Freewill exists

Let’s condense your argument as you’ve presented it.

Utility is not the absolute truth.

The absolute truth is no identity.

Your reliance upon utility is a contradiction to how a person is required to act if they truly believed what you assert to believe is the only truth.

So, I can easily assert that you don’t believe your own argument whether it’s true or not.

That’s just a bare minimum of what I’m required to do to end this debate, that as a proof, you don’t believe your own argument.

Even though I did prove it false, I don’t even have to go that far with you.

You’re responding to my posts, which means that deep in your head, utility is superior to non identity for you.

So the question for you is;

Now that we’ve proven identity (utility) means more to you than non identity, what are you going to do with that corner I put you in earlier. Remember?? The remainder of the limits that can’t be chaos??

Remember that corner?

My assessment of Silhouette thus far:

He is a wannabe slave-master. He doesn’t believe the shit he’s posting. He doesn’t trust in his own words and position. Instead he pushes his agenda as a means to persuade others into slavery, or those who are slaves, to prevent them from ever considering Freedom. He hates the idea of Freedom. He is against it, with all his (“intellectual”) might, because it would cut into his underlying agenda.

He hates the possibility that other people could be ‘freer’ than he-himself is.

And/Or

He hates the possibility that slaves might become enticed by dialogue of Freedom, and then go onto Free-themselves. As a wannabe slave-master, this is too much for him to tolerate.

This schematic you posted Artimas is pretty nifty.
Its an interesting experiment to go in meditation from the bottom to the top.

Id say most od us operate at least on two of these frequencies - I don’t know how literal to take that term here - at any given time.

There can very well be joy with a background of fear, or reason with a background of shame - and this is I think pretty useful as a therapeutic model.

“My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will”

  • William James

That chart, which I cannot seem to copy or bring with me, seems like a mix of different kinds of states and qualities. One coudl have several at once and I do not think the ones at the top are better. So much depends on the context.

Certainly one who claims to belong exclusively to the highest order is going to encounter some tough challenges.

Humility!

No honest man could claim to never be in a state of fear, shame, or any of these other states.

Agree, most likely bounce between multiple frequencies. Once you get to the view of it is what it is though, there is no turning back so at the highest state, one can effectively see when one is in a negative state easier and is more likely to catch such than someone whom is only on one of those states. Because to rise, all states must be experienced at least once or twice in life to understand them. That’s the moving up the staircase aspect, if we couldn’t or didn’t bounce back or go down as well, there would be no worry of devolution and I wouldn’t be here, but we can move backwards.

He’d just call that ad hom.

The problem with this academic gymnastics is that common sense win every time.

He’s basically calling it a logical fallacy that if silhouette and I were in a mesa (cliff on the whole perimeter) and I warned silhouette that there are cliffs in all sides, and then silhouette walks to the edge and walks around the whole perimeter without falling, and then states, “there are no cliffs here”, that I am committing a logical fallacy by inferring that silhouette most certainly believes that a cliff is there. Then silhouette would quote the argument from incredubulity! When it’s not me, but silhouette who is being the incredulous one.

Silhouette is like some bizarre broken computer of logical fallacies.

I don’t think he’s trying to make slaves, I just think he’s a broken computer.

When I was about 20 years younger I achieved Nirvana for the first time, and I spent the next six month meditating continuously, every day struggling to get to that state, and once arrived, spending a few hours there.

Eventually, because the state wasn’t permanent, I lost a bit of faith in it as a purpose and I allowed myself to drift back into a more imperfect consciousness, knowing the bliss is part of me and always attainable.

Now, I enjoy he struggles of life and the sort of jagged consciousness that comes with it, which I see epitomized in dramatic art, especially of the typical western kinds, such as tragedy and hiphop.

It’s not really worth conversing with that one - except if you agree with him and you want reassurance and a sense of belonging to a tribe. Give it a go though if you want to try it out for yourself. Funnily enough, if I’m a broken computer, he’s a broken record :wink: - the chip I’ve put on his shoulder from demolishing him constantly for about a year really took a toll on him, he still can’t shut up about me :laughing:

I would take exception to common sense winning every time. That’s no slight to common sense - there is a ruthless society-wide refinement that goes into forming it, but this is also its weakness. Its whole point is to homogenise into a simple, singular, mediocre “common” sense for common people. It’s adverse to new creative thinking, which you might call rare sense. I’m well aware that I’m furthering a worldview of rare sense that flies in the face of common sense in many ways, but the fact that it solves so many traditionally problematic philosophical conundrums in a relatively simple way makes it really promising in my opinion - and absolutely worth exploring.

It’s an original philosophy that I came up with many years ago, which I dubbed “Experientialism”.

And I wouldn’t say I am incredulous, because I am able to believe in identity - as I prove through my use of it in communication and casual social interaction (I would be seen as extremely weird to common people if I didn’t conform to such basic linguistic traditions in everyday conversation!) I have just adopted far more rigorous standards of knowledge than usual, which identity does not pass, and so using these standards it can no longer be said to be “true”. However I think I can say differently about you and others, who won’t/can’t believe the consequences of adopting standards of knowledge as rigorous as I am using. To borrow your analogy, I’m not walking around the cliffs, I am walking on what you thought was over the edge, but actually isn’t.

Sure, that seems fine.

I can see now that you’ve been using the word “contradiction” in the layman way - where it is acceptable to say things like “your words contradict your actions”. I’ve been using the technical way this whole time - the one that is applicable to logic. Sure, in layman’s terms my words “contradict” my actions. But there is no logical contradiction there if using the term as it is used in logic.

It’s funny to me, to see people reacting so negatively to someone such as me who knows the truth but acts differently just to be able to operate normally with regular people. I have no bad faith or cognitive dissonance because I understand and accept what I’m doing perfectly.

Regular people make a virtue out of acting in accordance with what you say/think - on one hand - but on the other hand they all believe their own narratives. Consider the modern western attitude towards religion: none of these people believe the stories are actually true anymore, but they see the wisdom in them and act accordingly. That is to say: they don’t think or say the stories are true, they don’t believe in them, but they believe in acting according to them - which is what I’m being accused of like it’s a negative thing.
All narratives are merely a conduit - a medium to translate meaning. They’re all removed from reality and put into the form of a story, and there’s no need whatsoever to believe in the story or think/say it’s true, whilst also living by it. People already do it all the time. It’s only the religious nuts who turn this on its head by insisting the stories are 100% true, to justify the fact that they live by them, and to make sure their actions match what they believe is true.

You have zero access to the consciousness that others seem to have, other than taking their word for it, intuiting through empathy using your mirror neurons, and generally using your imagination based on your own consciousness. You create this narrative that is “their identity”, but the thing is you do the exact same thing for yourself. Common experience such as what you learn to be “your hands”, “your legs”, “your reflection”, “your sense of balance and coordination” etc. reinforce themselves through repeated exposure to form this shopping basket that comes to form this idea of “identity” if enough of these things are in the basket at any one time. Lose enough of these things, or change them, and people say “you’ve changed”, or “you’re not you anymore”.

I’m not wrong here, and this is all perfectly consistent with my own philosophy, Determinism and the arguments I’m making here. Understand and seriously consider what I’m saying here long enough and you might even come to realise it solves a lot of problems - simply by differentiating between truth and utility.

You keep going on about genius, well this is what it looks like right here.

I’m far away from any corner you think you ever put me in - we’ve only been following one line of reasoning: the one I found most interesting to discuss. Even if you decided you weren’t interested in truth and wanted to operate from utility and then revisit your initial argument, I still have my 3 main arguments against Free Will that nobody’s even attempted to get around:

  1. Possibility is not actuality: the feeling that you could have chosen differently doesn’t make it an actual choice. Only actually choosing makes something actually possible.
  2. The mind-body problem. Not a problem in the sense that it could have a solution, but a problem in the sense that it’s an unavoidable obstacle to any degree of Free Will at all.
  3. How can you be influenced by circumstance, in order to have something to make a decision about, without being influenced by circumstance, in order for your decision to be free from said influence? Free or Will? Not both.

I find my “View of Life” is just “Is” but I wouldn’t say I’m “Enlightened” in any “spiritual” sense that one might associate with things like Eastern religion or meditation etc. I don’t meditate and I am averse to anything religious, I’ve just realised life just “Is” and this is how I think of it, simply through thinking philosophically so unremittingly for so long. My emotional state isn’t “Ineffable”, but the fundamental concept of Experientialism that is “Continuous Experience” is ineffable. I don’t really have an emotional state, someone I worked with once mistook me for the happiest person they’ve ever met, but another colleague corrected it to more like “content” - I don’t have any of this “Energetic Frequency”, I just “am” - but not even that. Not needing an ego, as is consistent with Experientialism and Determinism, is a significant ingredient of getting to where I have. I’ve not tried to get anywhere, I just ended up here. From what little I know of what I think is Buddhism, my way is consistent with not needing attachment. “Neutral” seems wrong, I find life neither satisfactory nor unsatisfactory - all of the other views of life don’t apply to me. I have my weaknesses that drop me a few tiers in the rare occasion that I am confronted with them, sure. As has been pointed out, it’s a fun schematic to explore, but not really as discrete as it is laid out to be: another example of “Discrete Experience” distorting Continuous Experience for the sake of utility over truth.

Silhouette,

The cliff analogy was perfect.

Non identity is the cliff.

The truest truth there is!

You never walk off it, even though it being the truest truth, subsumed identity as its subset.

Ultimately on the cliff, the truest truth that there is, is the cliff. Yet you never step off it, while claiming that it doesn’t exist, or rather, that beyond it is the ONLY place you and I need to be, or are!

I believe that a higher order logical fallacy can be made from this example, which doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination make it “laymens logic”.

What about:

“Ad hypokrites”

(Towards an actor)

Denying laymen’s logic by coming up with the most layman imitation of proper terminology ever: “Ad hypokrites” :laughing: Now that is perfect :clap:

You really do think there is a cliff face in your analogy don’t you… I’m the one calling the illusion and walking over what you think is the “edge” to prove it, you’re the one who won’t follow me because even being shown is not enough for you. I can act like it’s there and walk around it just the same as you and other lay-people - that’s the only way you will all accept what I have to say. But if I walk over the boundary unscathed and better off, people think I’m trying to trick them! I’m reminded of the opening to Thus Spake Zarathustra #-o

Good job on avoiding addressing anything in my post by the way. Stick with your “argument by analogy” where it’s safe. But if not engaging is a sign you’re no longer interested then by all means move on.

I avoided your entire last post because it was a long winded attempt at declaring yourself not a hypocrite for “proving” that the subset (identity) is not beholden to the superset (no identity).

You’re not only walking in contradiction land here, everyone knows which one is actually true to YOU!

Identity.

The one that you state is impossible is the only one that you’re about.

You’ve become a joke.

You’ve got yourself in a very deep hole here, and astoundingly, you just keep digging yourself deeper and deeper.

The problem with pro-slavery advocates (anti-free-will), is that they always fall-back upon their crutch if forced into a corner:

It must have been the case to begin with, always.”

This is a logical fallacy insuch that it can never be disproved (moving the goal-posts). You can never disprove “it must have always been”. Nor can you prove it. So if a proposition can never be proved, or disproved, then it is not a sound argument and it is not a valid argument.

But “must have been” according to whom, and according to what???

Silhouette says “The Four Fundamental Forces” (according to Theoretical Physicists), therefore, according to a some scientists who claim to know. Their “Science” is no less sound and persuasive than what Silhouette presents here. According to whom? To scientists, who themselves, cannot back or prove their own assertions. “Must have been”, according to Science?

No, that’s not how Science works. Science “must have been” is only according to recorded, proven, repeated Experiments. If Experiments cannot be repeated, then they cannot be given as a ‘proof’ to subsequent arguments or demonstrations. Thus it is NOT “according to science” that it “must have always been”.

Silhouette’s position is undermined. According to whom? To him? To nobody?

This is an Appeal to Authority, another logical fallacy.

There is no “always must have been”.

Trying to persuade other people to think outside the box… #-o

When you go to a job interview and demonstrate how good a candidate you are - these actions are your true self!
When you go to a foreign country and speak their language you become a joke for acting differently to how you really are!

I can give example after example of everyone doing what I’m doing in their everyday life - even things you would do yourself.
But no, you would rather ignore all evidence if it means you can latch onto something that you can use to convince yourself that you’ve won.

I guess you recognise that’s the closest you’ll ever get to an actual real win, so fair enough - celebrate your nothing-win, congratulations :slight_smile:

Necessarily true superset (the existence of the cliff) is much different than acting differently than your true self (lying), because according to you, the subset (lying) (like the cliff) is impossible!

There’s a big difference between stating “x is necessarily true for all beings” and watching you and EVERY being do the exact opposite and stating that beings can lie about themselves.

I agree that beings can lie to themselves for utility, but when push comes to shove, not ABOUT utility itself (just like the cliff)

You’re the guy who keeps walking around the mesa and saying that because you haven’t fallen off, there’s no cliff. Everyone knows that it’s your stubborn ego talking and not the truth, just like a boss checking your references or doing a background check.

The assumption behind your whole analogy is that the cliff is real. You’re just presenting it as a given.

It’s not, and I’ve explained why - you can ignore that we’re both walking off the edge all the time, simply speaking in language that is phrased in terms of not going over the edge so we can both understand one another. I’m using this language to say we can do exactly what we’re doing, you’re saying we can’t do exactly what we’re doing and we’ve been on top of the mesa all this time. That’s what the analogy should be. It’s the wording that’s the lie, the actions are the continuous experience that we’re just imagining is discrete so we can create meaning through which to communicate about continuous experience in terms of discrete experience.

No, my analogy is that everyone including you, by definition of mesa, and what they observe, knows that it’s a cliff.

You’re the only one in the group who argues that it’s not a cliff.

Everyone else knows that you’re full of it!

You’ll be in the ledge and they’ll tell you to take a step forward to prove it to everyone (stop posting on ILP) and you’ll tell them that they’re using a Tu Quoque logical fallacy and that they lost the debate, and just walk back.

Your absurdity is plain for everyone in these boards to see.

The cliff is no identity (leaving the boards because none of us exist, including you), posting here is utility, the behavior that you are lying about and truly don’t believe the cliff doesn’t exist… you NEVER step off the damn cliff, even though it’s the only thing you can do to prove the absolute truth scoofs and chuckles of existence. To prove us all idiots.

“Determined by who?”

“It was, is and will be Determinism that caused these traits to become as they are and function as they do, or otherwise, in the first place!”

Determined by Determinism?