Freewill exists

Yet we’re here from the rock as symbolizing the unconscious aspects of reality. How is it a strawman? If determinists can say “i know what an atom or neuron is doing and so I know what you’re doing” then the same argument can be made for comparing the unconscious to the conscious. That’s not a strawman, that’s reality. The unconscious and subconscious aspects in reality and in humanity are what granted consciousness, value fits into this argument and we project value, nothing else does. Which this value can become entrapment or liberating, that’s up to the individual who values.

To compare neurons with the entirety of consciousness or the human, is a ridiculous argument. I am not a single neuron and my brain is not a single neuron, they are subconscious/unconscious… humanity is conscious. I don’t understand how it’s not easily seen, that there are LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. If there are LEVELS of consciousness then that is a DETERMINED more free and less free in regards to INSTINCT. admit it already so we can move on to how we’re going to wake up the monkeys in society.

Determinism is cause and effect yeah? Well free will is understanding that cause and effect and with attribution of VALLUE. Free will is the VALUE one can determine or project onto other things or aspects by creating or letting go of attachment and past/present/future.

Never said I was free in an absolute sense but the absolute freewill is the same infinity that determinism has already laid out for us to tread on its path of understanding knowledge. Are you saying that understanding or wisdom ends and is not continual and infinite? The day wisdom and change ends will be the day you can say free will isn’t absolute. Your decision to pursue a more free will than yesterday. That’s on you. The absolute is observable but may not be attainable, never stated we had an absolute free will, only that it is visible by the same continuity of information that determinism has determined.

I don’t move to learn because of my own wish? So I didn’t sever all attachment with my past and experience to remain unbiased in searching for understanding? So then what’s suicide? What’s value? I can easily kill my self, the fact that I don’t IS MY wish, acceptance. I never said it is all due to me that I am here, it is due to me after I understood I am here and why, who, what, when, where, how, that makes it my choice. Understanding grants responsibility.

I’m unconscious to why I have my own desires? What’s suppression then, what’s psychology? Am I? Speak for yourself. If I have a bias, I can remember back in my past and sever attachment to the experience of which created a bias, welcome to Buddha. You speak of genetic desires? Oh? What’s molecular/chemical treatment by medicine? What’s being conscious of environment so that we may shape our own genetics by consistency of trial and error? Don’t make your self seem so small, you’re a a millions of years old experiment, you aren’t as small as you’d like to think. You should pay attention to the future and advocate for it because the answers are coming, to which you will have no more arguments that confine a human will, and if no confinement then there is no argument of which will isn’t free. What’s genetics, what’s ancestry? Pretty sure a doctor has to trace ones ancestry to figure out an illness embedded in genetic history, of which genetic history IS able to be altered by environment. So tell me, where are you not free?

Spinoza must not have practiced the buddha’s philosophy of attachment and value attribution.

Consciousness of Desires alone aren’t what make one not free, it’s the -freedom- to act on those desires or not based on what? Oh, in value… well look at that.
Free to weigh the losses/benefits of every cause and effect scenario, exploit. I don’t think dogs know chocolate kills them, they require direct experience to value. We’re past that to an extent because we have already been embedded with the direct experiences in our subconscious/unconscious past, which granted us what? Well welcome to consciousness.

You misconceive what I state. I never stated we are free of the game, I stated we are free in how we play it. Want a new set of desires? Reset yourself. Only a man insecure with himself will use the argument of desires being the confines against a will that is free in use, even if those desires don’t have to be followed through on, freedom isn’t always built off happiness, in fact, much the opposite.

That an appeal to authority? Funny how humans look in the past to take the pasts word solely, when they are the present because of the past and are genetically superior. What’s evolution if not? Respect your roots sure but no one is saying to remain tangled in them.

Again, I’m a compatibilist.

The person who is a determinist is afraid of judgement (consent violation)

The denial of determinism is a fear of assenting to consent violation.

These positions both come from fear.

Both exist, it’s not hard to see. I don’t deny either side. Absolutes on both side exist but may not be attainable to us, the fact of the matter is, we can see the absolutes and are in the middle ground.

If you think rocks are “more complicated” than humanity and the human brain, or that inanimate objects are in anyway ‘conscious’ then, big lolz…

Artimas is right.

Silhouette and the whole “fundamental force quantum quarks are as ‘determined’ as organic life, particularly humans” is the real “strawman” argument.

Not mine…

The unconscious aspects of reality are at the very least instinctual but not subconscious/conscious

Unconscious = instinctual experience
Subconscious = instinctual experience and knowing, knowledge and learning of value comes from this stage.

Conscious = understanding of knowing and instinctual experience with the use of value attributing that is the knowledge from the previous state of subconsciousness and experience from both layers of sub/unconscious.

It’s good to have you around Karpel, as a genuine neutral voice on this issue. I can understand how insufferable it may be to deal with people such as myself firmly standing by points of view, that we really think justify being stood by.

I’m inclined to agree that complexity does not yield freedom. Of course it’s true, to the extent that we currently understand it, that humans are far more complex than things like rocks - and that’s the only real difference. Somehow complexity results in descriptive models such as Determinism no longer applying?? But to give us a first hand taste of the sort of intellects that are able to go no further than arguing from incredulity in such a way, the guy seems to have understood what you said as the literal opposite of what you said in his response to you :laughing:

I note your comment that determinists have all sorts of problems to deal with. I don’t want to drag you into any discussion that you want to blackbox, but what sorts of problems are you thinking of? You mention a problem of how one knows one is rational if they believe in Determinism. To appeal to a word that derives from the same root as rational: ratio, which is numbering/calculating etc. - there’s simply more attribution of measurable concepts in Determinism than Free Will. It’s more testable, it’s more precise and discerning - all of the things that one requires for knowledge. For example, where Free Will simply discerns between conscious/unconscious as Artimas is accentuating, perhaps mind/matter in line with the seemingly necessary Dualism required to believe in Free Will, Determinism goes into far more details of neuroscience, down to the level of individual cells in the brain and beyond. I think by the very definition of the word rational, Determinism clearly involves more. I would like to stress that I don’t believe any narrative of understanding can ever be absolute - also by definition - Determinism is simply more true to the world (far far far more).

I wouldn’t want anyone thinking I am right by virtue of the effort I put in my post - I don’t want that to add to any perception of impeachability. It would be fallacious to give my arguments more credit than what can be derived through their content alone - though actually I can’t find any name for it, perhaps some kind of fallacy by association with hints of argument from authority, but not really.

I do it to aid in clarity and specificity - I want to be sure I know exactly what my position is before I explain it, and I want to help others know this too to aid in my quest to find someone who can poke legitimate holes in what I have to say. Obfuscation is the last thing I want to be involved in. A problem I have with your writing, Mr. Mandu, is I have to read your sentences multiple times to try and coax out exactly what is being referred to, for example. When you use too many pronouns in one sentence, don’t explain non-standard terminology, and gloss over the absolute crux of your argument too lightly, it really makes it a chore to read and engage with you. I’ve said before that poor writing can be a sign of poor thinking, but I don’t want to assume this. When I try and phrase what I say, I am stretching my theory of mind as far as I can to make sure that someone who isn’t me ought to be able to understand what I’m saying - I recommend this for everyone, though plenty of people here are sufficient enough in this capacity.

How would you define the distinction between capitalising the term, and not? Honestly, I don’t want to take any credit that I don’t deserve - I only capitalise terms like this when they’re standard terminology, like one would capitalise Proper Nouns.

I think he was referring more to the incessant tedium of Urwrongx1000. Your zeal may be a little misplaced, though it’s true he was phrasing his post in a general manner.

I wonder if you associate Determinism purely as reliant on Materialism? I would disagree, if this is the case. If I had to choose a more standard ontology, I actually find myself more inclined towards something like Panpsychism. But in an attempted synthesis between this and the Logical Positivism that came after it, which has obvious ties to Determinism, this is why I propose my more neutral “Experientialism” - where experience is the fundamental subtance that incorporates both mind and matter. In my view, given the mind/matter dichotomy, it should be clear that matter only occurred to anyone in the first place as something viewed in terms of mind. It was only subsequently that this was inverted such that mind was then put in terms of matter - which has problems of the sort you seem to be pointing out. “The hard problem of consciousness” comes to mind. As such, I would prefer to think of matter as quanta of mind’s qualia, which I model as Discrete Experience versus Continuous Experience respectively. They are two forms of the same thing as a Monism rather than a Dualism: experience. You can “deal with” the discreteness of matter - it has utility where the true continuity of mind cannot be dealt with: the former models the latter. They are “of” the same thing, but serve differently. So whilst the ontological and epistemological ideals and absolutes reside in “that which is modelled”, the models themselves are the reals and relatives - and this is where Determinism comes in. It comes in terms of Discrete Experience to model Continuous Experience as the relatively most real and transitively true model of it. Free Will is a more primitive version of modelling Discrete Experience in far less precise terms - something more like a first attempt in the same way that religion is like a first attempt at science. We got better at this and now have Determinism.

Hopefully, if you can see the sense in this, you will now see how concepts such as “value” are not a problem for my philosophy. Nor is consciousness, and the Hard Problem of Consciousness no longer applies.

This is why I sing such high praise of Experientialism, because the simple distinction between truth and utility in terms of experience, monistically, solves a ton of traditional philosophical conundrums.

I’ll try to read your longer posts in due course and maybe respond to them at another time - like I did with your last longer post.

I think generally the above is analysis through modeling, but the general tone reflects what I was tempted to write responsibly, but much overtly in line with general opinions of my method of muddling up arguments.
Then again, I was compelled to add it, since the analysis above is really a peeling back from and through language qua consciousness as defined by Artemis, and left unqualified by Silhouette.
But I’ll add the narrative anyway, not as an exhibition of anything, but rather, a showing of following with the intent of getting on board, from and through non deconstructed level of meaning and value.:

Here I quote myself :

"Perceiving is the substata of understanding and knowing , derived from patterning and rearranging forms of experience, leads toward understanding knowledge. The cogito ergo sum could not have ever begun without mirroring,
primarily self mirroring .

Therefore 'cogito ergo sum" must have always been 'sum est percipii". How come it took 500 years to find this missing link?

For the man in the middle , the compatibility can only begin with the most outer layers’ synthesis, the most general patent outlines , and venture into and toward the quantum composition of spatially determined time.
The very earliest contention between seemingly opposite logical systems, preceeds, (Parmenedies / Heraclitus).
through the three conversions starting from ancient materialism, modern differentiation (Descartes-Leibnitz) and post modern phenomenology ( Husserl)

Where we are at now is beyond that, a re integration of and through all these temporal signifiers through various holographic quantum energy systems,

If such are based on constant processes of replication , then a substratum, must have effects of variable" formal and contextual degrees of differentiation of energy systems.

Implying variable energy systems cutting off at critical points which are perceived as more or less determinant , and systematically lower giving rise to perceptions of absolute freedom of will, or lack of".

Now what started me thinking the above , is this from Siluette-

“So whilst the ontological and epistemological ideals and absolutes reside in “that which is modelled”, the models themselves are the reals and relatives - and this is where Determinism come…”

(The difficulty I am having is very slight but still the idea of abstracting from which is modeled to the ideals and relatives lead to the heart of derivation , of abstraction and derivation. At different levels of modeling such correlation of ideas indicate less and not more residual content), and does reaffirm the very general parenthesis between language as knowledge and language as understanding.)

I find this argument rest in a word ‘reside in’ , contentious for definitional reasons, the ideals , models, absolutes, relatives reals, appear patently more prone toward less structurally complex, - leading to projective assumptions of positivism in language, ( in Artemis view, more in line with a deterministic interpretation , then his conscious/subconscious understanding) - [ I think there is no needless emphasis , when 'rests there ’ implies a setting up of the basic contradiction of the kind preset by Heraclitus and Parmenedies, and gives more slant toward less complex dynamics toward the implications toward relative value, here. Such is the stuff contradiction is made of, and can indicate a mild form of the circularity that was inherent with dualism. In its mild form, redundancy can mitigate complexity, at least informally interpreted as here I am attempting.
Meaning: within these informal , relative values , one may get lost within the model, the object, that determines the transcendental utility within which the argument implies; the differential ability of the model, either as appearance or understanding. Such will lead to the contradiction between understanding and knowledge.

The peeling away from more to lessening levels of complexity, may not determine anything else but a show of preferential bias of arguing from and through logical contingency than necessity, giving an impression of allowing more value for meaning per-se, and as such, the formally determined sequence of the effects , that modeling has more open , cognitive, rather then ‘less conscious’ mind-neural activities.

For these work antagonistically, by mirroring as modeling, rather then modeling on previous cognative constructs.

As a parting shot. such reductive view, becomes more necessary as the mentioned neural links become prevy to more.mechanistic effects on consciousness, replacing sub conscious distinctions. Whereas, on that level , there appears more uncertainty and diffusion and interpenetrability between them.

Silhouette,

Sorry if my clarity is lacking for you. I always consider that to be the authors responsibility.

This is where I think you lost the argument, discussion, debate … whatever.

The cliff is ultimate reality, it’s the most objective of the objective. people will act the same no matter what they say, even if what they say shows that they don’t believe the cliff is ultimate reality.

After a while of this, it becomes incredulous.

Nobody contradicts ultimate reality as they see it, regardless of what they say.

You say that ultimate reality is no identity (no cliff), but nobody contradicts ultimate reality as they see it. Your ultimate reality is identity (even though you claim that it isn’t), and thus, you never come close to stepping off the cliff (true ultimate reality).

I’ve already explained that the reason I’m so keen on the identity argument, is that when dismantled, it brings us back to the remainder argument of mine.

I have a method to this, and I’m not going to chase unnecessary tails to get to the heart of this thread.

You’ve been gracious enough not to call me unresponsive. I said that about you once.

So here we are.

I think you’re the opposite of unresponsive :smiley: If I’ve been unresponsive to you before it’s because I can’t pick out exactly what it is that you’re trying to say. My criticism of your lack of clarity isn’t meant as offense, it’s just a barrier that affects my ability to respond as well as I would like. And the whole mesa analogy thing is just another level of removal between me and your point - and not for lack of trying, I’ve somewhat lost a taste for trying any further to get to it. You might just as easily blame me for not being able to understand you - I think it’s your explanations, but I don’t want to guarantee that 100%. But it’s always nice to have some self-improvement to work on, no?

I wouldn’t be so hasty in calling victory, it seems more like an impasse. Neither of us has moved, and you don’t seem to think you’ve “lost” any more than I do. For me, I can’t see you saying anything more than “well actions are the ultimate arbiter of what you believe, regardless of what you say”, or words to that effect.

It might have gotten lost somewhere that by my “actions” not matching what I say, I mean by my use of language - involving all the usual syntax that inherently implies identity. Pronouns like “I” and “you” especially. I don’t mean by my physical movements around the world. Those actions are perfectly in tune with the ultimate reality that I’m declaring. I think the actions of the physical world take precedence over the action of using conventional language, because truth takes precedence over utility. I don’t think my use of language ought to make others incredulous concerning what I’m using language to say - it’s just a means to communicate, not a direct presentation of the Continuous Experience that is the world. Language is “of” the world, it isn’t the world itself.

So based on this, I can’t accept the argument that “actions are the ultimate arbiter etc.” because it doesn’t apply to what I mean. That’s why I can’t, in all honesty, concede any defeat to you. I get the feeling that I’m constantly missing points of yours because I don’t understand the sentence construction, so continuing to get to the bottom of this is unlikely to get beyond the impasse where we are…

I have the same issue with Meno - perhaps it’s me who is at fault. I rarely understand what he’s saying so I tend to avoid engagement. For example, to his above post - I can barely make head nor tail of it. Apparently I didn’t qualify consciousness or something? I don’t know what was being required of me here. I think I can make out the gist of most of the sentences, but I can’t tell what his point is. Perhaps somebody can translate? I’m sorry, Meno - I don’t mean to be rude. If it’s any consolation - English is a dumb language. Unfortunately it’s the only one I speak with anything close to fluency.

Silhuette,

I can say this: I do understand You for the most part, I feel safe to say that You are literal, but less so relatively speaking. I am almost certain, that whereas I am constantly making points allusively , with poignant references to less then proximate movement away from the center, to farther assumptions,than it needs or should which is used referentially.

I do apologise, main point being that as a consequence , You’re style tends me to shortcut reasoning below toward the use of contradictory language, which in it’self tends to seek verification within its own absolute domain, excluding those which tend to be more familial then approximage.

I am not writing this to elicit an involvement , but rather, to say that there may be other reasons than lack of clarity for this.

Often , on these boards, and I am not at all implying anything, lack of clarity is given as a reason rather then others more consuming.

Silhouette,

I’ll try to make this as clear as I possibly can:

Utility (identity) is not ultimate truth to you, yet, nobody ever contradicts ultimate truth.

This is an easy exception to your Tu Quoque stance.

You’ve shown that utility (identity) is the ONLY important thing to you … while you state that it is not ultimate reality.

No matter how much you state that the cliff doesn’t exist in ultimate reality, you never step off it (stop posting on ILP). The cliff (identity) is ultimate reality not only to you, but everyone. Nobody contradicts ultimate reality, regardless of what they profess.

Oh I got that bit. I mean, didn’t I sum it up by “well actions are the ultimate arbiter of what you believe, regardless of what you say” - as a reiteration of your point? You are nice and clear in the above quote btw, even if not quite representative of me.

I know nobody contradicts ultimate truth… that’s what I mean by all physical actions being perfectly in tune with what I’m saying (no identity). It’s only language that is violating ultimate truth by dissecting its continuity into Discrete Experience, so that we can talk about it, for which we invent concepts like identity. So identity is only important to anyone for the purposes of utility. That’s why we all speak in terms of it. Communication is important to social beings like us - not so much for a fly, for example. Flies do not suffer existential crises every time they dodge your attempts to swat them, they are purely instinctual and it gets them through life. If we could live as instinctually as them, like feral children, identity wouldn’t be important at all. One would just be living reactionarily, moment to moment, without developing a sense of identity - which children only do from about age 6 if they grow up in adequately social conditions. Identity is a construction - you can’t tell me that I show that identity is the only important thing to me when it’s made up. Ultimate reality, pre-identity if you like, is all anyone needs unless they want to communicate. Identity is an add-on, a bonus.

In reality, not that I want to get back into this analogy, we’re stepping off cliffs that aren’t actually there all the time - as I said before. We just speak in terms of staying away from the cliff edge, because it’s there that we understand what we each mean.

You can say the mesa is there by definition of being a mesa, but our actions prove it isn’t all the time - it’s only our words that say otherwise.

I get what you’re trying to say, do you not get what I’m trying to say? What you’re saying doesn’t represent me - I don’t know how to be any clearer than I am. We’re only going to get beyond an impasse if we’re agreeing on one another’s representations of the other. It’s known as Steelmanning, if you haven’t heard of the term before.

… but what does more ‘complicated’ mean? no matter how he defines it, you’d not be willing to retract your belief in freewill because you don’t know what the concept of metaphysical freewill is… what it is asserting. Silhouette and peacegirl (to an extent… but she’s a ‘soft-determinist’) are the only ones in this thread who know what in sam hill is going on here.

now you tell me; what is the special property a human being has that makes it immune to influence of the natural forces? ‘consciousness’? but consciousness is an effect, not a cause… unless you believe that thoughts can move objects.

when comparing rocks to humans, of course we can say that there is a greater complexity of system processes, but processes aren’t things, aren’t physical, they are descriptions of behavior. we’re not questioning how things behave, but why they behave as they do, and process is not an explanation for this… at least not at the fundamental level we are examining here. now if you disregard the differences in processes for a moment and look for the property that all things have in common, you’ll see that they are all objects located in space/time. now if causation affects all things in space/time, what is that special property human beings have that makes them exempt to these causal forces? forget about your consciousness, your ‘thinking’… this is not a property in a physical sense… not even a thing… but a descriptive process for a kind of behavior; you don’t ‘have’ consciousness, you don’t ‘do’ consciousness. you ‘act’ consciously or not, and we say you are conscious not because we ‘see’ or have located in your brain some special feature which we can say of ‘wait… that’s not part of the brain… that’s something else’. rather we see corresponding behavior states to mental states, and while these are sometimes interchangeable (mental state x may be contiguous to behavior y, or vice versa), there is nothing showing that a mental state doesn’t, itself, follow causally sufficient antecedent conditions… conditions you didn’t spring into being by ‘thinking’.

all this talk about slave mentality and subconscious/unconscious instinct and psyche and power totems and yada yada yada is neither here nor there. until you can demonstrate a substance - such as an acausal ‘soul’ - that cannot be affected by the physical causation that affects everything else in the universe, you cannot assert that there is metaphysical freewill.

you guys really, really need to do some research on the philosophy of freewill and determinism so you can know exactly what you’re saying when you say freewill is real. i can tell by your arguments that you haven’t done this. i know this because you aren’t even defending freewill properly… much less refuting determinism. if i can come in here and present a better argument in defense of freewill (even though it would be sophistry), you guys ain’t hittin’ on shit.

i’ll even give you a push. read over hume’s problem of induction so you can get an understanding of the only solid empirical argument against causality. and then look at kant’s reply to hume on this problem. finally, look at how spinoza treats the problem, and you’ll find the strongest deductive proofs for the existence of causality that stand on a purely rational foundation. you’ll discover that you don’t need to ‘experience’ causality to know that it exists and that everything in existence is subject to it. no ‘wiggle’ room, no ‘yeah this is determined but not that… not all the way, not completely.’ and if you find the shit too dry, check out richard taylor, roderick chisholm, and peter van inwagen.

man i don’t what ya’lls deal is. it’s like you’re scared of the shit or something. like it’s not even a big deal, though. what are you gonna do if suddenly you realize there’s no freewill? stop getting out of bed in the morning? what, do you need to believe in freewill to make your life meaningful? you think if the world woke up tomorrow and stopped believing in freewill, there’d be any less responsibility and culpability? hell naw, man. it was never about freewill in the first place because there’s no such thing. the entire corpus of judicial law and morality is founded on power relations, and you can bet your ass there will always be consequences for what people do. that shit in a court room about ‘yeah but you knew it was wrong’ or ‘but you could have chosen not to do it’ is nothing but a sophisticated language game ministering to some kind of exchange/subordination of power. morality and freewill is just a cover-up for this dynamic. the shit isn’t real, bro!

ya’ll need to spend a whole week studying substance dualism, because that’s what you’re all doing… and ya’ll don’t even know it. don’t think anything you say in defense of freewill hasn’t already been said, said better than you, and thoroughly refuted. ya’ll niggas is better than this amateur shit you’re doing.

promethean75, out.

Silhouette,

Feral kids don’t jump off cliffs and flies don’t dive under water.

They have identities that to them is ultimate truth

“Proper Nouns.”

Right, exactly.

It’s not about being “immune” to natural forces or influences. It’s about being aware of what those forces truly are. My position is Epistemological and Silhouette knows this full well. If Science and Physicists don’t know what’s going on in existence, to a degree of certainty, then what makes Silhouette take the extra seven steps to claim that “everything is always already determined, before anybody knows about it”? I have my own presumptions there. But the difference between what is known and guessed at, is obvious. Beyond a certain point, nobody can say “what is determined” or not, because if you could, then you could predict the future with 100% accuracy. Nobody can, not even close. So Silhouette neither has evidence nor proof for his position.

It’s a weak position. And I think more are catching onto this obviousness.

^

Ive read a bunch of pages of this debate and its great.

Almost all aspects are covered.

Except this tiny one, literally tiny:

If all is determined by outside forces, or forces inside that don’t essentially belong to the determined thing, how are all these forces even recognizable in the form of a thing, which appears to have an entity?

I believe we arrive either at RM:AO or at VO.