrefutable answer.
Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”
See how this works? The author merely assumes that his own premises here are by default the starting block. We actually are free to develop more autonomy! You merely cherry pick the science and – presto! – you too can be more authentic.
As for the influences of our environment, don’t they go all the way back to the day we are born? Don’t they cover years and years of hard-core indoctrination in the family, the community, the state, the culture, the historical parameters of “I”?
And who then gets to decide which set of behaviors best exemplify a positive development toward a more meaningful life?
With or without autonomy, “I” is a profoundly problematic vantage point
Or, perhaps: As humanistic psychology is compelled to suggest, we have innate potentials and characteristics that are independent of external factors, even if this aspect of us may be so obscured from us that we can barely see it.
And this cries out for a context in which explore all the factors this might include, Again, even assuming some measure of autonomy. After all, what can possibly be more complex than human psychology at work in interactions revolving around identity, value judgments and political power? And, at this intersection, “adverse cultural and social influences” are all over the map. God or No God. Liberal or conservative. Nature or nurture.
And how does he actually demonstrate this? Well, he doesn’t of course. He doesn’t cite an experience that he had in a particular set of circumstances. He doesn’t note a clear-cut distinction between memetic and genetic influences. He doesn’t expound on how exactly he managed to resist these influences in order to remold his own behavior so as to override the adverse cultural and social influences that curtailed him before.
Let alone examine this pertaining to actual behaviors that clash in regard to conflicting goods. It’s all just contained in a world of words.
Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”
And then around and around and around we go. If you take your intellectual leap to free will then you are convinced that you have of your own volition “exercised your autonomy”. If you take your intellectual leap to determinism then nature has compelled you to believe psychologically that you have of your own volition “exercised your autonomy”.
Then what? Then the link to one or another scientist that is either compelled by nature or not to confirm what you are either compelled by nature or not to believe is true.
Either the determinists are compelled or not to refute the arguments of the free will advocates, or the free will arguments are compelled or not to refute the arguments of the determinists.
As though someone out there has finally pinned this down once and for all. And, as though, in turn, that isn’t embedded in whether or not, if someone has, we are even aware of it.
And that’s before we get to all intelligent life on other planets that sans worm holes we will never, ever hear the arguments of.
Now, how is that not the boat [existential or otherwise] that we are all in?
well biggs if you must know, ‘freewill’ isn’t only inconceivable but also unworkable in any possible system whatsoever. the first part - what is inconceivable - is what the concept ‘will’ is supposed to mean in the language of the freewill argument. but even if we were to grant such an entity or agency, we’d still be faced with the ontological problem of interacting substances that are not reducible to the same fundamental properties… in which case we wouldn’t be able to understand how they affect each other. if you take for example descartes’ substance-dualism of the material (world) and the immaterial (self), you might be able to imagine these two substances existing independently and on their own… but how would they interact? how would the immaterial self touch and make contact with the material world in order to cause and direct physical action?
now my school of analytical nihilism (i just started it, btw) goes even further in criticism. we could even grant that this interaction were possible between these two ontologically distinct substances… and we’d still not have a case of genuine freewill. we would have to ask what compels the immaterial self to interact as it does with the material world, which it is not a part of, without itself being subject to some form of immaterial causality. that is to say, we’d have to posit an infinite regress of ‘freewills’ to get around this dilemma.
so if you ax me about the cash value of this fact, i’d admit that there is very little to it; we still live in a world as if we have freewill. it certainly seems like we do, and as such we have to find a workable way to live that sustains this illusion without it causing collateral damage. problem is, it’s causing a whole lotta collateral damage in ethics (and criminal justice, especially). this is something peacegirl was very attentive to and wrote a lot about.
the great paradox here is that abandoning belief in freewill actually has the opposite effect of fatalism and places more responsibility on man to control his environment and the causes within it. and of course you’d say ‘but even that would be part of the dominos toppling over’, yes. i admit that at this point we have not yet worked out a way to deal with this redundancy, but our research does show great promise. we’re now working on a theory called polymeric causal holism. its central thesis is that when a certain threshold of determined events occurs, an emergent self-determining effect results and is able to separate itself from the causal chain from which it evolved and direct itself as if it had freewill. but this doesn’t happen on an individual level. it happens on a ecological level… and by ecological i mean the interactions between environment, intelligent animals, and language users.
no just kidding. there still ain’t no freewill. i wuz just bullshitting.
Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”
Ever and always it is merely assumed that this reconfiguration is not wholly configured by the laws of nature themselves. In fact, some are compelled by nature to get really, really fierce in insisting that their own life is shaped and molded wholly in accordance with their own autonomous behaviors. The ubermen among us in particular mock those who insist that they were never able not to mock those who were never able not to believe that their own lives are considerably less remarkable because they were never able not to be.
These exchanges can get really, really surreal, really, really fast.
But, even assuming volition, we are then confronted with that which our free will and autonomy does in fact pursue out in the world with others in shaping those biological and environmental influences. How ought they be shaped and molded given that this is something that is more or less in our command.
And these exchange are often not only surreal but, at times, downright vicious. Not only am I free but I use my freedom in the pursuit of those behaviors that are the obligation of all rational and virtuous men and women to pursue in turn.
So, which is worse…being enthrall to the laws of nature or to the laws of those objectivists who set out to shape and mold the world [and everyone in in it] to their own moral and political specs.
Freewill is macroscopic quantum coherence suspending the collapse of superpositions long enough for the brain to get it’s shit together and effect the outcome.
Not sure I entirely believe it, but it sure sounds cool.
At any rate, I’ll settle for ‘unpredictable will’, which kicks determinism out the window. Kinda.
Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”
Again, what am I missing here? As though somehow the “spiritual” facet of human interactions is exempt from the laws of matter. The Buddha teaches self-discipline and self-control. And, surely, the Buddha himself was exempt from the laws of nature.
And certainly God is.
It always comes back to the psychological sense – here manifested in religion – that [somehow] I just know that what I am thinking and feeling and saying and doing is under my control. Sure, contingent on both genetic and memetic variables that are, in some crucial respects, beyond my control, but… but never completely beyond my control.
And that may well be the case. I certainly have not reached the point where, at times, I don’t have significant doubts about my own recent turn in the direction of determinism. Viscerally, it just does not seem possible that I am not of my own volition [whatever that means] typing what I do here. But it’s that I can’t know this beyond all doubt that is always there exasperating me.
Right, like he can go to the scientists who study this empirically and experimentally, using the rigors of the “scientific method”, and say, “Okay, give me the definitive argument I can use to prove that a ‘spiritual’ quest does in fact demonstrate the reality of free will among our species.”
Really, who cares how long the introspective process is when there are folks on both sides of the debate who have gone down that path and come to different conclusions.
Disciplines like Buddhism are just more intent and intense in focusing in on the ego in ways that other religious denominations are not. But that doesn’t make either the intention or the intensity of the pursuit any less necessarily exempt from whatever brought matter into existence and then laid down the law regarding what it can or cannot do. Only to the extent that the human brain is shown to be the one exception to the rule, does autonomy become more plausible. Spiritually or otherwise.
Saving the Self
Raymond Tallis defends personal identity from those who say the self is an illusion.
Tell me this is not downright “spooky”? There you are poking around inside the brain or probing it in real time, functioning through fMRI images. And who knows what new technology the neuroscientists either have or will have at their disposal.
But it’s not like they have ever reached the point where, while performing their experiments, probing their images, they actually make contact with the “I”. The part of the brain able to be separated out from the purely biological functions of all the parts.
Imagine that conversation!
See? As soon as you start in on the actual interaction between brain scientists and any one particular brain, you’re back to the chemical and the neurological interactions that can be documented and encompassed as in fact true objectively.
At best we can note the biological parameters involved and then point out how this particular brain in this particular head in this particular person is intertwined with all of the other things that we are reasonably certain about regarding the historical, cultural, and interpersonal “I”.
Without coming into contact with that “stand alone bit of the brain”, we are back to square one.
Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”
Of course Nietzsche too was no less addicted to his own “general description intellectual contraptions” in exploring the nature of “I” able to “overcome” itself “in his head”.
But what “out in the world” does that mean when, in overcoming yourself in any particular context, others overcoming themselves, insist that the consequences of your own overcoming comes into conflict with the consequences of their overcoming.
Exactly: As soon as this or that overcoming precipitates social and political and economic conflicts, what then?
Suppose you set out to “overcome” yourself in regard to the coronavirus? How do you suppose that might play itself out given particular behaviors that you choose?
As for being “self-satisfied”, how is this not in turn the embodiment of dasein? You may choose a new path and for all practical purposes your choices may improve your lot in the world. But what I always focus on is the part where the consequences of this “new you” detracts from the well-being of others.
The part that for me precipitates the fracturing and the fragmenting. How does it not for you? And, again, how is any of this back and forth assessing able to be demonstrated as within the parameters of human autonomy?
Here’s how the author “demonstrates” it?
He merely asserts all of the above to be true by assuming he was not compelled by the laws of nature embodied in his brain to do so. And it’s not like the determinists can demonstrate otherwise. So, around and around we all go, leap by leap by leap.
The Free Will of Ebenezer Scrooge
Richard Kamber considers the possibility of changing destiny.
Wow. I recall as a child, there were two movies that first got me to thinking about the relationship between time, myself and free will. One was The Time Machine with Rod Taylor and the other was A Christmas Carol with Alastair Sim.
And it was the part that took us into the future that most intrigued me. After all if we could go into the future and observe it, how could it ever not but be that way?
But then there is also the focus of films like Back To the Future, Timecrimes and Primer…films that explore how, if we go back in time and change something, that changes the future into something else. But what I could never quite configure in my head was the part about the future. If, for example, today, we could go forward in time 6 months and see our coronavirus ravaged world then, how could things not be compelled to unfold such that this was the only possible future?
Then the part where, in the multiverse, every possible combination of events exists in one or another of an infinite number of parallel universes.
Even now I still can’t quite wrap my head around the extent to which I am thinking this through in the most rational manner. Or if there is a way in which to think it through in the most rational manner at all.
=D> 
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