What becomes particularly surreal then is the manner in which we react to assessments of this sort only because we were never able to react to them in any other way.
Ah, but only if my brain precipitates my mind to precipitate my fingers to type these words only because I am not able to not type them.
Where does nature with its laws of matter fit in here? Descartes, his theatre. Then my reaction to Robinson’s reaction to it compelling the post above and now you being compelled to read these words. Is it all really just one necessarily intertwining reality unfolding inexorably toward what can only ever be?
Along with Wittgenstein and his boxed beetle?
My own exasperation in acknowledging that I will almost certainly go to the grave not knowing what if anything is behind it all being but one more unimaginably insignificant facet of it all in turn?
From “Pointlessness Doesn’t Follow from Determinism” at the Breaking the Free Will Illusion website
Again, the part [in my view] where everything in this debate seems to get all tangled up in what we either are or are not able to fully encompass using language.
Assuming for the moment that in using it we do have some measure of free will.
In other words, for all practical purposes, if we do live in a wholly determined universe, it would seem that however we frame the meaning of the word “pointless” and its relationship to the meaning that we give to the word “determined”, the “point” of the future doesn’t make the actual future itself any different than it seemingly must be given that the point of nature is to unfold solely in accordance with the immutable laws of matter.
And here the word “futile”. Since we are inherently/necessarily a part of nature unfolding as it must [for whatever reason], the only way that futile makes any sense to me is in discovering the reason why existence unfolds at all; and then determining that the existence of existence itself is futile. That any reason is as ultimately futile as any other.
Here we are back to the distinction that peacegirl and I seem to make between “choosing” and choosing.
Because we at least “choose” to do only what we are able to “choose” to do. This our part in it all must surely be less futile than the parts played by mindless matter.
well you’ve been around long enough to get the gist of my position regarding this problem of language. i took a strong post-structural turn toward philosophy after i found wittgenstein, and recently i’ve been studying derrida… something that seems almost like a grand finale to my epistemological nihilism. the timing is perfect; derrida’s concept of the ‘trace’, ‘logocentrism’, ‘différance’, ‘binary oppositions’, ‘presence’ and ‘aporia’, are all magnificent insights revealing the essential instability of philosophical text (where they are expressed most). and what’s great about all this is that i get to see it happening in real-time at these forums. it’s almost like i’m taking a class, dude. when i apply the concepts i’ve learned from wittgenstein in a deconstructive approach to what i read here, i see all these things come to life. for example, in one of the freewill threads, there is now a new binary opposition of ‘internal’ and ‘external’. now it’s not the fact that such a dichotomy would be irrelevant to what and how causation works - there is not a space or enclosure or limit at which causation starts or stops working… so ‘inside’ and outside’ are fortuitous terms here - but that even if there were such a difference of space, of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, nobody using the term could define clearly where it was. and yet, they flow right on with the discussion as if this idea is taken for granted and understood by everyone using the term. so with this you get a great example of the wittgensteinian language game - where a word used in an ordinary context to define physical, geometric locations is now transferred into a metaphysical environment where it’s usual connotations are completely missing - as well as derrida’s aporia; the stability of the terms depends solely on ‘what comes next’, but this in turn depends also on what follows, etc. being that the terms are fortuitous to begin with, there can be no ‘right’ direction, and any direction will produce the same ‘sense’ of meaningfulness for the viewers… precisely because they are meaningless. the reader takes possession of the text, decentralizes the transcendental center or intent of the writer, and re-appropriates the meaning to fit what he understands the words to mean. so you finally have a kind of self sustaining logocentric simulacrum freely operating between the writer and reader… wherein the language becomes the destabilized transcendental center rather than the intent of the writer or reader. what occurs is a meaningless freeplay or pantomime of language… by which each interlocutor is only arguing with himself.
a general principle: in language, the signifier is always incompletely defining all the possible ways the signified can be meaningful (cue W’s language games)… and yet at any point that the signifier is pinned down and becomes dependent on ‘what follows’, the aporia results and the text loses all stability by being continuously postponed.
from one nihilist to another, let me suggest that, in fact, the intuitions we experience when we observe what we can’t make any sense of (or multiple senses of… which amounts to the same thing), result from what are actually subtle structures which nonsense and ambiguity must conform to. granted that this is a deconstruction… you might think of it, paradoxically, as the last possible structural approach to language and philosophy. so no, my friend, you are not the crazy one here. on forum boards, insanity is the rule. for the nihilist, it is an exception.
i had breezed by derrida a decade ago without giving him much thought… but this was because i hadn’t yet put the necessary years in to experience exactly what he was on about. now i see it more clearly than ever. odd that many ordinary language philosophers call him an obscurantist. like wittgenstein, he’s actually waged an assault on philosophy for the purposes of returning language from it’s metaphysical environment.
From “Pointlessness Doesn’t Follow from Determinism” at the Breaking the Free Will Illusion website
I’ll be the first to admit that the distinction some make between determinism and fatalism is lost on me.
If the laws of nature determine what the future will be, why is it not reasonable to argue that the future is fated to be what the laws of nature inexorably make it?
Thus what we are compelled to “choose” to do is to participate in the interactions that will unfold into a future that necessarily encompasses these choices.
It’s not a question of mattering but of what we do mattering because in an autonomous world we might have chosen to do something that resulted in an entirely different future.
If, however, the future unfolds only as it must, what we choose to do matters only in the sense that it would matter how the dominoes are set up if in the future they are all to topple.
They would seem to be fated to all topple only if we are fated by nature to set them up so that they will all topple.
How then do others see this distinction between determinism and fatalism?
separate morality from free will
by Phil Goetz
at the lesswrong website
As many here might imagine, my own interest in determinism revolves fundamentally around the question that most interest me philosophically: How ought one to live?
And Kant would seem to be right in the bullseye in noting the clear connection between free will and moral responsibility. If you are not able to freely choose your own behaviors, then being held responsible for them by others is just another way of saying that they are not able to freely choose to hold you responsible.
Then for Kant [and philosophers of his ilk] it is merely a matter of concocting a God such that in a world where we do have autonomy, He becomes the ultimate arbiter on Judgment Day.
On the other hand, if this transcending font is omniscient, how is one able to reconcile human freedom with that?
But here [for me] things immediately get tricky. What does it mean “for all practical purposes” to refer to free will as “a mysterious philosophical phenomenological concept related to consciousness” and then to make a distinction between that and someone “pointing a gun at the agent’s head”?
How and when do the concocted concepts of free will make contact with the behaviors of conscious human beings choosing to point guns at the heads of others?
How are the laws of nature not compelling both one philosopher to define and describe free will conceptually and another philosopher to point a gun at another’s head?
“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine
Let’s be honest: few of us possess in tandem both the mental capacity and the educational background needed to ponder all the balls lofted up into the air inside one or another intellectual contraption like this. Conjectures that attempt to come to grips with an actual choice being made by someone in a particular set of circumstances. And even the neuroscientists who do explore the functioning brain here, do so by and large in a very narrow context: probing the brain thinking and deciding inside one or another fMRI device.
Not only that, but the balls can bump into any number of “conditions” in which the brain is [at times] fiercely tugged and pulled autonomically in any number of directions: drug use, hypnosis, delusions, dementia, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, clinical depression, psychosis; and many other physical and mental disorders.
And what of the dreams that we have? How is this particular “ball” to be grappled with [represented] other then as a classic example of how the brain itself creates these truly astonishing “realities” such that, while in the dream itself, “I” is convinced that it is calling the shots.
From “Pointlessness Doesn’t Follow from Determinism” at the Breaking the Free Will Illusion website
Another point I seem to be entirely missing. If the future unfolds only in accordance with the laws of matter in the present, it will be different only in the sense that here and now we are not around then to note the difference. But it can still only be what it must be.
It’s like nature compels John to set up a million dominoes. And, as it turns out, given the laws of matter, John is compelled to set them up such that they all do [must] topple to form a design that depicts Trump and Putin in bed together.
Now, the dominoes before they topple do not look the same as toppled dominoes. But the present and the future are still no less necessarily intertwined given my own understanding of determinism.
Of course some things would be considerably more problematic in a free will world. On the other hand, other things would change only because in the either/or world the laws of matter are applicable to the past, the present and the future. Anything that we might deem to be “significant” or “better” is still embedded in nature.
On the other other hand, in the is/ought world, free will precipitates any number of conflicts regarding those things deemed by some to be “significant” or “better” that are not deemed that way at all by others.
I must be misunderstanding the point being made here.
Separate morality from free will by Phil Goetz
[from the lesswrong web site]
Of course my own problem here is that many who insist that they do have a “distinct concept of morality”, are very often not willing [or able] to connect the dots between their concept of morality and the manner in which the definition and meaning that they give to it is rendered more substantively/descriptively in regard to their day to day interactions with others.
And if one sees another’s conception of morality as “macro”, what on earth does that mean relating to their actual reaction to the behaviors of others which conflict with their own.
Likewise where are the examples that Kant notes which take this “general description” itself out into world he lived in? And, even in assuming free will, to what extent does he delve into the components of my own moral narrative: the self as the existential agglomeration of particular experiences and relationships; Barrett’s idea of “rival goods”; the role that political power can play in a community that either worships and adores a rival God, or a secular community embedded in a No God ideology like Communism; or one revolving around the nihilistic assumption that prevails among those who are more inclined to embrace a “show me the money” social and economic ethos.
And where is Kant’s deontological morality [for mere mortals] without the transcending font?
How is one to realistically intertwine the metaphysical concept of free will with the actual nitty gritty day to day conflicts that arise from different “one of us” communities insisting that, autonomously, being morally responsible involves behaviors that clearly clash?
Determinism on the other hand subsumes all of this in but the psychological illusion of free will. The clashes are real but they were never able to unfold other than as they must.
This is the part that is particularly problematic to me. Here I’m simply confused regarding the ability of language like this to be brought down to earth and intertwined in an examination, description and analysis of the choices we make.
What on earth is this supposed to mean with respect to the behaviors that we do opt for existentially?
Human consciousness certainly seems able to think up [autonomously or not] an abstraction like a “mysterious philosophical phenomenological concept related to consciousness”. But how “for all practical purposes” is this applicable to someone who does point a gun at another’s head?
“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine
Really well put, right?
To think that “I”, given all of the extraordinary ways in which we are able to experience and express it, can have somehow just evolved “mechanically” from matter that consisted basically of the elements hydrogen and helium just after the Big Bang, seems, well, preposterous.
And yet, come on, who has ever really been able to pin down this “real me”? And look what the brute facticity of the human brain can construct in the way of “I” in dreams. How are “you” then not just a chemical and neurological “contraption”? How are dreams themselves not just the brains very own SIM worlds or Matrix perceptions?
Yet it is here again that I am unable to “think through” speculations of this sort and decide if they are an explanation enough. How might Dennett’s “atmosphere of free will” not be just another manifestation of a brain able to “produce” thinking like this in sync with the psychology [illusion] of free will in sync with a metaphysical determinism?
What on earth can really be demonstrated to be “independent” of a wholly determined universe? Even the “thought experiment” above could be seen as but another necessary manifestation of that which can only ever be.
From “Pointlessness Doesn’t Follow from Determinism” at the Breaking the Free Will Illusion website
by Trick Slattery
But: Is not a determinist compelled by nature to recognize everything only as he or she was ever able to?
And being a nihilist in a determined universe doesn’t make these recognitions any less compelled. And, sure, there might be hundreds of different types of nihilists…but what they would all seem to share in common is their inability to choose to be anything other than what the laws of matter propel them towards.
I’m always perplexed by this sort of thinking. In a determined universe as I understand it, nihilists would seem to be interchangeable with Platonists or Christians or Communists or anarchists or hedonists or sociopaths. No one actually has the free will to choose to be these things. No more so then I have the free will to choose to type these words.
And would not ethical nihilists [like me] necessarily follow along our determined paths?
How could they not?
Instead, there’s a part of me unable to actually believe there isn’t a part of me able to actually choose freely among alternative options. If only, in particular contexts, as an existential contraption.
But this always takes me back to the extraordinary dreams that I have. It simply boggles my mind how convinced I am “in the dream” that it is not a dream at all. That “I” am real, choosing freely to do this instead of that. Then, waking up, I immediately realize that none of it was real. It was al a virtual reality “world” that my brain created out of…what exactly?
separate morality from free will
by Phil Goetz
at the lesswrong website
From my frame of mind, morality in a wholly determined universe is just another example of nature manifesting itself as it does in, say, the unfolding of a natural disaster.
Only unlike the mindless matter interacting in, say, a tornado, the matter in the human brain is able to delude itself into believing that human interactions are qualitatively different. Why? Because, through human consciousness, matter “chooses” to unfold only as it must.
Always and ever the mystery of mind.
An ignorant [but autonomous] alien would note human interactions as seemingly predicated on the free will of the men and women they are observing. But a more sophisticated [and autonomous] alien would point out that nothing they “choose” to do in interacting was ever really of their own volition. Just as we understand that when we see characters in a film, we know they are not “in the moment” up on the screen choosing to do what they do. And, besides, the director and the screen writer are choreographing “the action”. But that too is only another manifestation of nature. They are no less compelled to do only what they must.
But even if our species does in fact interact as autonomous beings, morality [as I understand it] is still not something that can be pinned down essentially.
The problem I have with Kant [in an autonomous universe] is the extent to which he failed to take into account the components of my own moral narrative. Through his own rendition of God, he provided us with a font that enabled him to argue that moral interactions can be embedded categorically and imperatively in rational moral obligations.
“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine
This is basically what I keep coming back to. Are the laws of matter compelling nature to compel my brain to compel my fingers to types these words…or is there some facet of “I” here that does in fact participate in “changing the outcome” such that my posting these words and your reading them might possibly have been other then what in fact it turns out to be?
Sans the demon or God.
Can we somehow choose to duck and not be hit by the ball? Or does the autonomous alien note that we did in fact duck, but recognizes that our “choice” to duck was only embedded in the psychological illusion of free will embedded ontologically in the immutable laws of matter?
And this gets us to the nitty gritty for many in regard to the correct answer here. If the swing is only as a result of “a million little deterministic factors” [going back presumably to the Big Bang or to whatever else explains Existence] then the golfer who believes this can insist that he missed the putt only because there was never a chance of him making it.
Whereas the golfer who refuses to believe in a determined putt, makes it, and then insists this revolves solely around his great skill as a golfer.
From “Pointlessness Doesn’t Follow from Determinism” at the Breaking the Free Will Illusion website
by Trick Slattery
Here however I make the distinction between existential and essential meaning. Having free will would certainly seem to permit us to ascribe particular meaning to particular things, interactions, relationships. But in the is/ought world the ascriptions relating to conflicting goods would be embedded more in existential contraptions than in essential truths rooted in Gods or deontological philosophical concoctions or nature or political ideology.
But having some measure of autonomy is clearly of fundamental importance.
After all, any meaning we ascribed to anything in a determined universe is only meaning we were never able not to ascribe.
Over and again: I must be missing something here. In our waking hours, the entirety of our coherent thought in a determined world would be the equivalent of the entirety of our coherent thought in our dreams: wholly compelled by a brain wholly compelled by the laws of matter.
The difference is merely embedded in all that we are yet to grasp about the physiological relationship between the brain, the mind and “I”.
From my perspective, he seems to make his argument as though he is somehow able to insert “I” into it in much the same manner as someone who believed in free will would.
The fact of the matter. Exactly. How is that not the fact of the matter here?
“Causality and consistency” as it is applicable in determining “what matters” and what is “important” to us, regarding the behaviors we choose, is determined by nature.
Nature has merely evolved into brains evolving into minds evolving into an “I” that is able to delude itself into thinking that what matters and what is important to “me” is because that’s what “I” was able to freely discern for myself.
separate morality from free will
by Phil Goetz
at the lesswrong website
If there is no free will then whatever we call human interactions [inside or outside the law] is in turn necessarily embedded in the laws of matter. So, what difference [ultimately] does it make regarding discussions and debates like this, if they are determined/fated/inexorably compelled by nature to unfold only as they must.
All “practical questions” would seem to be interchangeable with all “practical answers” here: wholly determined.
You can never choose autonomously to do either the right or the wrong thing in a determined universe. Why? Because “right” and “wrong” are just words that were compelled to be invented by those compelled to speak the English language embedded in the psychological illusion of free will. Which is then embedded ontologically in whatever brought into existence nature and its material laws.
If, again, that, in and of itself, can ever actually be known for sure.
I found this not clear at all. So if you know what he is trying to say, can you paraphrase it.
Do you mean ‘is determined’ by 'is embedded in the laws of nature`?.
Well, it does seem like if one truly believed in determinism one would be interested in other activities. That’s my take. I’d rather eat cake. Of course, the determinist can argue that he or she is compelled to participate in the discussion, but then, I find it odd that their belief in determinism wouldn’t compell them to lose interest in such discussions. What odd machines they are?
It seems like you are saying that determinism, if it is the case, precludes morality. I think I agree. We might still desire to punish people. We might loathe and dislike certain acts. But moral judgments seem odd, yes. Unlike peacegirl, I do not see any of this necessitating turning the other cheek. I will still be interested in responding to slaps with a slap. At least in many cases. I will still want certain people behind bars. But I may be missing things in your post. I found your writing a bit hard to understand. I think I agree, but I might be misunderstanding you.
yes. Though it gets even muddier if it was Kant’s idea of autonomous.
Not that desires necessarily offer autonomy, but one’s moral duty, it would seem to me, often comes from outside oneself-like in Kant’s time from the church. That hardly seems autonomous.
And if we look in brains, than this kind of moral duty would include some parts of the brain that one’s desires would not. It’s like saying that if this part of me is in charge than I am free and if this part of me is in charge I am not.
It’s like we’ve given up having an internal unity or democracy.
Well, from my frame of mind, he is suggesting that those behaviors most folks distinguish as either moral or immoral can be called one rather than the other by folks who assume that if there is no free will what difference does it make.
I’m merely suggesting that it “makes no difference” because in a determined universe anything that we think, feel, say or do is only as it every could have been.
The tricky part here for those who profess to believe in a determined universe is that they either do or not not acknowledge that even their own analysis of it is only and always in sync with the laws of matter.
Whereas I have taken a particular leap here and now to determinism but I have no way in which to grasp all that can be known about existence itself in order to pin this down…such that I am actually able to demonstrate to others that we do in fact live in a determined universe.
As with “I” in the is/ought world, “I” contemplating quandaries this mind-boggling are at a loss to anchor the “self” to anything solid enough to compel confidence in whatever happens to be believed here and now “in ones head”.
“I” might have a new experience, engage in a new discussion or come upon new information and knowledge, that changes my mind about all of this. Thus, only in what appears [to me] to be the rock solid either/or world do I feel more confident about what I believe.
I mean this: if the human brain turns out to be no less an inherent, necessary manifestation of nature’s physical, material, phenomenological etc., laws then you were compelled by these laws to type those words. Just as I was compelled to read them and am now compelled to type these words in turn.
Nothing that is matter would seem to be exempt.
Only I have no way in which to go beyond my very own intellectual assumptions here in demonstrating that.
Bottom line [mine]: If determinism is in fact as I understand it – though what are the odds of that? – all that is “inside my head” is seamlessly intertwined in all that is “out in the world” to be the only possible reality.
Unless…
…unless human consciousness is [somehow] not like other matter. Call it a ghost in the machine, call it a spirit, call it a soul. But something so phenomenal it is actually able to choose among options in the manner in which most free will advocates understand it.
But: If either side has presented an irrefutable argument and/or a mountain of evidence to demonstrate it one way or the other, I myself have missed it.
No, my point is more in the way of suggesting that even this exchange itself precludes any measure of autonomy. I ponder the meaning of “I” as dasein confronting conflicting goods in a world propelled by political and economic power. But only because I am compelled by nature to. And what you think you agree or disagree regarding is no less embedded necessarily in the only possible reality.
But that can only be predicated on assumptions that I make. I am not a neuroscientist engaged in the sort of fMRI experiments that probe these things “for all practical purposes”. But even they themselves are unable to finally pin the whole truth down. To the best of my knowledge anyway.
Unlike you being unlike peacegirl, I presume that the manner in which we are like or dislike others is all merely a manifestation of human dominoes being toppled by the laws of matter having been set up by…by what exactly? By God? By whatever brought into existence, existence itself?
I am or am not compelled by nature to think that many folks are or are not compelled by nature to be perturbed by my points here. Why? Because right from the start, I am suggesting that anything that we think, feel, say or do is “beyond our control”.
And that, even to the extent that it is within our control, we will go to the grave ignorant of so much that we still don’t know about existence itself.
It’s just that some [compelled or not] find that frame of mind bleaker than others.
We’re all seemingly in that boat though. We come to the part where the words we use here are connected more to the definitions and the meaning that we give to them in our intellectual contraptions.
Rather than in any capacity we have to demonstrate that, even if we can agree on the definition and the meaning, we are then able to actually prove that human interactions either are wholly determined or are within some measure of our control autonomously.
