Fair enough… you can frame it such that every word’s meaning is a concept
So perhaps I can try to illustrate this a different way…
Determinism as a word has a meaning… that meaning is a question of semantics
Determinism as a concept is a model of reality wherein every event that plays out could be predicted given sufficient information.
“I/me/myself/self” are words… what they mean is a question of semantics
“The concept of self” is what is formed from that definition…
My point is, whatever that conception of self may or may not be, it has absolutely no bearing on the concept of determinism… it may be rendered impossible by determinism, it may be only possible given determinism… either way it does not constitute a change in the concept of determinism.
There is a HUGE difference between arguing over what the definition of “self” ought to be (semantics) and how best to model the phenomenon that we choose to call self.
We have made great strides toward understanding the workings of our brain and there’s a lot left that we do not know… but whether any of that information pertains to understanding the nature of “self” depends entirely on how we define “self”.
When someone says they define self as being a person’s soul and you define it as being their brain… the disagreement can be about SEMANTICS (an absolute waste of everyone’s time) or it can be about the existence of souls and what role they play.
How did the “concept of determinism” become so powerful that it drives the existence of “concept of self”? Why doesn’t the “concept of self” maybe render the “concept of determinism” impossible/possible?
After all, only conscious being with ‘selves’ can come up with the “concept of determinism” in the first place.
It’s probably not that huge.
Then you have one person who sees a lot of souls in the world and another person who sees a lot of brains. And these people are going to act differently and they will change the world based on those actions.
It’s like those who say that “animals have feelings” and those who say that “animals don’t have feelings”. Both are looking at exactly the same world/reality. They treat animals differently.
The right answer is that there is no right answer. Right?
No wait a minute, the correct attitude would seem to be “I don’t know whether there is a right answer or not”. That would lead to a calm peaceful state of mind. There would be no reason to attack ‘objectivists’ for their beliefs since you don’t know if they are right or wrong.
Instead :
You’ve convinced yourself that a right answer is impossible for “mere mortals”. How dare they think that there is a “fucking answer”.
No uncertainty there. Never : maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong, maybe the concept of right and wrong is not applicable.
Of course until we are able to determine the extent to which the feeling that we prefer is the feeling that we have freely chosen to prefer, we still seem stuck with taking an “intuitive leap” to one frame of mind or the other.
A leap that we are able to make with some measure of autonomy or not.
And, even in a non-determinist world, the choices that we make in the is/ought world are, in my view, circumscribed by the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
Our “control” here is embedded in a particular historical, cultural and experiential [individual] context understood from a particular point of view ever subject to change given new experiences, new relationships and access to new information and knowledge.
1] From my frame of mind, human psychology is important here because I see it as a crucial component of the objectivist mind. The objectivist has obviated an essentially meaningless world by subsuming “I” in one or another intellectual contraption that sustains some measure of comfort and consolation. Having an answer is the main point for them.
Thus, for example, the conservatives claim to have the answers in the political arena no more but no less than the liberals claim to. Then back to my arguments on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296
And then the part where the religious objectivists obviate the obliteration of “I” in death by subsuming it in one or another God and Salvation.
On the other hand…
2] Any particular individual’s psychological bent can only be an enormously complex agglomeration of countless existential variables going all the way back to his or her birth. What are the odds then that we have any really true understanding and/or control over them?
Nature, nurture, genes, memes. All embedded in the trajectory of one particular life. “I” here can only scarcely be glimpsed I suspect. Let alone understood fully. Let alone in attempting to fully understand the psychology of another.
We exchange these hopelessly problematic arguments because, well, that’s really all that is within our reach.
But what if/when such differences follow /or become increasingly compatible to the point that they approach indiscernibility? Then You may be wrong, but only then, maybe way too far in the future perhaps never?
Mostly what I am saying is that I do not seem to have access to the answer here. Even in the either/or world, “I” is still construed by me to be an existential contraption “thrown” fortuitously into being at birth and then ceaselessly configured and reconfigured all the way to the grave.
“I” seems in turn to be created and recreated in the gap between what I think I know is true here and now and all that can be known to be true about existence itself.
Some, of course, just shrug that part off. As though it were of little consequence. They have their answer about the relationship between matter and mind; and this works to sustain whatever measure of comfort and consolation that having an answer gives them.
It’s just that some factor in God and relgion as well. That way “in their head” [and later “in their soul”] the answer can sustain them through all of eternity.
Iambiguous, you definitely have what’s termed, a personality disorder.
They’re basically incurable.
Everyone is defined by continuity of consciousness, you from a child to you now. There’s no confusion to anyone who isn’t trolling for attention. I’d almost be willing to think that you’re a female, as they have the largest percentage of personality disorders.
Iambiguous: I really don’t want to interject because it makes me look like too persistent. But for the sake of philosophical truth, isn’t my persistence grounded in this particular con text within Your ground in the either/or, particularly as it concerns morality, whereas we should be beyond that by now? Your uncertainty feeds absolute predicates which dis unite an evolving spatial-temporal demarcation at least in essence?
I don’t “use” determinism. I grapple with trying to understand the extent to which the human mind may or may not be able to determine the extent to which we think, and feel and behave with some measure of “free choice”.
Also, my own experience with objectivists of your ilk is that, when they accuse you of not responding to their posts, what they are really bitching about is that they don’t recognize the words that you choose as the words that they would choose.
This thread then revolves more around the extent to which such exchanges were ever within our capacity to control.
And here, I am, admittedly, drawn and quartered. I am simply unable to come to any conclusion that settles it.
No, I wish to entertain an argument able to convince me that whatever it is that I think I want to grasp about human responsibility, it is within my power to entertain alternatives and then to choose that which I believe [autonomously] is the most reasonable point of view.
That is until, in having new experiences, I come to freely choose a conflicting point of view.
That is until someone is able to demonstrate substantively that which all rational men and women are oblgated to believe is true.
Unfortunately, so far, that’s not been you.
I take away something only if I can be convinced that there was something that autonomous minds are able to freely take away.
And then the part where some seem compelled [literally or otherwise] to attach their own agency to one or another God or one or another political ideology or one or another philosophical contraption or one or another rendition of nature.
I’m still trying to understand how that pertains to you out in the world of conflicting goods.
I don’t “use” determinism. I grapple with trying to understand the extent to which the human mind may or may not be able to determine the extent to which we think, and feel and behave with some measure of “free choice”.
Over and over and over again with you: The right answer pertaining to what particular context understood from what particular conflicting points of view?
On this thread though it gets all that more problematic because we are discussing the extent to which any answer reflects at least some measure of human autonomy pertaining to every context.
You seem to insist that I seem to insist that how I view this is how I think that all rational men and women are obligated to view it. Whereas in reality – remember that? – I don’t think that at all. Quite the opposite given the manner in which I keep pointing out over and over and over again the depth of the ambivalence I am embedded in when thinking about it at all.
No, I make a distinction between answers [in the either/or world] that seem to be apllicable to all rational men and women and answers [in the is/ought world] that do not.
Here though the question revolves more around answers [any answers, all answers] as but more dominoes toppling over given that the mind is the brain and the brain is just more matter in sync with matter’s immutable laws.
But:
I’ve convinced myself that I don’t know if any answer is ever anything other than the only answer that could ever have been.
As for the “concept” of right or wrong, how is that either in sync or not in sync with that which can be demonstrated to actually be right or wrong for all rational human beings. Out in the world of conflicting goods.
And that’s when you insist that all of those who don’t think about things like Communism as you do have the wrong answers.
Over and over again with you … can there be right and wrong answers in the general sense? You know, that there is an answer to at least one question in the field of identity, etc. One fucking right answer. And can there be wrong answers?
(This is where you ask me how it would be demonstrated. But I’m asking you first. You must have figured out the problem with demonstrations since you have the idea that it can’t be demonstrated.)
Yeah. You say that you are ambivalent but you don’t sound like it. I think an ambivalent person would tend to shut up or at least phrase his posts very differently.
And then there is the fact that you keep finding something wrong with the objectivists who don’t think as you do.
Notice how the pile grows. Now you need “the only answer that could ever have been” instead of just “a fucking answer”.
And here it has to “be demonstrated to actually be right or wrong for ALL RATIONAL HUMAN BEINGS”. Pile it on.
In that case, there is never two kinds of any “ism”. Say good bye to Protestantism and Catholicism. If X-ism is defined as the belief in X, then that settles what X-ism is. So long as a person believes in X, he or she is an X-ist. If that person happens to also believe in Y, and another X-ist disagrees with Y, we can’t say there are two kinds of X-ists–those that believe Y and those that don’t–there is only one kind of X-ist–those that believe in X. And there may be some who also believe Y, and some who don’t, but if Y has no bearing on X, we can’t say there are two kinds of X-ists.
But doesn’t this seem kind of absurd in some cases? Take materialism, for example. There are two kinds (or so a philosophy professor at university taught us): eliminativists and reductivists. The eliminativists believe that the only thing we can legitimately say is real are the most fundamental building blocks of matter (or whatever turns out to be real)–particles, energy, whatever–whereas the reductivists believe that we can say that the things built on top of the most fundamental building block of matter (or whatever turns out to be real) are also real. For example, an eliminativist would say there is no spoon, only the particles arranged in the shape of a spoon, whereas the reductivists would say the particles that make up the spoon are indeed real but so is the spoon they make up. But both believe in the essential part of materialism that makes it materialism: that the world is ultimately no more than matter. According to you, we have no right to say materialists can be divided into reductivists and eliminativists. There is only one kind of materialist: those who believe that the world is ultimately just matter. But there happens to be materialists who are also eliminativists, and there are materialists who are also reductivists. Their views on eliminativism and reductivism, however, ought to be treated separately from their views on materialism.
^ To me, this itself is just semantics. We can say that there is only one kind of materialist, and independently of that, eliminativists and reductivists, or we can say there are two kinds of materialists: eliminativists and reductivists–ultimately, we’re saying the same thing but in different words–semantics. The latter way of saying it doesn’t entail that the meaning of materialism changes depending on if you’re an eliminativist or a reductivist–it stays the same–both believe the world is nothing more than matter–but it adds additional information about what in the world of matter they believe is real.
Now, I would agree that not all such divisions are useful. Saying that there are two kinds of humans–those under 6 feet tall and those over 6 feet tall–is pretty useless (depending on the context); but saying there are two kinds of humans–males and females–can be a lot more useful. In the case of determinism and whether the self is a participant in the system or an outsider just watching from the sides, I think it can be very useful to make the distinction. It has implication for some of the most contentious topics the determinist likes to engage in: are we in control?
This is true, but it’s rare that each person’s definition goes unmentioned. When someone says that the self goes on after death, it’s pretty clear they mean a soul. I don’t think anybody believes that the body goes off somewhere after we die. And if the definition isn’t clear in the course of the discussion, it usually comes up very soon. And then the discussion can turn to whether the soul exists or not (or whatever you want to talk about).
Dude I don’t even understand how what you just said has anything to do with what I said previously. It’s such a confused reading of what I said that I now suspect you just want to argue for the sake of arguing… but I’m going to assume it’s a misunderstanding and I’ll try to express it differently, in case it might help.
If my concept of self is one wherein the essence of it is let’s say “supernatural” and I have a conception of reality wherein there is no supernatural dimension, then neither concept needs to be adjusted by the other…
they can co-exist AS concepts and do not at all relate to each other in any way.
The same way the concept of absolute darkness is utterly unaffected by the concept of absolute light… forming one concept does not alter the other…
Someone saying “I’m a determinist” and then denying there is any agency within this model is either denying the existence of complex organisms or more likely playing a language game where those organisms do not qualify as “agents” because of how that term is defined.
If it’s a language game… it’s a waste of everyone’s time to argue about it… a rose by any other name and all that jazz.
I’m with you 100% and if you follow that logic to its conclusion… the only distinctions worth making are the ones with consequences.
I’m not saying people don’t get really upset and bicker over semantics and split into different camps and I can’t argue with your point that it is in fact useful to distinguish between said camps
but I can and do argue that it’s a fucking pointless distinction to bicker about.
In the case of determinism there is only one version… what people are bickering about is whether or not that version is compatible with their individual notions of free will, agency and self.
A question which is answered by defining those terms… so there really is nothing to bicker about except about which definition everyone should use…