Freewill exists

Then are we all in agreement, or?

Seems like we re not dumb enough to keep disagreeing in perpetuity on matters which are of some real interest.
On top of that though there is the rank order of free will as a result of a honing process. Since free will comes about, rather than that it is present from the outset, free will is literally and in both ways the end of determination. Determination (not determinism) leads in the end to a state which can only further determine itself.
Much like parents can feed and kick around a Childe until it becomes powerful enough and rational enough to make its path for itself. As an analogy.

To address a post I missed, before I get round to newer posts:

The problem is that yes, the steps are as clear as day and I do understand both sides - that’s the whole reason I choose the better one and not the one with internal contradictions. I’m also well aware of Compatibilism, but internal contradictions aren’t dilluted away by compromise. Evolution also shows examples of species going extinct, so this argument from evolution isn’t exactly compelling.

Your attitude sounds like the logical fallacy of “Argument to Moderation”.

Done that, made a whole new original philosophy about it…

Yes, complexity - as has been covered by now - does not yield Free Will. It just means it’s more intellectually demanding to get your head around the deterministic mechanisms that predict complexity. Exploiting the system isn’t breaking the mechanisms, it just means complexity has successfully enabled mechanical manipulation of the mechanisms. This opens up a larger quantity of “things we know how to do within the system”. The layman use of “freedom” is synonymous with this, but it’s a misnomer because you’re still just as bound by the way nature works that can successfully be modelled in terms of rules, which are deterministic. Again, it’s not to say nature has Determinism built into it, I am no Essentialist, all it’s saying is that the authority of the ways in which nature appears to consistently work - in the cases of scientific laws working without exception - map nature with such precision that it may as well be its essence even if it isn’t its essence.

Maybe there will be a next step after Determinism, just like Determinism was the next step after Free Will. No doubt this is why we still have artifacts of its previous reign in our grammar. And to be pedantic, the ocean isn’t blue, it reflects mostly the sky, which is only sometimes blue in accordance with Rayleigh Scattering.

As above, there may very well be a next step, but the one we’re on now that’s up from Free Will, is Determinism. Keeping your backfoot on the lower step sounds more like denial to me. I am biased towards superior ideas, I am afraid, but little else. The whole reason I’ve broken out of a limbo like yours is because I am extremely “self” aware - so much so that the idea of self at all has dissipated away.

Why do you feel the need to assume such negativity in a person who doesn’t think like you? Perhaps you “feel” this is “logical/reasonable” (your words) because you consider yourself to be in such a positive state that can only be reached in the way you’ve reached it. If it’s not the only way then you are fallaciously “affirming the consequent”. Your experience is that most of the time when people dislike religion it’s over fear or ego (pride), which may very well simply be a reflection on the breadth of your inexperience! For example, many people in the modern world simply grow up secularly these days - was their lack of exposure to religion at an early, susceptible and credulous age causing them to not align with religion out of fear or ego (pride)? What about someone who took standards of knowledge seriously - who acquainted themselves with what constitutes knowledge, what the requirements are and what doesn’t pass these requirements? Philosophers ought to be wary of fallacies of questionable cause and improper premise. For example, if you are looking for evidence to support your religion or idea of spirituality, this is circular reasoning: assuming the conclusion. I am well aware of the tendency of the religious and spiritual types to fit evidence to their religion. If you are going to be strict about what constitutes knowledge, you ought to devise controls to isolate specific variables that are causing specific outcomes - you ought to test if what you thought was linked to something quantitatively is linked with more than random chance. Nothing religious or spiritual, however intense and life changing your experiences that you associate with them, turns out to be causal to any extent more than random chance - and this is with people trying their hardest to prove a connection for a very very very long time! Not one has legimitately succeeded. Sure, keep trying - we don’t want to fall for the problem of induction, but it’s worth thinking ruthlessly about what you are testing for when looking for evidence of religious and/or spiritual concepts. How exactly can you test for these things? The only negativity I’ve experienced towards religion/spirituality is how none of it remotely stands up to Epistemological requirements. I was raised around Christian practices, I was interested in Taoism for a few years, tried meditation on many occassions in formative years + would again if I felt like it, experimented with hallcinogenic drugs, I’ve read about a third of the Quran so far - of course I’m still interested in finding something of substance, and by no means am I assuming anything about what I will find even in spite of everything I’ve just said, but do not do not do not assume I’ve not looked hard enough or that I’ve been assuming outcomes in advance. Just because the evidence is all but closed, doesn’t mean my mind isn’t open, and just because I am siding with the overwhelming winner, doesn’t mean I am not looking for contradictory evidence. The only way I can justify being so sure is exactly because I am so open to alternatives - but being open doesn’t mean being accepting without discretion and standards. Saying no after due consideration doesn’t mean prior bias, and it doesn’t make one “negative” as a person.

Continuous experience isn’t “anything”, it just is. Doesn’t mean Free Will is in there somewhere, Free Will is just a model in terms of Discrete Experience much like Determinism, but older and far less refined. You can interpret Continuous Experience in terms of Discrete Experience in line with Free Will all you like, you’re just doing a crappy job compared to advanced evolutions beyond this, like Determinism.

Whether the universe is open, closed or flat is hardly as clear cut as you’re making out here. You shouldn’t proclaim to know these things with such certainty when even the best minds in physics are so far from confirming anything - as far as I know at least. Perhaps you’re on top of these issues or secretly at the cutting edge of research here in which case please enlighten us! I don’t want to assume but I have a good idea that you’re simply assuming.

Then you won’t mind if I too laugh at you for thinking I’m saying we’re not more complex than a cell or simple neuron. There’s a hell of a lot of these things, and their connections with each other outnumber atoms in the universe - and yet they all individually work very simply. They either fire or don’t, subject to deterministic conditions, it’s just keeping track of the sheer number of them that’s the current barrier to reading brains like computer bits. But the size of a problem doesn’t change the fact that it’s all based on extremely simple, understandable mechanisms. It only results in such a compelling outcome because of quantity. Again: quantity/complexity doesn’t yield “Free Will”.

“Confined” by Determinism? I’ll say it again, it’s not Determinism that confines, it’s Determinism that describes the confines of nature - and what is not confined by the four fundamental forces? Even consciousness relies on them by way of the neurons that don’t fire resulting in no conscioiusness. We aren’t any more free from the four fundamental forces now we know what they are and now we can use them to our own advantage, we just have more tools in our Deterministic toolkit. That doesn’t make free, it just gives more options, which is only mistakenly thought of as synonymous because the ways of nature remain - that we are not free from.

“Were you there?” May I laugh one more time? The only way we have to know what happened in the past, or what will happen in the future is Determinism. We know it works because of relentless testing and attempts to find contrary evidence and grounds to discredit theories - this is the scientific method. How can you predict the weather on the other side of the earth when you aren’t there? Determinism. Were you there when they elected a leader in another country? How do you know they did? Are you ever in the future when you predict a ball is going to bounce off a wall that you’re throwing it at? How can you know if you don’t live in the future? Nuff said. Don’t go all Creationist or Flat-Earther on me. The thing about science is that you can test Determinism yourself! I know you’re a nice, well-adjusted gentleman who accepts both sides of the argument, but just there it sounded a lot like you were casting unreasonable doubt on Determinism - not that it’s necessarily impossible that the four fundamental forces will change in the next second but y’know… I’ll take my chances. Again - I’m not being absolutist, but relativism can tend towards the absolute pretty far in certain cases! But we can know that any doubt won’t be replaced by contradictary ideas by means of logic. Perhaps the prevalence of logic will disappear in the next second as well?

Thank you for noticing. Nice to have someone who is philosophically versed around town.

Analogical cliffs/water or actual cliffs/water?

I can assure you that flies don’t dive under water because of their sense of self-identity.
I say it again: humans take 6 years to even cobble together a sense of identity, flies don’t live longer than a month.

Why don’t they dive underwater? They’re just following the sensory stimuli they find most attractive without any idea what they’re doing or why - which breeds out the suicidal ones, leaving the ones that don’t dive under water. Feral kids have an instinctual fear of heights - no identity needed here either. Neither has a sense of identity, and even if the feral kid cobbled something resembling one together, it doesn’t need it to survive - none of us do. We create one because it makes communication possible, the literal abstraction through language away from truth in order to transfer it to another, such that it can be translated back into concrete action.

They’re descriptions, not entities - in the same way a verb differs from a noun. We don’t need RM:AO or VO to understand that, do we? It’s a relative model, not absolute reality in itself.

Science would beg to differ.

Regrettably, language is the only tool we have to abstract as well as we currently can - from reality, accepting the illusion that the signifier (word) represents the signified (reality) - and back to reality after the intention of the illusion is understood. It’s not ideal, but by the acceptance of a lie, truth can be communicated.

Yes, and this is the alternative to the lie of language and identity (Discrete Experience) i.e. utility as opposed to truth. Truth is tautologous and doesn’t really say anything by itself - you need a lie to say something.

Silhouette,

Other posters in this thread brought up this argument, which I’m going to put in my own words, and I’m curious as to your response:

If everything is determined, then we have no way of testing / falsifying truth claims (including determinism)… we were all just determined to think and act the way that we do, to believe what’s true and not true (regardless of whether it is true).

You claim it’s the best theory because you can test it, but, truly, by definition, it’s not falsifiable, it lends itself to zero testing.

My question to you is, understanding all of that, how can we all stand back and falsify or even have this discussion in the first place?

We know it can’t be 100% determinism, that’s not falsifiable, so what is it?

What’s the remainder?

How can I step back in a 100% deterministic system and say that determinism lends itself to zero testing, like philosophically, how am I able to do that? To step outside the system we’re all bound by and analyze it as feedback upon itself and question it using logic and reason?

Interesting statement.

sure but the conatus, that ‘striving’, precedes the personal conception of self and doesn’t begin as/with self-awareness… so we wouldn’t say that one only begins to ‘will’ with the cogito, with consciousness, with self-awareness. so there can be no personal or internal cartesian entity or ‘will’ particular to a person except for the purposes of using the word in ordinary speech. it’s that cross-roads at which we use the word metaphorically (as ‘he has a strong will’ and ‘use your will power’, etc.) and use the word philosophically, that creates confusions. it’s all about the context of the use. discussion here tends to talk of it as if it were a possession or a special property or even a substance in itself. but as i said… and N has said this in so many ways as well… there are no individual ‘wills’. will power is already happening, conatus is already striving for perseverance, long before that long line of complex causes and mechanisms makes it possible in the human being to be conscious and self-aware. now if you realize that these causes are not one’s own - one by no means sets them into motion - then to lay claim to one’s ‘will’ as something distinct and separate from something external is like a false dichotomy of sorts. think of deleuze’s ‘plane of immanence’. no more ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, no more boundaries or closed systems. the conatus pervades through everything, and unities are only temporarily organized forces in cooperation with each other so that some particular thing can persist. but that particular thing doesn’t have it’s own conatus for reasons of there being no cartesian ‘self’ except as a ‘habit of grammar’, as N put it (sort of).

consider how schopenhauer describes the ‘will’. that’s more to the point. individual things are representations of a universal will, not the origins of will… not a moment where a new will comes into being at the conception of the individual.

i’d not call determinism a science, because it’s certainly not empirical and neither is it falsifiable (ecmandu got one right!). the idea of causation is wholly rational… even deductive if one’s premises are self evident… and kant would argue that experience is impossible without causation being first an a priori category of reason. so there’s no science to it… but a helluva lot of logic and rationale.

yeah that’s a big problem with spinoza’s Ethics… something academics are still arguing over. it makes little sense to say at one moment ‘all things happen through necessity’ and then in the next ‘knowledge of causes increases one’s freedom’. what he must mean here is not what i think people think he means. i think he means that in being aware of causation in the sense of being able to identify regularity in nature, one increases one’s capacity to act in the way of being able to utilize that regularity… being able to predict and know in advance what is likely to happen. for example; astrophysicists, in knowing how physical forces work, can successfully send a shuttle into space. this is a great increase in capacity to act… but there is nothing really ‘free’ about any of this. capacity to act can’t mean ‘to stop being caused’, but only to be able to do more, due to one’s awareness of what can be expected by any number of processes of phenomena.

I wouldn’t say grow into, a lot of people don’t grow into wisdom, it’s a choice more so, conscious pursuit. Everyone sees it on their death bed though.

When does the inside start being a part of us? Do you mean now when do we become conscious? Or do you mean when did consciousness evolve out of subconsciousness, the inverting?

I was fighting about this with Jakob ages ago.

So the cogito is not the starting point. But what you call as coming before, the chains of cause-consequence or pre-conscious mechanisms as you describe them and probably I guess in general come after cogito, not before, they have been cogitoed.

So what is the starting point? i think you get that right. The problem is the starting point. And it is not cogito. As Nietzsche also described and I’ve read you agree with, logic and cause-consequence are also artifacts of the cogito, post-cogiting.

Well then as a straight line it is a lost cause. It is not cogito but all words come from cogiting. Or not… But all words have been cogited.

So then? What is the starting point?

Don’t give me “because it is convenient.” What a cowardly load of crap.

Shit I forgot why I had stopped doing philosophy.

I’m getting that abyss headache. I already got all the answers I needed from it, but good luck to you all.

I’ll just skip ahead and tell you the answer I arrived at, shortened, post-Nietzschefied (not out of further progression but out of industrial necessity): It starts at what matters. Before anything, before any thought or impulse or anything, what is there is what matters.

You can be fully surviving out in a jungle in deep correspondence with a million non human forces or sitting in a room within a room within a room in the dark thinking about abstract non-desribables. You can be feeling love in a dumb way or considering the strategic facets of a tennis match and high-finance simultaneously.

You can be minding the gas station in a remote town on your 75th year and drinking bear and vibing on it, scowling at strangers. You can be in a state where even human disappears.

You can be in the full envelopping furor of day to day communist struggle. You can be a schitzophrenic (Deleuze had a fetish with that one) in the midst of a global consipracy. You can know 200 words or 2000000.

You can have an identity as an individual or literally not have one. Most of history has held most humans to not even have the idea “individual.” A baby feels, thinks, but doesn’t even realize hands can be someone’s hands. Someone doesn’t exist. Does the baby not exist? Where you not a baby?

Do you exist?

What matters?

Anyone who knows me a bit knows I don’t really think that people think.
The cogito as an agent or argument is perfect bollocks, until someone actually thinks, which in my eyes Im the first one on the sweet earf to really do.

That is, I became truly conscious of what thought is made out of. Namely, and Pedro is right here, of valuing. That is to say, until you know what really matters to you, there is no way you can ever have a real thought.

Look at it this way. When do people start to act somewhat rationally? Only when they’re in danger. I.e. when they really, really need to. But being rational isn’t sufficient for thinking. Thinking requires sound structure. That wasn’t required hitherto, not for human survival.

Back to Spinoza though. His argument with Conatus isn’t that it starts with thinking, rather that self awareness is the end product, or comes toward the end. As a final reckoning of valuing with itself.

All in all everyone who makes sense agrees that nothing happens inside a consciousness until it matters to the person who is conscious. But I saw that consciousness itself is a symptom of something mattering (like pain, fear or hunger). We aren’t ever conscious of something that doesn’t matter to us altogether. This is as consistently so as that a tub of water is never ever filled with water except with water. Its tautologically so.

Furthermore I hope someone has witnessed my identification of Silhouettes fallacy. I Socratizsed so well that he in the end gave this as an explanation of his position - “we can’t say anything without lying”. I.e. “This statement is false”. I don’t think anyone has ever been Socratized harder.

The self awareness of an individual consists of its needs, values.
The baby knows it is something by wanting milk. Not until its own hands begin to matter to it (when it wants other shit) will it recognize hands at all. Nor its hands nor others hands.

A creature is aware of existing only to the degree that this awareness is necessary for its existence.

All modern “self-awareness” is illusion. As are all modern selves. You don’t know what you are until you know that you are, and this only happens once you really are. And modern society doesn’t really provide the environment for that.

HAIL ODIN

hey yo but that’s what it is. A convenience in an ordinary, non-metaphysical, convention of language. Of course there’s a ‘self’ and an identity… We talk of these things everyday. But when we transpose these concepts into philosophical language to use as a basis to defend metaphysical freewill, everything gets real sketchy. If these niggas is using the meaning of these concepts wrongly, then the conclusions which follow will be nonsense. I’m saying (and many other serious thinkers as well… Peter hacker, for instance) that the argument for freewill proceeds wrongly from the confused idea of what ‘self’ means.

In the end, you can speak of freewill in a non technical language all day, and everything is cool. But don’t take it into philosophy because it won’t fly there.

We can’t be sure there WAS a starting point. Aquinas could be terribly wrong in his ontological argument. But we do know that existence does not pertain to the essence of the modes which are human beings. While we aren’t contingent and causally necessary, fuck hold on gotta go. Be back later.

For good measure, the term “free will” originally simply means the gift of physical freedom, of living without constraints and being able to do as one pleases. As in, he does something not out of fear of punishment but out of free will.

In as far as we are discussing it as a metaphysical thing, it can either mean something nonsensical, some spark of divinity or something which is untied to any causality, or it can mean a being which is so in tune (resonant) with that which caused it, that it has become, in its self-perpetuation, a causa-sui.

The deeper question here is a logical-scientific one. It is: how can one particle determine the course of another, if it doesn’t also partly determine itself?

A famous criticism of Falsificationism was that it was not falsifiable itself.
So I guess we shouldn’t bother making sure knowledge is falsifiable and go back to simply claiming stuff that can’t be tested?

So the question is if things are only going to turn out one way, that we’re all going to believe what’s true and what’s not true, regardless of whether it actually is true - yet this goes for all stances, even Free Will. Even if Free Will could be true, and you decided every choice free from causal influence, whilst somehow also being influenced by your experiences/preferences/tendencies, and also able to influence causal events even though they don’t influence you, except in the ways they do (you get the picture), things would equally only ever turn out one way, and we’d all believe what’s true and what’s not true, regardless of whether it actually is true.

What’s the difference to the argument, whether Determinism can model exactly how the self is entirely influenced by causation, or if Will tries to claim that you’re both partly influenced whilst also not influenced at the same time?

I think the intention of the question is to frame “testing falsifiable truth claims” as only possible if you could have done otherwise, yes? If so, putting the answer of Free Will into the question itself commits the logical fallacy of “Begging the Question”. What’s really going on is that the consequences of testing amount to determining that you recognise truth from falsehood to your determined ability. The danger here to is to confuse Determinism with Fatalism, and to think that you’re destined to think and act the way we do regardless of what tests we do - this is not the case. The difference is that with Determinism you are determined to react to testing in the way you are determined to, and this causal chain can potentially be followed to work out the way someone thinks and acts in advance, where Fatalism claims in advance that one will think and act in a certain way regardless of any causal chain. Both can result in foresight, but the means to those ends are the difference: one depends on interactions, for the other your interactions are irrelevant - and it always tends to be the latter that Free Will advocates are actually protesting against, which they confuse as Determinism when it is actually Fatalism that they don’t like. I think the question probably wants to put Determinism in terms of Fatalism, like it doesn’t matter what you do, but in Determinism it does matter what you do. What gives this away is phrasing like “we are all just determined”, as if the core of Determinism itself (i.e. determining) was irrelevant.

What ends up happening is that those who are determined to want to test claims, and those who are determined to recognise truth from falsehood will succeed and outbreed those who fail in either or both of these respects. If you are determined to think and act the way you do, the ones that believe what is closest to “whether it is true” will proliferate, and the ones that believe what is less close to “whether it is true” will die out - that’s the real test. Natural Selection is a neat answer to the question, which is why there are a lot more determinists around today than there was even just a few millenia ago. It started with people reacting to situations largely instinctually, one case at a time. It evolved to the personification of consistent events in the form of multiple gods, who determined each type of case as the prima causa in their own field. It evolved to the consolidation of these forces into one God who was the prima causa for absolutely everything all at once at all times, except able to give you your own limited ability to be a prima causa and therefore solely responsible for your own decisions, to be tested and judged by God Himself - the birth of guilt. These days, Free Will advocates still hold on to the idea that they are their own prima causa who can choose ex nihilo like “God Himself”, often after the death of God in their everyday lives with more and more Secularism around the globe. Intellectuals have learned to quantify and harness the forces formerly attributed simply “to God”, allowing Compatibilists to simultaneously think of themselves as a prima causa as well as being able to harness Determinism - the best of both worlds. But really they are only yielding the creations of the Determinists who understand how causation works through everything, even “the self” - this is the next evolution. “Historical Materialism” in action before our very eyes (though I would correct “Materialism” to “Experientialism”) - that’s how you step back and analyse Determinism’s feedback upon itself.

So yeah, still 100% Determinism (only tentatively maybe less than 100% Determinism if and only if there is any indeterminacy at play underneath anything - order emerging from literal chaos, not just from complexity) - until we evolve not only out of Free Will altogether, with everyone not only up to the next step of hard Determinism, but also beyond to the next step after even that - assuming this is possible. But for now, yes, 100% Determinism.

We had a discussion? Why was I not informed?

I answered some of your questions, you responded that I made an interesting statement, and suddenly I’ve been Socratised between your response and your new claim? What are you, Bill Cosby? I feel violated.

I gather that you want to simultaneously claim I’ve contradicted myself, or at least resorted to a paradox, and that you Socratised me at some point previously to this - all in the same sentence.

Consider: are these statements logically equivalent?
a) This statement is false
b) This statement has truth, but is based on something false

For example, if you tell a fictional story that never happened, but it communicates a truth, is this communication a falsity?
The means were false, but the ends were truth.
“a” is flatly a logical paradox, where as “b” refers to two different things: (A ∧ ¬A) as opposed to (A ∧ ¬B).

I don’t mean to Socratise you back, so I hope I don’t get your hopes up and lead you on 8-[

What happens in society, isn’t that. It’s “this is truth” and it’s looked at as false until experienced with the correct variables that show it is indeed true. Trial and error. Ones vision is what creates a falsity, truth just is.

If you’ve been told a story that is truth, but looked at it as false, is it false? Based on ones /own/ vision of that story as literal instead of metaphorical? What if you don’t understand the language of the story being depicted? Do you still have grounds to claim what it is?

There’s debate amongst artists whether to leave art open to interpretation, or to deliver a message. Does the artist intend one or the other? And if they choose the former, of course the experiencer of said art has grounds to claim what it is. If the artist chooses the latter, then those grounds are removed from the feet of the experiencer. A political analogy might be a democracy versus a dictatorship. A democratic artist might insert intricate expressions of meaning into a story that might even be picked up by the observer - an attraction to the treasure hunter, or explorer types. A dictatorial one might do the same, in which case the experiencer has no grounds to claim what it is unless they pick up on exactly the intended message. The problem is: how do you know the intention of the artist? If they tell you, the piece of art may as well be dictatorial either way: either you are commanded to make up your own interpretation or you are commanded to receive the intended interpretation.

So what is the intention of the story?

This is the question that must answered before your question can be answered.

Innocence until proven guilty: I support this. “One’s vision”, yes, is an imperfect judgement - it opens up the possibility of falsity, and also truth - I would say relatively so, as Discrete Experience. Truth just “is”, indeed: Continuous Experience.

When Free Will is proven guilty, it was treated as innocent until then, and now not so. Using language in a way proven false, but to deliver truth: what then? Truth, from which language is abstracted, just “is”. Language lies that it is not “just is”, in order to transfer meaning for the purposes of utility - language is like vision: creating relative falsity/truthfulness in a transitive way: “true TO ” as oppossed to simply “True” intransitively.