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.