Your spinal chord doesn’t ask your brain permission to move your leg when the doctor hits it with that little hammer; it takes the liberty.
Your brain finds out after the fact. That’s why it feels like it’s something that happens to you.
And yes, that is what the doctor is doing. Checking the integrity of your spine.
Same with the spinal cord, no doubt.
Only we have no way in which to determine definitively if the human brain itself is not just one big “reflex” built into the laws of matter. Hell, even the moral nihilists and the fulminating fanatic objectivists among us might be entirely interchangeable going back to the explanation for why there is matter at all.
Either way, the leg moves, n’est-ce pas?
Well, if the human brain is wholly in sync with the laws of matter, “either way” itself becomes the only way. Que sera, sera?
Only, if there are aspects of our lives where there is actual liberty, why what we choose to do and not what others choose to do?
The spinal cord in the is/ought world let’s call it. Where what can happen to you revolve around, say, the fulminating fanatic objectivists seizing power and demanding that you think, feel, say and do things exactly as they do.
Not getting vaccinated for example.
What is “actual liberty”? What would that look like?
It is a reflect action which by-passes the brain. An atavism of an arboreal ape.
… it is not being told to do something. But acting through self determination.
That was a question for biguous, as his comment implies that ‘actual liberty’ is incompatible with physical determinism.
This question is important for me because I haven’t yet come across someone who has such a view, who can explain it in a way that bypasses the dilemma of determinism
First, of course, for mere mortals to speak of “actual liberty”, they have to acknowledge the gap between what they think they know about it “in their head” here and now, the extent to which they are able to demonstrate that what they think they know about it, other rational men and women are obligated to think/know/believe as well, and then the gap between this and all there is to know about it given a comprehensive grasp of the “human condition” on this planet, going all the way back to “all there is” given a comprehensive understanding of existence itself.
Although, sure, for some here, that part is little more than a trivial pursuit.
But, okay, let’s acknowledge no one here is now able to come even remotely close to grasping all of that. Let’s leave all of that aside and focus in solely on the “human condition” right here and now on planet Earth.
“Actual liberty” for us.
Now, historically – morally, politically – we might ask ourselves, “does capitalism or socialism come closer to ‘actual liberty’ for mere mortals in a No God world?”
You tell me.
But my point goes further out on the metaphysical limb. “Actual liberty” given what we think we know about “I” given the raging debate going back millenia regarding free will and determinism.
In other words, we would have to make the assumption that “somehow” when lifeless, mindless matter configured into biological matter evolving into conscious biological matter evolving into our own species on this planet, we acquired “some measure” of free will.
I can’t know that for sure, you can’t know that for sure. Instead, we know what we think we know either because nature compelled us to know this and only this, or nature did “somehow” manage to evolve into self-conscious entities – us – having acquired actual autonomy.
You tell me.
In any event, as most are aware here, my own main interest revolves around “moral responsibility” given “reflexes” in the brain given either free will or determinism.
Well, given a particular context, anyway.
You put ‘actual liberty’ at odds with the idea that the human brain is in sync with physical laws. I’m trying to understand why. All I know from your previous post is that you don’t know what actual liberty is or what it looks like. If you’re so ignorant, then why are you so sure actual liberty is incompatible with the human brain and human thoughts and decisions just following the laws of physics?
No, what I put at odds is our capacity to put anything at all as we do because nature compels us to think, feel, say and do only that which must unfold in the only possible world…or our capacity to put things as we do because “somehow” the human brain is matter that evolved into minds on this planet able to think through particular things and opt among conflicting conclusions about complexities such as this.
In other words, you are trying to understand why because you were never able not to or you were able to choose to do something else instead but settled freely on deciding why here.
Again, let’s go back to capitalism and socialism. Now, given free will, “I” am “fractured and fragmented” in regard to which comes closest to “actual liberty”. How about you? Can you demonstrate to us which of these political economies does in fact come closest? Or, perhaps, it’s another one altogether?
Awareness and ignorance are very different things in a wholly determined universe and in one where human beings here on Earth are, in fact, able to freely note arguments able in turn to demonstrate why rational men and women are obligated to be aware of this rather than that in regard to capitalism and socialism.
That’s when, given free will, I make the distinction between moral objectivism and moral nihilism.