So, still as dense as ever? AH… well what can I say, other than my own lack of surprise.
Old dogs never learn new tricks? Well I can’t believe that, even as the odds may be against you.
They question everything, pretending they are freethinkers, interested in the truth, real philosophers… but they never question their own definitions.
There you will find their motives, concealed beneath mountains of words.
There you will find their true objectives.
Don’t accept my definitions of ‘will.’
Use your senses. Use your experience.
You will. What do you experience when willing?
What are you doing, when you will…when you move, when you act?
‘Free’ is a qualifier…like ‘strength.’
Like ‘power.’
Like ‘good’ & ‘bad.’
All value judgements require an objective.
Including moral value judgements.
What objective directs the will when it attempts to be moral?
Is man the only moral species?
In fact, all social species exhibit the behaviours man has categorized as ‘moral.’
Only one species uses language, converting actions into concepts, represented by words. converting behaviours into ideas.
Only one species abstracts.
Why did morality evolve?
Or did god give man morals?
Apply the same method to free-will.
Will to Power does not mean Will to Omnipotence, so how did free-will come to mean freedom from causality… independence from space/time… liberation from the determined past?
Only when men sought to manipulate other men.
As they did with the concept of ‘god.’
Don’t prove me wrong bro.
If you are familiar with Kierkegaard, non-free will is the ethical stage. Works of love is free will. You have free will the whole time, but it’s locked until you transcend into (unlock) works of love.
And if you wanna get into love ontology… love (quality/end) IS (virtue/character) as love does (action/conduct). Love without works is…n’t.
None of this really addresses my point, which is that “free will” exists in some fashion, but importantly, it does not exist in such a way that entails the reasoned intuition of deservedness in the moral responsibility sense.
The only reason this is at all worth mentioning, in my opinion, is because a great many people think free will can and does exist in this way. (Such that it warrants the reasoned intuition of moral responsibility in the deservedness sense.)
It’s true that definitions matter, and I’m not that interested in debating what “free will” means in general, or what is usually meant by it in the literature.
I’m not all that interested in whether I have freedom, I don’t base my sense of meaning on whether I am the ultimate source of my choices. I assume I’m trapped in the flow of antecedent events and this doesn’t bother me, although I empathize with those bothered by it.
My interest tilts toward the study of that which increases wellbeing and reduces suffering. (I get tired of typing that, so I say IWRS.) I can talk about how I derive/define wellbeing and suffering in a rational, empirical sense, and I believe it holds up.
But I’ll save that for another comment. In my circles I grew tired of constantly saying basic desert moral responsibility so I shortened it to BDMR. People believe we have BDMR, I contend we don’t, and that the belief we do causes unnecessary suffering.
Also, I got tired of saying “exists, but not in such a way that entails the reasoned intuition of” so I call that particular adverbial modifier G∇. Or G Nabla.
Then there’s GΔ, or G Delta just means it “exists in such a way that it…”
I find that with most words you have to use an array of G∇s and GΔs to eventually drill down to precisely where the real argument or disagreement is.
Getting to that location is fraught with difficulty, most people don’t want to get there. And once there, most people don’t want to stay on the dime.
The irony of a place like ILP is it’s often the art of deflection rather than the art of rigorous pursuit of truth for its own sake. Disorderly, disorganized, irrelevant comments and snark tend to choke the conversation before it can get liftoff. Sometimes it seems like that’s what’s loved, the art of sabotage and subterfuge.
The issue of free will G∇ bdmr is a perfect example. Most people are so threatened by the idea that BDMR is incoherent that they run for shelter in compatibilism, which is a form of changing the subject, and normally I wouldn’t care, except that, like I said, this persistent belief in BDMR, while certainly having some utility value, is metaphysically incoherent and also causes unnecessary suffering.
And yet most philosophers believe in it and just about all religious people believe in it. It’s the pillar of meritocracy, too. The anti-religious hyper-capitalists, like Ayn Rand, also believe in a sort of libertarian free will.
I find all this cognitive dissonance fascinating and sickening and incredibly widespread and persistent.
So I think and talk about it a lot.
Morality evolved to discipline individual will to collective interests.
So, we find it in ALL social species, including man.
Man is the only species that intervenes upon what nature has produced…and so it is so with moral behaviours.
Man encodes behaviours into behavioural rules, and then amends them, to facilitate his objectives.
All value judgements, including moral ones, have an objective.
In the case of ethical rules, the objective is the collective’s well-being.
Its well-being determining the well-being of its members.
Cooperative survival and reproductive strategies necessitate such restrictions on individuals.
The wise saying still holds true…
Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do.
All these poor simpletons claiming they do not believe in free-will, go about their lives as if all, including themselves, did have freedom to will.
All those that profess to be amoralists, act in adherence to moral rules and their arguments are moral in origin.
They cannot rationalize their ideal world, so they imply an ethical argument, whist declaring morality debunked.
This is the way, they hope, they can bring about the world that “ought to be.”
Their actions and, inevitably, their words contradict their claims, even when it comes to free-will.
Have they ceased accusing and blaming?
No, they haven’t.
Have they stopped acting as if all had a choice?
No, they haven’t.
So, don’t listen to what these poor souls say; watch what they do.
Self-deceit is part of the human condition.
Lorikeet/Satyr, if you are replying to me, could you please say so, otherwise I’m going to ignore you and just focus on Gamer for now.
ACTually, I addressed that here:
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Just because you don’t believe in compatibilism doesn’t mean that it does not exist… It just means that your ‘terms of agreement’ on existence, have changed. ; )
But isn’t that the epitome of compatibilism, in that the twists and turns of -as you call it- antecedent events control your destiny, but take away those events and your path is clearer/clear to do as you please.
Welcome back. You must see the fact that we succumb to the illusion of free will doesn’t prove its existence in reality. It is begging the question—the problem restated. It is the phenomenon that contradicts the law of cause and effect upon which science is based. Free will is a phenomenon like seeing the sunrise in the morning despite knowing it’s an illusion due to the fact that earth revolves on its axis. Human hubris wants to see itself as the exception to the rule. It is the illusion of the autonomous ego and systems of jurisprudence are based on it. So not even Salposky has seriously considered the implications of throwing it over. The antimony of free will vs. determinism stands in the middle of modern societies the way general relativity and quantum mechanics stand in modern physics. It illustrates the division at the heart of humanity. It won’t be resolved here. So, banter away all. Cheers!
Your adopted definitions are not Mosaic Laws.
You CHOOSE to adopt a definition that you can then dismiss…
You can do the same with any concept.
Strength does not imply omnipotence, and freedom does not imply independence from causality.
You’ve been duped, and you refuse to correct yourself.
So, I repeat…why would it matter what you think or say if you behave in contradiction to what you think and say?
Deny morality, now that the god of Abraham is debunked, but if you behave morally then your belief is not necessary.
Your consciousness is not required.
Plants have some freedom of will…and they don’t even have a nervous system.
Freedom simply means options.
Will is not an “illusion”. Will does not require special knowledge.
Nature did not trick you…
That you cannot discern the curvature of the earth is not nature fooling you.
Men invented ways to figure out the curvature of the earth.
An ignoramus could live in his flat earth, if he so desires…he cannot walk over the earth, so what does it matter what bullshyte he uses to comfort himself?
Dogs act morally and their awareness is not required.
Apes exhibit moral behaviour…their acknowledgment is not required.
Man’s understanding of Quantum Physics is not necessary for it to be true.
Freedom does not mean…‘not determined.’
They deny free-will - absolutely - and then accuse and blame others for their actions, as if they had a choice.
Because they know that others, like themselves, DO have a choice.
They deny morality, in a "no god world - forget the fact that their brains are infected with only one conception of divinity - and then insist that their “solutions” to whatever existential issue they suffer from, can be resolved if others behaved morally…their entire worldview being founded on ethics, or what is the “right thing” to do…or what “ought to be done.”
Moral actions do not require moral codes…nor god.
Again…all social species exhibit moral behaviours, because without them cooperative survival and reproductive strategies would be impossible.
It is true…a simpleton can live out his entire life believing the earth is flat.
But if he CHOOSES to act on his belief, he will find himself corrected by reality.
So…
A simpleton can live out his entire life convinced that he has no free-will, and that he could not have done anything other than what he did…A comforting idea.
But if he applies this belief, he will suffer the consequences, whether he acknowledge it or not.
These brainwashed automatons - according to their own beliefs - behave in antithesis of what they claim, because they constantly accuse and blame, and they come on-line to convince others that they are all automatons…contradicting themselves.
Defining a concept in a way that makes it impossible for them to be applied, unless one is a god, is how they attempt to justify themselves to others.
I repeat…
We can do this with ANY concept.
The Platonic Ideal is used as the standard to evaluate all concepts… because we are experiencing their shadows, here, in our fallen state…our illusory world.
The concept must be perfect…absoltue…Ideal.
We can set the standard so high that nothing can meet it, so that we can then deny its existence.
Top<>Down emoting.
God…morality…free-will…race…any concept that contradicts our comforting worldviews can be given the same treatment.
Try it with the ‘concept’ of a horse…adopting the description of a fantastical unicorn, declaring perceived horses as ‘illusions.’
Horses do not exist, given our definitions …what we perceive are illusions…false shadows of the ideal horse.
No living horse can ever meet the criterion set by the abstracted unicorn.
Horses are illusory…because we are not omniscient…We don’t know enough, so we must not know anything, Even our knowledge can be given a criterion ti cannot match, so that we can declare all knowledge as being ‘equally flawed.’
‘Equally’ is the key word.
Sometime, in the future, we may gain knowledge that will expose the horse illusion, but, for now, we do not know enough to impose upon others our beliefs about horses.
“Their actions and, inevitably, their words contradict their claims, even when it comes to free-will.
Have they ceased accusing and blaming?
No, they haven’t.
Have they stopped acting as if all had a choice?
No, they haven’t.”
Strength and power do not necessitate proof of omnipotence.
Superior awareness does not necessitate omniscience.
Independence does not necessitate freedom from causality, the determined past, or suffering.
We don’t need to be gods to be free.
‘Free’, like ‘strength’, like ‘power,’ like ‘beauty’ is a qualifier.
All value judgements, including ‘freedom’, requires an objective.
Not ‘freedom from…’ but ‘freedom to…’
Our will participates in what is being determined…and then simpletons, with a terrible streak of bad judgement calls, want to absolve themselves from responsibility… because of what it implies about them…their ego cannot take it.
They prefer to believe that they could not have made a different choice, because of the intolerable implications.
they need something, or someone to blame…they discover that along with the god of Abraham they’ve gotten rid of some comforting ideas, like the scapegoat.
They need a scapegoat. But, without a god, wherefrom will this scapegoat come?
Spinoza?
But why must they be convinced?
Are they the final arbiters? Is their belief required?
Doesn’t matter to me.
Will they not suffer the consequences if they ever dare to behave in accordance with their beleifs…like those who believe the earth is flat?
Their acceptance is not necessary…because they continue to act contrary to what they profess to believe.
Their self-deceptions is a matter for psychology to study.
Same with the anarchists.
Same with the amoralists.
So…if choice is an illusion…what of natural selection?
Are we back to creationism?
Why the charade, and all that struggle and suffering if it is all determined?
Is nature sadistic?
God’s will is now Nature’s Determinism?
Have we truly overcome the god of the Jews?
Has Satan tricked us into believing that we can contradict god’s will?
Are we on the brink of losing paradise…again?!
Is Satyr.. Satan?
Sir Walter Scott
‘Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive,’
A refresher of the refresher of the steel manning:
A straw man, actually.
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