Will is based on Desire and Need. The Will (“Wanting”) of any and every organism, represents its genetic composition and survival-instinct. In evolved creatures, humans, this ‘Will’ develops to the point of Artifice. Mankind has sufficed almost all animal needs and so works on something “better” and “perfect”. Mankind produces Art for example, and Athletic excellence. Now, that you and Silhouette both want to ignore all this, to try to scrounge and scrape any kind of ‘point’, is your prerogative. But I presume that underneath the veneer, you actually know what I’m talking about, but don’t want to agree out of pride or wanting to maintain a sense of control in this conversation.
But it’s common-sense. Now why is Will Free? I’ve already explained, many times, re-worded, but it doesn’t seem to click in some brains. So I’ll just keep repeating and rephrasing it.
Freedom is the Essence of the Will because that is the very nature of survival itself anyway. Life needs to survive, and so it makes choices, some of which get (most) animals killed on a daily basis. An animal is being pursued by a predator. It chooses to dodge left instead of right. Wrong choice, it dies. Or another animal chooses to dodge right instead of left. Right choice, it survives. That’s “freedom”, meaning, the ability to choose from countless/infinite parameters, and facing the consequences for those actions.
The “consequences for those actions” is the hurdle and wall that you and Silhouette cannot pass. It’s your dead-end. Neither you nor him understand that in so being ‘free’ means that there are consequences for choices, and penalties/pain to be paid for wrong choices.
You should be familiar with this, but, you don’t seem to be.
Here’s another interesting thing. When a person keeps repeating a wrong choice, and paying for it, you would think it would learn. But that’s not always true. Many times, or most of the time, individual animals, and humans, seem drawn to distinct Vices, and through those Vices, keep paying a steep price all the way to the end of life, Death. What does that have to do with Freedom? From the point-of-view of Vices, it will seem ‘Determined’ that people will keep making wrong-choices, to the bitter-end.
I could explain more, but, what’s the point? I need to have an ‘equal’ opposition in a dialogue and discussion. Otherwise it’s one-sided, and you probably wouldn’t learn anything anyway.
Since that is the case, I’ll just talk to “The Audience” and continue on with the thread.
Why are some unique, exceptional, and rare organisms “Responsible for things” and can make “Choices”, but most if not everybody-else, cannot? For example, plants and trees don’t make “choices”. Maybe even insects and worms, don’t make “choices”. Maybe even mammals don’t make “Choices”. Maybe most humans don’t make “Choices”, but live under the illusion they do. This is the Deterministic mind-set of Sil and Prom. Everybody believes they’re making choices, but they’re not. “Choice” is meaningless, to the Determinist.
Regardless, there has to be some Agency, somewhere, making Choices, if not the Determinist-himself, and if-not mammals, and if-not birds, and if-not insects. Something has to be Culpable, Accountable, Responsible. Hmmm, I wonder who that could be?
Determinists are ex-Christians/Abrahamists. They still have a sense of Authority, which is why the appeal to “Science/Scientists”/Theoretical Physicists/Somebody Smarter than themselves. If you notice Silhouette and Promethean, they admitted several times, that “it’s science”, which is a fallacy, but let’s grant them that. If you want to do even a mediocre level of philosophy, you have to grant your opposition lots of fallacies, lots of irrationality. Let them have it.
So how is it that “Science gets to Choose” but nobody and nothing else does? There must be some Higher Intelligence and Higher Agency, yes???
This “reasoning” and rationality reeks of Religion. It’s God. God did it. God is the ultimate Authority. God made the Universe, Existence, Created it. And that was the First Cause. And from that Cause, comes all other Causes and Causality-itself.
Just cut through all the bullshit, Sil and Prom, how is your “reasoning” any different??? It’s the exact-same thing.
At least my position is rational and makes sense. I say as always said: No Beginning, No End, and Freedom in-between.
Without Free-Will, there is no Agency, and so there is no Morality.
Now the correct “Determinist” response is, “we all ended up this way by chance, or by some Higher Power, or by some Force”.
Can the Determinist determine the means of his Determinism?
No, apparently by Sil and Prom, Determinists are Un-Determined about the source of their Determinism.
There’s nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s achievements, but I find boasting about what one believes to be theirs a waste of time and a distraction from the OP.
Once established and made, our positions and arguments speak for themselves, there’s no need to talk about how smart you supposedly are or how dumb your opponent is, it’s already apparent in everything you’ve written to anyone with a brain.
All it does is demonstrate where your priorities are: less on knowledge and understanding and more on looking good in the eyes of others.
Some of us are smarter than others, but I’ve yet to engage someone with a less than average iQ on these boards.
Some are average, most are above, and yet the range of opinions expressed is very broad, everything from the strict materialist to the strict idealist, everything from the far left to the far right and beyond.
It should be established and commonly accepted, and I’m certain it is intuitively anyway, that “Higher Ability” = More Choice / Freer. So those who are stronger, are freer. Those who are faster, are freer. Those who are smarter, are freer. Does this mean that humans can fly like birds, or birds can play pianos like humans? No, but, relative to the body and purpose of any organism, freedom is a function of its genes and adaptation. Organisms exist to convert & change environments to their own favor, meaning adaptation. The organism changes itself, relative to the environment. And the environment in-turn changes, relative to the particular organism.
This allows humans maximum ‘freedom’ within humane and hospitable environments. Men are not ‘free’ in space. In space, outside Earth, there is no oxygen. So man is confined, Limited to, their spacecrafts.
Freedom is always relative; I think that’s the problem that Sil and Prom have.
But in its most abstracted sense, Physical Freedom means the ability to move, and move objects, within a specific environment. Furthermore, Mental Freedom means the ability to think, reason, and comprehend foreign ideas/concepts which others or most both cannot and will not consider. So a “freest human”, in every sense of freedom, would be a Free-Man. I believe that, to push the topic forward, this has Political and Social ramifications. Liberals would tend to surmise from this, that “Freedom” means no longer being responsible for Oneself. You can harm people, but without penalty, because you are blameless and never responsible. If you run your car through pedestrians at a sidewalk, then it’s their fault, for not moving out of the way of your car. Liberalism, is a disease in this sense. And that is the vibe I get from Sil and Prom, a deeply selfish mentality, that is blameless to the point, completely devoid of Agency. There’s “nothing” there.
So Liberal-Freedom, in the Post-Modern sense, is a contradiction of itself. There is no Moral Agency, and so a person can never Cause anything to be. Everybody is a permanent victim, and so, a slave-dialectic for a slave-population.
Freewill (along with willpower and intellect), insofar as it exists, can be good or bad from a social Darwinian standpoint.
You have the freedom to repress or beneficially modify unhealthy instincts, but also the freedom to repress or detrimentally modify healthy ones.
Btw what constitutes healthy or unhealthy can vary from place-time to place-time.
Sentient animals, perhaps humans especially have gotten far removed from nature and some of our natural instincts, and I think we can agree that hasn’t always been a good thing, ultimately it may even be our undoing.
There are consequences for choices and penalties to be paid for wrong ones but sometimes for the right ones also
Mistakes are unavoidable but also necessary because it is through those experiences that we grow as moral beings
There are agencies which absorbed responsibility in the hierarchy or the agencies’ standing, where responsibility induced far enough down that hierarchy may perceive perceived vastly larger latitude of action , without needing to find right from wrong.
The liberal trend in the enforcement of misdemeanors and infractions stemming from traffic violations have been grossly liberalized within the span of the last few decades. The gradations within the liberal spectrum have had causitive underlying politocal and economic pressures upon them, which harm to be relaxed for various reasons. The conservative overall agenda may have such pockets within them, appearing as such, and in no way conflicting with overall conservative positions.
As matter of fact , such do the opposite to what they seem, and the contradiction is illusionary, for they are based not on logistics of equaminty, but serve compensatory goals for stability.
The same goes form the appearent moral/ethical divide.
The contradiction is subscribed to, for political , reactionary purposes.
It is a matter of perception, determinism could be associated with pessimism/nihilism from my view and free will the opposite, if you balance yourself between the two extremes, you see that both exist. It depends upon the mind in which one sees realities functioning. The semantics don’t really even matter, we all speak differently but of the same thing ultimately but from my consensus, without a free will we cannot observe a deterministic system, it would be impossible because the system itself would not reveal itself, yet it does and we discuss such, it’s because no matter what we do, we have the option to learn contextually, negative or positive. But the contrast shapes the perception you see. For every bad there is a good, extremes and a middle. The balance achieved is where one may switch their own perception to see both sides of just about anything,(often referred to as enlightenment) the philosophical capability to learn just about anything in existence. Even the imagination is real, we may or may not manifest anything within its realm, the real question is, should we and what.
Man this is a crazy existence and world to be in, I’m glad I am here with you all, despite our differences in language and perception.
Determinism determined itself free you see, by allowing learning to be available to perception contextually through any scenario. For every question, the contextual questions may be posed, learned/undeestood and answered, who, why, where, what, why, how, and for every possible question we are lead to, there will always be more contextual freedom than not. I hope this makes sense. And if such is the case that more of those contextual questions are free in terms of availability of options than not, then the will is more free than not and may only grow more free through an inevitability that is both absolute but at the same time a continuity, wisdom.
Now what follows is just a thought experiment, I haven’t given this that much thought and may very well be dead wrong about it:
But, is determinism really that falsifiable?
If I flip a coin 100 times, odds are I’ll get heads about 50 times and tails 50.
However, what are the odds I’ll get heads exactly 50 times and tails 50?
It’s more likely I’ll get heads 50 times and tails 50 than any other outcome, like say getting heads 100 times and tails 0 or vice versa, the two least likely outcomes, but getting H51 and T49 or vice versa isn’t much less likely than H50 and T50, nor H52 and T48 and so on, so it’s actually very unlikely I’ll get exactly H50 and T50.
Now what if I flipped the coin in 100 sets, and in each set I flipped it 100 times?
While getting close to H50 and T50 would probably come up much or most of the time, in some sets I might get about H80 and T20 or vice versa, in a few sets I might even get close to 100H and 0T or vice versa.
Now when we look at human behavior, we look for patterns…in fact we’re pattern fixated, we ignore randomness, so there may be far more of it out there, and in here than we’re aware of, or care to admit.
Humans are complicated beings, and while no behavior may appear in the same or very similar situations 100% of the time, some behaviors show up more frequently than others.
Some behavioral patterns, like consuming food over non-food occur frequently (but yes there’s exceptions, like people eating deodorant, glue, etcetera), but other behavioral patterns are weak to nonexistent, like what color we prefer, there doesn’t appear to be a strong tendency in color preference among humans as a whole.
And some behaviors, like trying to shove a bowling ball through your ear while licking a pinecone and bouncing on one foot to the rhythm of Joy Division’s song ‘dance to the radio’ probably never made an appearance, altho it may after me writing this.
Now what makes us so certain any of these behavioral patterns were determined?
What even makes it probable?
Again, even in a perfectly random, extremely complex system, where lots of things are occurring over a very long period of time, patterns, like getting heads thousands, perhaps millions of times while getting tails only once are bound to show up from time to time, it still wouldn’t prove it’s not perfectly random.
Perhaps human beings and everything we do is an exercise of freewill…perhaps the entire cosmos is.
For the determinist, one instance of H2 and T0 is enough to prove the cosmos prefers H, and for the indeterminist, one instance of H1 and T1 is enough to prove the cosmos has no preference, but in this cosmos, we encounter billions of things we think we can explain, and billions of things we think we can’t, billions of instances of chaos and billions of order.
Todays inexplicable becomes tomorrows explicable and vice versa.
Today it’s fashionable to think the cosmos is 100% orderly, and that instances of apparent chaos are a by-product of order, but yesterday it wasn’t and tomorrow it probably won’t be either, it could just as easily be said the apparent order is a by-product of chaos.
I made a similar point before, I’m not sure if it was in this thread or “New Discovery” but basically the idea was that it’s the consistency of usage of free will that blinds us to its existing and so we automatically bounce to another idea, which is determinism and both do exist but work based off of the framework of one’s mind and their perception of reality. The key is to learn to swap perception at will, once this is learned and understood, one can see so much and think so deep that ones mind will show them near whatever it is one wishes to see.
Chaos does still exist, it always will. Just like darkness and nothingness. The oldest teaches it’s youngest brother and even if the oldest were to die completely, the youngest brother will still carry within it, it’s older brothers lessons. And if carried still, it is not truly dead. Contrast has to exist for balance and existence to be. So we are caught up in an ever growing/expanding variety of differentiating contrasts that never ends in it’s multiplying variables. Determinism and free will are two contrasts go each other in language, yet both exist based off perception. I view it a little more objectively though, such as a subconscious state being much more deterministic than a conscious state. The observation can be made by us viewing humanity in comparison to animals in nature. We as conscious individuals compared to animals whom are subconscious.
A subconscious state, I view as something that can possess knowledge and understand from direct experience to an extent but not able to always apply such knowledge effectively nor think in terms of a priori.
Conscious state is being able to understand knowledge completely with usage of a-priori as well.
those determinists are just as confused as the freewillists. in the same way that pure nihilism is impossible (everyone values something), fatalism is as well. it makes not one iota of difference what the cause of me deciding to eat a bagel really is; would i decide not to eat the bagel if i discovered my choice was caused by something other than myself?
‘here man, have a bagel’
'can’t do it, bro. i’m not sure it’ll be my choice to take it. what if my brain is making me think i chose to take it? ’
‘wtf difference does it make, dude?’
‘it fucking makes a difference dude because i want what i do, to matter… i want to be the one in control, i want the freedom to be able to choose or not choose to eat the bagel. if i can’t be certain i don’t have the freewill to take that bagel, i won’t take it and i’ll sit right here and fucking starve to death because i’m a fatalist and a nihilist and a pessimist now’
‘suit yourself. one more bagel for me.’
now, would he really do this? this is what i mean when i say there is very little praxis in this problem; very little is changed by the verdict except for a reorientation of moral attitude toward others. you’d find no observable difference between a determinist and a freewillist except that the freewillist will have a tendency to complain more… especially about what other people do. when the freewillist is offended, he blames and manipulates and undermines, he poisons the conscience. when the determinist is offended, he attacks. he couldn’t give two shits about what the cause really is. x does y and i don’t like y; attack. get her done, bro. moreover, the determinist also possesses greater patience and undertanding. he knows choices are never random… he knows people can’t not believe what they do is the ‘right’ thing to do… he knows everyone acts toward greater satisfaction. he is quicker to put himself ‘in the other’s shoes’, to switch perspectives. he is in every way conceivable more evolved, intellectually and spiritually. the freewillist is a philosophical toddler by comparison who’s world would come crashing down at the thought of no longer being able hate something. and this is only the psychological profile of the freewillist. the intellectual profile is even worse. like the freewill/determinism test is one of the easiest to pass. it’s hardly even philosophy 101.
naw, this is an ‘all or none’ deal, bro. either the natural laws pervade completely and absolutely throughout all space/time, or they do not. there is no ‘sometimes’ my choice is free and ‘sometimes’ it isn’t. there is no sometimes a special causative immaterial cartesian agency breaches material causes and makes the body move and sometimes it doesn’t.
oh c’mere ya big lug. give us a hug. i know it’s hard, man. the internet is a veritable cornucopia of philosophical nonsense and it’s very easy to get swept up in it if you aren’t careful. imma look out for you though, homes.
A determinist is someone whom gives power to context over will, instead of will having power over context. Whichever you believe, will be. I see it everyday. No excuses, no blame, no complaining. What do I care if one sacrifices their only freedom, will? The only effect it has on me is universal for the entire species, it doesn’t help me more than it helps the individual trapped by context, aka determinism. The only absolutes that I can see exist for sure are, nothing, something, energy, pain, wisdom. Determinism isn’t an absolute when it is in the process of freeing itself. Though you can observe them both being somewhat absolute, determinism being a past absolute. Free will being a future absolute though both are continuities in a sense, based off perception.
It isn’t ‘sometimes’. That isn’t what is being said. It’s a matter of how you look at it. It’s all the time, perception is what alters it. Both exist and are observable by/of varying differentiation in option, understanding, etc, through individuals, both human and animal. Comparison. It’s the changing of perception that makes it seem as if it is “sometimes” but both, are all the time… Whether you wish to observe and attribute it value is up to you, but our valuing it or not doesn’t matter to its functioning how it does. I value determinism as far as it goes but I value free will as well as it has more power over context if such is believed and executed from points of understanding.
Determinism does seem nihilistic because if everything results from a system out of an individuals control, then things become more meaningless, less freedom, things seem to have less value.
when it’s just a view, not the full case of being.
There are also a lot of things I have done in a present moment that I knew weren’t the right things to do, people do it all the time, self destruction. Deterministic instincts and emotions such as anger, fear, etc, kept me from the true doing the right thing. Once such it realized, the will may become free by understanding how to execute oneself properly and bypass or not give full power to that system of instinct. But this is a choice between two paths, a fork in the road. One path is to play victim and give power to context over will, the other is to give power to will and be better, to learn, pursue wisdom, practice such. That is an execution of a free will by a past deterministic event (instinct) then, being understood after. Every event results in the will becoming more free. How can you not see that? Why is that so against what you say?
It was not free to attain but it is free to use, forever. Wisdom is power, is it not? Hence, a free will. Freedom must be fought for, it must be chosen.
Not all are meant to achieve excellence in their field, be a high-achiever, etc. as they are the exceptions to the rules.
Sounds like determinism is designed to put one in one’s (designated) place… this is your lot, you ain’t getting any more so don’t expect any more. Who do they think they are…
i.e. don’t try this at home kids… because you can’t!
Beam me up, Scotty?
Toxic types should be eliminated, and then they are free to do whatever they want within the very confines that they have set for others, to work within for themselves.
Friends become enemies and then strangers, family become strangers but not enemies, and the mind becomes content… at its own expense… never should it be at the expense of others, for that is a false dichotomy.
who or what is ‘responsible’ for some state of affairs is a question less important than the gravity of the deed, why it happened, and what can be changed to prevent it from happening again. a freewillist looks for a meager individual and quibbles over stupid moral questions like ‘didn’t you know better?’ a determinist proper is above this arbitrary pettiness and places his inquisition elsewhere; he looks at the entire age, or the systemic political, economic and social structures in place… he doesn’t ask ‘omg how could this asshole have done this’, because that’s an amateur question. rather he asks, what about this person, what he believes, his environment, his education, etc., would contribute to him thinking what he did was the rational thing to do. the freewillist, on the other hand, needs to significantly narrow the scope of investigation so that he can comfortably grasp what he is intellectually unable to approach, much less accept. he must be able to simplify the problem so that he can comprehend it. he does these things like this; first he tells himself he knows what is ‘right’. then he tells himself that everybody else is able to understand, and know, how what he tells himself is right, is right. finally he blames someone when they don’t do what he thinks they think is the right thing to do. then comes the moral culpability, the blame, the guilt, and the shame. now it is much, much easier to do it this way then it would be to establish these facts first and foremost and proceed from there:
a) there is no imperative ‘right’ in this universe.
b) even if there was, you can’t be sure you’d be able to discover what this ‘right’ was.
c) even if you did discover what this ‘right’ was, you can’t be sure anybody else should be able to discover it as you have.
once this is understood, the entire approach to morality changes. the determinist recognizes that the impetus of every action is for the good - this means, a maximization of benefit in a particular context according to the person’s understanding of things. a man steals a loaf of bread. no no no you shouldn’t have done that, it’s illegal! but is it therefore wrong? is ‘wrong’ and ‘illegal’ necessarily synonymous? if no, then there is no more substance to his guilt than there is to the asshats who try to shame him for doing it. ah but see it would be far more difficult to challenge the whole system for putting into place the circumstances that made that theft possible then it would be to just call the thief a bad guy and put him away. the pretense needed for this series of deceptions is freewill and objective morality. and so far, our leaders have been just such liars and imbeciles. in fact i couldn’t really call them liars, because they actually believe in this nonsense.
what seems to boggle the minds of amateur freewillists is how a determinist could hold any entity responsible if there is no cartesian agency behind the wheel. this very question itself, that they would ask such a thing and scratch their heads over it, betrays the simplicity of their intellect and how tedious their discourse with men and state must be. these people are entirely oblivious to the world and lack the vision for looking deeper into the forces that move things. but what am i saying? the most difficult moral quandary these dummies have ever faced was an argument over who used the car last and left the gas tank empty. here, i suppose it is as easy as ‘it’s your fault, dude!’ these folks can’t help but extend this simple understanding into contexts which require a much more critical examination of the premises of the freewill argument… but most importantly, the veracity of the consequences if they’re wrong.
now then. on the matter of ‘holding responsible’. does one need to know what the cause of a deed is before they can make the judgement; ‘this is wrong’? if a p-zombie shot a dude in the parking lot, and i later discovered this culprit to be a robot, would i be any less offended by the deed? do i need to know there was a ‘free causative agent’ responsible for making it happen, to be able to be repulsed by it? what does it matter if there are one or twenty people inside his head that made the choice to shoot this guy? i’m not looking to blame anyone. i’m not looking to hold anyone responsible. and i’m not doing these things because a) they can’t be done philosophically, and b) i couldn’t care less, anyway. what i’m trying to do is change and/or modify the circumstances that brought about this event, and i do this by examining the causes at work… one of which is not some ghost in the machine that has the magical ability to know what is objectively right… and then deliberately make the decision to do what is wrong, instead. none of this nonsense is in any way relevant to the determinist. to the freewillist, sure, because his head is not only occupied by a ghost in the machine, but also full of pancake batter as well.
so what does the determinist do to rectify a situation in which he has made the judgement; this is wrong. he sets out to change and/or eliminate factors and forces without paying any attention to the entity through which these things have manifested in the commission of the deed. the ‘person’ is almost infinitely less important than the structures in place making such an event possible. example. a lying, opportunistic prosecutor who charges a man with a crime he didn’t commit. is what he did his fault? that’s a cool question, but what the fuck does that matter? what matters is that this was even possible, and that this happens all the time all over the world. so… what makes this possible is our question. what allows lying, opportunistic prosecutors to exist, and how do we stop them from popping up all over the place? well, for one thing we don’t waste our time shaking our finger at any one of them because we don’t believe in freewill. this guy is a symptom, not a cause. get that straight first. next, ask what can be done with him, or to him, to contribute to preventing others like him from happening. we don’t waste our time arguing with this piece of shit over such things as ‘you shoulda known better’ and ‘what you did was wrong’. why? because who are we to say he shoulda known better, or that what he did was wrong? this kind of argument is for philosophers and amateur freewillists. what we determinists look for is consistency in structure between state and practice, between personal moral conviction and action, and we find circumstances that are producing conflicts between these things. we don’t demand ‘do the right thing’, but rather ‘do what you say and say what you do’. first criteria for establishing the social contract between state and citizen. later we can examine whether or not what is said and done is effective in producing optimal conditions for the improvement of life. but until you get this shit taken care of, you’re still at level one. playing the stupid blame game because you are wholly ignorant of the mechanics of causality.
i’m beginning to feel like freewillists envy the determinist… like they feel impotent in the presence of such great architects. i understand some of this, and some of it i do not. i do understand the envy one experiences in the presence of a superior thinker (i experienced this in my adolescence), and the anguish of being forlorn and forgotten by someone you’ve always wanted to impress… but i don’t understand the sense of panic these people experience at the thought of not having freewill. well wait. that’s not what they panic about. the panic is over someone else not having freewill… because then they are unable to resent and hate. these miserable weaklings need such privilege more than anything else. a catharsis, as it were, to expunge one’s impotence of action. but this psychosis runs so deep that even they aren’t aware of it, and can even pass off as decent, regular folk. and yet this is what is so dangerous about what philosophy/religion has done covertly over the last few thousand years. a meme so powerful that it almost becomes genetic… almost an intrinsic feature of a certain type of person who can’t be anything but a bad apple. you’d damn near have to perform a lobotomy to get rid of it, and i even believe that despite the triumph of science and the revolution of our future educational systems to follow, there will still be that type of person who can’t get past this profoundest of errors (the belief in freewill). maybe one day they’ll identify the gene(s) responsible for this psychosis.
but i personally have never been less forceful because i knew i had no freewill. it never bothered me in the least, because i never felt less in control without it. if anything, the range of my power has expanded. whole zeitgeists speak and work through me. what matters the little cartesian ‘I’ in this grand economy? but enough. i’ve spent another twenty minutes i could have spent rearranging my sock drawer.
But…you can’t know why anything happened without first locating its source, its ‘responsibility’…
So the thief is not responsible for stealing, nor is the baker not responsible for leaving his bread out, but “the leaders” are responsible for everything, yes??
If you think these topics are simple, then you’d be correct. I’m waiting on proper interlocutors to progress the discussion. Or I can go ahead, with or without you, but you wouldn’t learn that way.
So whose fault is it really???
You’re wrong here. People investigate the shootings because, ideally, understanding/knowing all the reasons, would mean that it could be prevented if-not mitigated in damage. If humanity knew-for-certain the cause of spree-shootings, or any basic murder, then they would, again ideally, try to prevent them from happening. But sometimes the causes are too fundamental and ‘hurtful’, to one’s own ego, that the larger humanity ignores the reasons. It’s too uncomfortable, that, male have less value or are less-valuable than females, for example, and so have almost nothing to lose from imposing violence upon others.
We could dig deep into the causes if we wanted to; and we should as Philosophers. But, if you want to give up, and say “it’s all determined!” then you’re only limiting yourself. It doesn’t affect me, but it does admit your own situation, and possibly limits others’ as well.
This is the ‘Morality’ aspect, and leadership of society. Some, few people, do “have to” be in charge of everything. Because “the people” blame each-other when things do go wrong. And there is a deep, fundamental, necessary aspect of morality and ethics, when it comes to Retribution, Revenge, and Justice. Can’t you accept the possibility that it’s easy for people to harm each-other, most often times, without even being aware of it.
This is where ‘Power’ becomes relevant. If one person is, habitually and daily, harming others, but the others can’t do anything about it, because they are weaker, then at what point to people snap and risk great loss, for whatever redemption they have in-mind? As-if those who are low on social hierarchies ‘should’ be higher, or at least, could they have a keen or accurate sense of Justice?
No, immature and stupid people, over-exaggerate, and if you stepped on my toes, then does it warrant a death-sentence? Or isn’t eye-for-an-eye more acceptable, more reasonable?
Certain crimes are not eye-for-an-eye though. If you break somebody’s property, with sentimental value, then what is the worth of restitution? Who decides, what costs?
It’s not me who’s thinking too small here, Prom…
I’ll clue you onto an important life-lesson, out of experience.
You can spend an entire lifetime looking through every possible-cause of everything, and you’ll never have a complete picture, and it’s always up for debate whether any “Authority’s” picture is even accurate. It can always be undermined. And responses to the causes, Judgment, can also be flawed. So it comes down to Pragmatism. Judges/Authorities/Leaders have to “make-do” with the information they have, at the time. Is it flawed? Is it incorrect, inaccurate, wrong sometimes? Yes, but it’s necessary.
In the Real-World, you have to make Decisions/Choices, based on a lack of information.
(That means you’re Un-determined/Indeterminate!)
I don’t think much of this is relevant. The “Free-Will” issue matters, of utmost importance, when it comes to “Cause” and “Blame” and “Agency”.
How can people be blamed for anything when causes are forever unknown, or worse, it’s physically impossible to know them? You could, always be wrong.
That doesn’t stop people from blaming, and forcing the issue. Because, again, pragmatically and realistically, people are readily willing to punish you, or anybody, for what they perceive as a wrong-doing, and furthermore, that punishment or attack doesn’t need to be reasonable or justified.
People harm each-other egregiously, often times, because they can, and because they want to exercise their power over others.
Thanks, and I agree with you.
I don’t think everything we can say/think is a dichotomy, but all the dichotomies, perhaps especially the basic ones, and the ones we deal with in metaphysics: life/nonlife, mind/matter, objective/subjective, positive/negative, whole/part, free/determined and so on…there’s no such thing as a one sided coin, both sides of a polarity are real, and we have to find, not any ole balance but the right balance between them, intellectually and in our lives.
Freewill isn’t illusory, and mind isn’t a by-product of matter, anymore than big is illusory, or left is a by-product of right.
Now cold and darkness may be the absence of warmth and light respectively, but I don’t think pain is the absence of pleasure or pleasure pain, yet various philosophers have ran away with both sides of this polarity throughout philosophy’s history.
Both pain and pleasure exist in their own right.
There needs to be more far more synthesis in philosophy and our daily thinking, but unfortunately we’re too much under the spell of scientific epistemology and metaphysics, and yes it really does have a metaphysics, it’s not just a method, just its metaphysics has become so deeply ingrained it’s subconscious.
It’s not that science is all bad, it’s just its antithesis isn’t bad either.
We need to get good at presenting the other side, it’s grown far too powerful and its authoritarian reign must be challenged so we can be free.
At one time religion was Goliath and science David, but David has since become Goliath.
We don’t need to re-establish religion, it should remain disestablished.
We need a new David for a new millennium.
It’s philosophy, if anything, that doesn’t assume a metaphysics, perhaps not even an epistemology, which’s not to say science doesn’t continually modify its worldview, but the fundamentals, materialism and so on go unchallenged.
Philosophy happens when different worldviews, the scientific, alt scientific, religious and ideological worldviews and everything in between and outside battle for supremacy.
And what’s festering in the inhumanities, the whole western civilization is a white male patriarchy thing, that really needs to be overturned.
cool. let me extend my thanks by giving you an important life-lesson in determinism.
in a court of law a person is not held accountable for committing a crime if he is judged to be ‘insane’ (they call it), judged to be ‘not of sound mind’, and therefore unable to recognize right and wrong. now it gets good. two idiotic assumptions are made before we even get out of the gate. first, that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ have ever meant anything more than ‘useful’ and ‘not useful’… valuations and judgments made in some context in which costs and benefits are being weighed against each other by a person who at the time is incapable of believing anything different than what he believed during the course of his actions. example; joe robs a bank to get the money to pay for his kid’s liver transplant. joe knows what he’s doing is illegal, but joe cannot believe it is wrong. or, joe might believe it is wrong… but he also believes it serves a greater good, and is therefore incidental.
second idiotic assumption; that joe had the freewill to not decide that he should rob the bank. now the court is in a pickle. they can’t say he’s insane, and they can’t say joe can simultaneously believe and not believe what he did was the right thing to do. if holding joe ‘responsible’ here means anything more than ‘being subject to consequences’, such a concept is senseless. the court can certainly condemn joe for breaking the law, but not for doing something wrong, and certainly not for having the capacity to magically not believe what he believes and believe something else instead. dilemma; does the court proceed consequentially or deontologically? for the former, no need for the theory of freewill… for the latter, absolute reliance on the theory of freewill. but the latter is definitively false and with no empirical basis whatsoever.
why then does the theory persist in a court of law? because it simplifies for an institution that requires control but lacks it, a means to avoid the responsibility of preventing the circumstances that produce the criminals it needs to control. it is far easier to subdue a citizen by making him feel guilty then it is to make the effort to modify the environment in which he was made. and to top it off, they turn this inconvenience into an advantage. quite brilliant. they industrialize the criminal justice system. they turn it into a money making racket. they neglect their responsibility, create criminals as a result, and then figure out a way to get paid for it. unrequited genius. let the federal government give money to state and privatized prisons to house criminals the federal government doesn’t have enough power to prevent. it’s no mystery why the united states has the highest crime rates. there is not just ‘correlation’ between blue collar crimes and capitalistic societies. there is a causal relationship here.
‘capitalist-democracy deserves every bit of the crime it has’ - lenin (not verbatim)
instead of making health care affordable and/or a basic right, our capitalist-democracy uses an age old philosophical subterfuge to brainwash joe into thinking he’s a bad guy… that he knew damn well what he did was ‘wrong’, and that he chose to do what he knew was wrong. that joe wasn’t compelled by the preponderance of the evidence he believes that makes him feel robbing the bank is the right thing to do, and instead secretly knew it was wrong and what… just wanted to do a bad thing for the hell of it? get the fuck outta here. joe had a reason. he believed he was right. he had no choice in believing it was right, because he has no choice in what he feels certain of. there is no ‘freewill’ in any of this nonsense. and yet the greatest institution over and above society rests the very foundation of its practice on just such nonsense.
now i know everything i just said will enter one ear and go right out the other, if it even makes it into your head at all. i look forward to a response about gymnasts being able to jump higher than midgets or slaves being envious of their masters.
That hypothetical example is incredibly morally ambiguous and is therefore probably not typical of most crimes that are committed
In most cases deontology is not going to be considered as the act will be regarded as simply being wrong [ both legally and morally ]
And in any case it is simply easier for juries to decide innocence or guilt based on what the law says rather than on what moral philosophy says
The ideal solution in the hypothetical example would be to find Joe guilty but due to the extenuating circumstances give him a lesser sentence
