Freewill exists

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?

That’s kind of what me and Meno we’re talking about, natural selection of natural selection, there is a source though, a single point of confined infinity, the first step out of nothingness.

Trial and error and adaptation more so then just cause and effect though. A bit more intricate. But to argue that point (which I do), which would mean everything has intelligence in some form, even if unconscious, the information attaches to imagery, via reactions, this is what change is. Instinctual unconscious aspects. If that makes sense… unconscious > subconscious > conscious

My question was “who,” not what. Things don’t determine. People determine.

But I like the terrains you traverse, I’m not hating.

Carry on.

How you get there is far less important than what you find when you get there, as I believe I can take Jakob for saying regarding Nirvana.

“That’s a very determined quark!”

Negus.

“That’s a very determined law of physics!”

See where I’m going?

This is also what I believe Faust meant in his excelent list. Science is a matter of consensus.

Also why the yell of euphoria. “Eureka!”

It is a joy. Not a, how you say, a subjugation. Like “oh, I have discovered my master.” Not at all.

Science is something you get away with. That’s Elon’s Achiles’s Heel. He was educated into the subservience class. So he fears his science.

Also, if I may, the sense in which Einstein didn’t invent the atom bomb. He had the Eureka. It was beautiful, a jzzoy.

Oppenheimer and them, they were seeking masters. Why also there was no original thinking from them, no discoveries, no actual “science.” Just mathematical refinements of Einstein’s science.

Yes, I think I went to far with that last post. i dunno.

I’m just sayin’. Determinism is easily undone.

Your fear or pride filled denial of attachment (even when one controls their attachment by attributing value to anything) to religion or spirituality or attempting at understanding it is what is trapping you or delaying the inevitability of your mind changing, whether you believe it or not. The books and spirituality in general have great significance, you should take less pride in yourself and put more pride in the fact that these books are ancient stories collected and preserved to depict man experiencing consciousness/psyche in the beginning of when consciousness evolved from the subconscious and that you can read them, if you have had a negative experience with spirituality then you should dismiss such, you state you are unbiased but are biased and it is blinding you. All you have done is change the semantics, it’s easy to feel right or special that way, when one thinks they are naming something new that has already existed long before and been described in different language and context. I used to be in your position, determinist, no free will… experience of myself lead me away from that, which is spirituality. Knowing thy self.

Well if a lack in/of emotional state exists then you lack the experience of value attribution to see that there is a will that is free. You don’t have energetic frequency? Everyone has energetic frequency. Ever felt someone’s bad energy around you? Or that something is not right? Ever seen the experiment of yelling at a plant or glass of water vs talking to it with love? We manipulate energy, that’s what we do at the cost of value attribution, that’s what we do and always have been, it is what we are.

Not needing an ego? Everyone has an ego, the ego is malleable identity, there are other aspects to consciousness as well, such as shadow, self, anima/animus, unconscious/subconscious mind, etc.
One can be self or one can attach themselves to the ideas of others and be made by them and not made by self. The ego is what you project yourself as and you have power over that projection by attributing value to what matters, you can be real or false and judging by how you lack the experience of reflection in meditation or any spiritual practice to discover or understand self I’d lean more toward false or an acceptance of indoctrination of specific ideologies of what ‘you’ and ‘we’ are.

He who lacks experience or imagery, is he who lacks understanding. There is no understanding blue without the image and the same goes for any understanding of any concept, there is no understanding of information, without the imagery of it. So if you do not understand yourself, how can I trust your judgement of what you believe to be ‘is’?

Change = information embedding into imagery by reaction of instinctive unconsciousness.

Existence is neither satisfactory or unsatisfactory (it is what it is), (it is what you make it) is life, which is consciousness coming from the subconscious (evolving instinctual complexity and a granted understanding of such)… your literal freedom is making it either or. How do you not see that? Well I described why you do not see it, above. You should take this serious and reflect on your knowledge, it will reward you for being humble. I had to reflect on mine and I have come back here after years with new views and understanding, yet there is always more to understand and learn.

Yes I read that you wrote “who”, but since it was an invalid question, I corrected it to “what”, which has a valid answer.

Things determine, and never by themselves alone. People are things, with no clear beginning and end to separate them from their context - just like everything else.

Everyone experiences the illusion of “themselves” being somewhere in there, determining things ex nihilo - but I keep pointing out the obvious contradiction: “It requires a mind separate from matter such that it is simultaneously immune from being determined by matter, yet can still be influenced by the causation of matter in order to inform decisions, and yet still able to interact with matter once a decision is made and realised.” Free Will advocates are trying to have their cake and eat it by proposing the self as involved in the causal chain yet not, selectively in a very specific way, just to conform to the illusion that their conscious “self” is alone the arbiter of all choices.

I’m glad you’re not hating - rational discussion becomes impossible when at least one interlocutor gets emotional.
Tell this to Ecmandu who is under the impression that since he lacks the ability to understand/accept my argument, “everyone else knows I’m full of it”.

The behaviour of things like quarks seems to be determined by laws of physics. Laws of physics are superficially determined by people, but since people are refining laws of Determinism in order to describe the whole world, including themselves, their creation is what is causing them to create their creation in an infinite loop. Continuous experience just “is”, it’s the doing and the being in continuity in one “everythingness”. It’s what people are trying to dissect into Discrete Experience in order to glue it back together with ever-improved narratives - the most advanced and predictive one yet by far being Determinism. So the best you can get in trying to model Continuous Experience, and question what models the model, is to end up in this infinite loop. Not very satisfactory, but the alternative of retreating to more dated conceptions such as “Free Will” where “the self” can somehow be the prima causa of things, breaking the infinite loop - this doesn’t absolve it from its internal contradictions such as the one I mentioned above.

Determinism isn’t “your master”. It’s a model of behaviours between things that influence each other in both masterlike and slavelike ways. It’s not even the masterlike or slavelike ways itself - all this conception of Determinism as a restrictive force is nonsense. It’s not like “oh no, I have to obey master Determinism because I dare not seek to escape its chains”. It’s however free you may feel, however many boundaries that you break, creations that you make, inspiration that you think and feel, it all works in a way that Determinism can model just fine. It almost seems like people don’t want there to be a way that explains things - like a resistance to the intellectual. If “you” are the prima causa and not even Determinism can describe the sheer freeness of your spirit, then you can achieve anything! - and that’s a nice feeling. The fact that Determinism describes and explains even this all the same dampens this feeling for some people? Why? It’s not a cage. If anything, Determinism is a tool to “free” you even further. Of course the better language is that it increases the quality and quantity of ideas that can occur to you. The irony is that, if anything, it’s the slave that needs to feel like there are no reins, because reins are what imprison them, but to the master, feeling like there are reins gives them ever more “freedom” to manipulate slaves to his will… It just makes me laugh how desperate cases such as Urwrongx1000 are growling the literal opposite of this truth with all the ceaseless gnashing of a cornered animal.

By profound contrast, with Einstein, as a creative thinker he would be aware that genuine creativity hits you from seemingly nowhere. All creative types are familiar with the surprise of a Eureka moment, seemingly coming out of nowhere. It hits you, you don’t “hit it”, any “self” is the object of creativity, not the subject. It therefore seems backwards to say the creativity came from you. Deterministically, of course it originated inside of your mind, unconsciously though. You can consciously mull through a logical problem and hit a solution, but this is not the same thing - perhaps you know what I mean and are familiar with this experiential difference? It’s almost as though you just need to be the right vessel for creativity to strike - Einstein was one such vessel, and those who built on his ideas were hitting solutions rather than getting hit by creativity.