Freewill exists

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.

Because till you show technically and unequivocally where and how pure flux becomes (“the illusion of”) entity which then continues to determine its environment through its illusory being, you’re not really saying much at all.

Urwrong, this is what everybody is getting stuck at. Nothing is ‘determined’ in the way of there being some entity in nature that has a preconceived idea of what will happen before it happens. Nature isn’t a ‘determiner’, but this can’t mean that there is no causation.

What were doing is anthropomorphizing nature when we think we can refute causation by attacking the concept of ‘determine’… which would be to attribute something to nature that it can’t have/do. It’s a red herring. Nature doesn’t plan or foresee anything… but causation does not need these things to exist.

‘Determinism’ is just a convenient word to call the position, but technically it confuses the matter.

Ah but what of the will, of the human with the right idea of himself? He is not led by the affected states but by his god-like being, his conatus.

Provisionary statement:

We become free-willed when we attain a proper consciousness regarding the forces that constitute us.

Argument against:

We are still always determined by these exterior forces.

Argument against that:

Impossible to demonstrate, therefore moot.

Commentary:

Things are determined by themselves in so far as their selves are the dominant factor in appropriating forces of the environment.
In so far as they are self-determined, they can not be adequately or accurately defined in terms of their exterior, because the way the exterior interacts with the entity is fundamentally unpredictable.

Anything which is fundamentally unpredictable is logically nondescript, which means it can’t philosophically exist.

Argument against Silhouette:

If discrete identity is an illusion, then to argue on its ground is error. No?

Therefore, whenever you use any pronouns, or confine any concept into a semantic form, you are screwing around and mumbling, metaphysically speaking.

You can’t state your thesis without denying it by the very tools you use to state it.

It seems to me the only way to keep Experientialism pure is by answering everything with either silence, or saying something like “See? Experience!”

Everyones lies and bullshit and ego and ambition as well as their truths and what not are equally valid as experience, all equally indicating experience.

Nice. Going to moot. Should be done more often. One quibble: it’s not just that one would be determined by external forces, it would include internal forces. Unless one is saying that all forces are external to consciousness (which is sort of like an epiphenomenalism claim). If my internal forces are determined by past internal forces and external forces, then my organism goes this way or that way, but it is all predetermined. Few determinists would say that other people and natural forces external to us completely control us. They would just argue that internal and external causes are the same in that they are determined by the moment before.

I think there are problems with claiming one knows determinism is the case, since determinism, if it is the case, makes knowledge claims very questionable. They are compelled. They would seem right. Etc.

I can’t do anything about determinism vs. free will. But I can (or I am compelled to) make decisions that increase the range of responses I make and the skills with which I make these choices. There is a difference between a rigid person who has only a few ways of responding and someone who is flexible and skilled - even if free will does not exist. One can also choose to (or be compelled to) decide that one will get out of one’s own way. Eliminate guilt, go for things one wants, more towards more freedom. This freedom is not a degree of free will, but a more flexible and fitting to one’s desires and needs situation for oneself. Prison, for example, is, for most, very limited. There can be jobs and relationships that are prisons in a metaphorical sense. Learning, skill aquisition, deciding to look at things in oneself and society one might find unpleasant, can lead to greater freedom. Again, with the whole issue of free will vs. determinism black boxed.

Yes, determinism is the science of determining causes and effects. It goes a long way, but it isn’t by ANY means comprehensive. Its basic buffer is the Standard Model and this is under constant subtle revision.

It doesn’t mean that nothing can be identified except as a cause or effect to something else.

Yes I did provide for that here:

“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?”

So the Spinozan question here is, when do internal forces become truly part of us?
He argues that it is once we know and understand them.

Until there are forces inside of us that we aren’t conscious of, we are being lived (determined) by these forces rather than by our own (Id)entity.

So our Identity is something we grow into, qua, basically, wisdom.

And as wee grow into our (id)entity, we become free. That is to say: we can’t be defined (predicted) any longer except in terms of what is clearly in our own self interest (our power to continue to be).

Its all pretty simple really when it comes down to the quality of life standard that is the real issue here.
But theoretically-semantically it gets really convoluted.
But almost everyone really knows that to be free means to know oneself means to have power, and that its fucking hard to attain a complete state of that.

Yes it is like robbing someone of their sword at gunpoint and then saying: see? there are no weapons.

Or something like that.

This is what Spinoza would call the process of becoming oneself. Meaning, becoming self-determining.
And what is self-determining if not “free”?

Free to oneself, of course.
Not: free from oneself.

These are two different kinds of freedom altogether which are haphazardly conflated throughout any free will discussion.

And it all ultimately resolves only in the question: where the hell did being come from anyway?
Obviously the Big Bang is simply a projection of the dilemma. Everything came out of nothing because the laws of nature didn’t apply in nothing. Yeah.