I never said the past or what occurred didn’t happen or didn’t exist, but it existed in the present. We now remember it for good or for bad. Why do people who get electric shock treatments often feel better? Because they lose the memory of certain traumatic experiences, and can begin to heal.
And I never said that you said it.
I am talking about your reasoning process. One is not necessarily aware of one’s reasoning process. And if you’re unaware of something, you can’t talk about it.
What I said is that you observed that “The past does not exist” in the sense of “The past does not exist in the present moment.” That much is true. But then, you unconsciously confused that sense with another, that other sense being “Nothing ever existed in the past”. That is false. It is this confusion that then allowed you to logically conclude that the past cannot determine the present, for if something didn’t happen, that something cannot be the cause of anything.
They call it “equivocation” and it’s a common phenomenon.
If you don’t think this is what happened then feel free to expose your reasoning.
Peacegirl: I’m trying. This is not equivocation. This is an observable fact.
Dear Magnus,
Equivocation is a Latin word for mistake.
Sincerely etc, etc,
Let’s face it, any discussion of free will is surreal. First, do we or don’t we have to start with one or another assumption regarding whether the discussion itself is or is not inherently a manifestation of the only possible reality in the only possible world?
I always come back to this:
Why? Well, either because 1] I am necessarily compelled to by a brain wholly in sync with the laws of matter or 2] if, “somehow” human brains did acquire some measure of autonomy [re God or No God], I freely admit I am not able to explain that.
Same thing though. The best argument someone makes may still be the only argument they were ever able to make. True and false arguments then being interchangeable. And if you can only be ignorant, well, what does it mean then to be ignorant of anything?
To me, it’s akin to the Flatland folks grappling to understand our world. In what may or may not be a multiverse with additional dimensions utterly beyond our ever being able to grasp ourselves.
Ah, of course: CornerSpeak!!! 
Note to others:
Not to worry. I won’t be going there often anymore. I quit cold turkey with Satyr, right? 
You can do it we believe in you.
I have three issues with this:
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The word “past” is not a reference to a word. It’s a reference to what existed / occurred / happened.
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How can something “remind us - in the present - of what occured” if “nothing ever existed in the past”? If nothing ever existed in the past, then nothing occurred, and so, there is nothing to remind ourselves of.
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You are saying “Nothing ever existed in the past” and at the same time you’re saying that things did happen. Isn’t that a contradiction?
I was talking about your unconscious processes. I wasn’t talking about what you said.
On the other hand, you just said it. You just said that “Nothing ever existed in the past”. That’s another way of saying “Nothing ever happened in the past”.
But that’s not what past is. The definition of the word tells you what it is. It is the set of everything that existed prior to the present moment. It has nothing to do with the present moment.
The word “past” never referred to a word. It also never referred to a memory. It never referred to someone reminding themselves of what occurred. Instead, it always referred to what occurred.
As I said previously, the author of the book you’re trying to promote – Mr. Lessans – is part of it. He existed in the past. He no longer exists ( since he died in 1991. ) He is NOT your memory. Your memory did not write the book you’re trying to promote. A real human being did. And that real human being is fully located within the past ( since he’s no longer with us. ) A person who is fully residing within the past determined the contents of the book you’re trying to promote. He used a pencil and determined the contents of the blank papers that later came to constitute his book. A past moment ( he using a pencil and pressing it against the paper ) determined the next moment ( ink on paper ) which also happens to be a past moment. One past moment determined another.
This is what we tell people who are paying way too much attention to the past.
But how is that related to claims such as “Nothing ever existed in the past” and “The past is nothing but a memory”?
There are also people who pay too much attention to the present moment. Does that mean that nothing exists in hte present?
Peacegirl: Possibly. It all depends on what they are focusing on.
It means people are conflating the issue of knowing or predicting something in advance with the issue of whether or not something is actually “determined”. If you want to talk about knowing or predicting in advance, that’s epistemology. If you want to talk about what something actually IS and whether or not it is actually “determined” that would be ontology.
Something can be absolutely “determined” or “pre-determined” if you like, and still be unpredictable. Chaotic systems are like that. Despite being entirely causal the system is too complex and sensitive to initial conditions to be very well predicted in advance. So what?
Failure of prediction doesn’t prove determinism is or is not the case. What matters is the system itself, the causality involved. But really all of this can be understood on a basic logical level: Principle of Sufficient Reason, i.e. nothing happens for literally no reason at all. There are no “uncaused things”, obviously. So given that, determinism so-called logically follows necessarily. Everything is the result of the totality of other things that acted as causes for it to be what it is. What we call free will is a type of very complex determinism that produces new types of degrees of freedom as well as the sensation/experience of “feeling free” or feeling in self-control. That’s what free will really means. It doesn’t mean some kind of magical “agent causation” or somehow “acting outside of causality” as if we might do something for literally no reason at all. That’s idiotic.
I appreciate your explanation of epistemology and ontology in regard to determinism. Thank you. I agree that unpredictability does not mean undetermined. The problem according to the book I am discussing is with the word cause. I don’t know if you have been following this thread but logically it seems that determinism means being caused to do what we do by the past. Therefore choice is an illusion. The opposite is being free from prior causes; or being the author of our choices without compulsion.
or necessity.
What this author is trying to demonstrate is that the conventional definition of determinism is misleading only because of the word past. If we only have the present (in reality), how can the past cause if everything we do is in the present? This author is just clarifying that although we don’t have free will, nothing (including the past) can force us to do what we make up our mind not to do, or against our will. People who are opposed to determinism don’t like the idea that this would turn us into automatons.
We have the ability to think through options and choose accordingly. The only tweak to the definition is that we are making choices in the present and we are doing this of our own volition. Having volition (or the freedom to choose one thing over another when there is no external force) does not mean we have the free will to choose A over B, when B is the preferable choice (using past experiences held in memory to help us decide what the most preferable choice is).
This compulsion to choose not what gives us less satisfaction or preference, but more, even if it’s the lesser of two evils, is an immutable law of our nature. We can only go in one direction making free will an illusion. I think people get so attached to certain ways of thinking that they cannot dare entertain the possibility that there could be a new way to look at an old debate. In fact it might feel blasphemous. I can’t move forward if no one is interested to see why this tweak in definition allows a complete revamping of our environment for our betterment.
Well, I am pretty sure that everyone knows that ( i.e. that if “Principle of Sufficient Reason” is true that determinism is also true. ) That’s not the issue. The issue is whether or not everything happens for a reason, or more precisely, whether or not everything is fully determined / caused by prior events.
In the free will versus determinism debate, that’s not even the main issue ( the main issue is whether or not the two can co-exist. )
Peace girl, on the other hand, thinks it’s important to prove determinism in order to demonstrate her central point. The problem, however, is that it’s difficult to tell what she actually means by “determinism”. She tells us that the past does not cause the future and Mr Lessans’s proof of determinism, as far as I can recall, basically consists of him proving ( albeit, as I explained in the past, not convincingly ) that a man can never do anything other than what he wants.
The past does not cause the future. In the past I ate breakfast. In the future the mailman will deliver my mail. There is no connection from the past to the future. See?
If you try to make a connection from eating breakfast to the mailman then it is purely on a non-physical level, meaning my eating breakfast did not physically cause the mailman to deliver my mail. There were physical causes of my eating breakfast, such as the toaster electricity being generated by the power company through some physical method. There was a chicken that laid the eggs, a person that collected the eggs, a vehicle that shipped the eggs, a stocker that stocked the eggs, and my vehicle that transported me to the store to physically pick up the eggs, put them in the cart, transport them home, and then at some point physically breaking the egg into a hot pan, and me eating the eggs and toast. All of which is a timeline of physical activity in the past. The past did not cause me to eat the eggs, the past is a chronological record of events that have already occurred.
I ate breakfast prior to my mail getting delivered by the mailman, but the “past” was not the cause of the mailman delivering my mail at a later time. The “past” is a point in time, such as 0752 hrs. The mail was delivered at 1126 hrs. “0752” did not CAUSE 1126 hrs to happen. PHYSICAL phenomena causes things to occur, and physical phenomena occurs over a DURATION of time.
What determined his memories in the present? What happened in the past, right? His memory was determined by his past punishments i.e. his punishments took place in the past and not in the present. So what we have here is a past moment ( rather than the present moment ) determining the present moment.
“The past causes our choices in the present” does NOT imply that the past causes us to choose what we do not want to do.
Chips have that power. A chip can be installed somewhere inside your head such that what you do is no longer decided by your mind. Your mind might still be able to learn and make its own decisions, and you might even be consciously aware of its output, but your body will no longer obey it.
Perhaps your mind has decided, freely of its own will, that you should not date that guy; but the chip, being in charge of your body, has decided otherwise and is now instructing your body to act in that direction. You end up dating that guy even though you consciously do not want to.
You have previously responded with “But in that case, it’s no longer you.” How so? It’s your body ( merely no longer controlled by your mind. ) It’s your behavior ( merely not determined by your mind. ) And it’s your mind ( merely no longer in charge of your body. )
But the important part is that your mind ( i.e. you ) decided NOT to date that guy, and yet, you ended up dating him anyways.
You explicitly stated that “Nothing ever existed in the past”. If all you wanted to say is “What existed in the past does not exist in the present”, that is fine, but why didn’t you put it that way? That’s what’s creating the confusion.
I agree that “What existed in the past does not exist in the present”. But how does it follow that the past cannot determine the present?
If you’re saying that the present can only be caused by things that exist in the present, then you’re actually saying that only instantaneous causation exists. And that brings us back to the following problem: how can we change the future if only instantaneous causation exists? For example, you’re standing at location A in the present moment and you’re choosing to move to location B. How can that choice of yours determine your position at the next moment if only instantaneous causation exists? Your choice at the present cannot determine your location in the future because the future does not exist in the present. That means that your choices cannot cause you to move. ( Note that the belief that only instantaneous causation exists is closer to indeterminism than determinism. )
It no longer exists in the present. But it used to exist in the past.
Every past moment was once the present moment. Everything that currently resides in the past once resided in the present.
And it is back when these things resided in the present moment that they determined other things.
There is what occurred ( e.g. someone pulling a trigger on December 25th 1932 ) and then there is someone in the present moment trying to remember what occurred ( e.g. what happened on Decemeber 25th 1932. )
Two different things.
By saying that the past is merely a memory, you are conflating the two; you are conflating the map with the territory.
What you’re doing here is analogous to someone discovering that the word “unicorn” cannot be used to represent anything that exists in reality and deciding to change its meaning so that you can attach it to existing things. But instead of putting it that way, and of course, without explaining why such a change is necessary, he tells us that the definition of the word “unicorn” does not reflect what is actually happening in reality, where by “definition” he means “the concept attached to the word”. By doing that, he talks about concepts as if they are propositions i.e. claims that some portion of reality is such and such. But concepts aren’t propositions; they have no truth value. They only have use value. What he actually has to do is explain to us why he thinks it’s useful to change the concept attached to the word “unicorn”. What is he trying to achieve?
You’re doing the same. You’re taking the word “determinism”. You are looking at the concept attached to it and you go “Oh look, due to the concept attached to this word, the word cannot be used to represent the universe we live in!” The only reason you believe that is due to your false belief that determinism, in the usual sense of the word, implies that the past causes us to do what we do not want to do. And then, instead of simply saying “The universe is not deterministic”, you decide to change what concept is attached to it, so that you can then say “The universe is deterministic”. Why are you doing that? I have no idea. But for some reason, you want to call the universe deterministic.
What you’re saying is that there is no connection between whether or not you eat breakfast and whether or not the mailman will deliver your mail at some later point in time.
I don’t know deny that.
But how does that imply that there is no connection between the state of the universe at one point in time and the state of the universe at some subsequent point in time?
Note that when I say “the state of the universe” I am saying “the state of the ENTIRE universe” and not “the state of some extremely small portion of the universe” as you do.
When people say “The past causes the future” what they are saying is “What existed prior to the present moment determines what will exist after the present moment”.
Noone is talking about points in time causing other points in time.
Y’all keep saying each other is wrong, but y’all don’t feel any need to explain why.
Y’all don’t think that’s a problem?
You’re probably going into too much detail.
Who cares if I ate breakfast or not, the mail being delivered is yes or no determined by the truck left the post office. You only need to prove that a point in time is correlated to a point in time, you don’t need to prove that any arbitrary point in time is connected to any other arbitrary point in time.
So you are saying my PHYSICAL ACTIONS determine the future? The physical act of eating breakfast CAUSED my mail to be delivered? Obviously not, as you previously agreed. So now you’ve narrowed it from “past actions cause future actions”, to “only related past actions cause related future actions.” What you are doing is basically eliminating all the “NO connections” until all that is left is “physical connection.”
Good, so you are saying that the chicken laying the egg CAUSED me to go to the store and purchase said eggs? No?
Of course, in a fatalistic universe, breakfast and the mail would still be conneced, but showing how would probably take a prohibitively long time and amount of complexity, and would not be necessary to establish fatalism.