I’m not sure about that. People who legitimately believe or accept that everything is deterministic can and do still express opinions and dialogue. They just understand that they don’t have knowledge of all the causes/reasons for why they do or say what they do or say, sufficiently to be able to trace all that out or predict it in advance. So more like accepting a degree of ignorance and how this ignorance is operationalized alongside the totality of reasons/causes of which we are actually aware, rather than positing or acting as if any sort of free will exists even as illusion.
Not that I am subscribing to such a position, only pointing out that such a position is possible to take.
You described the experience of the determinist quite well. But, I don’t find the experience of understanding that one behavior is determined without knowing it’s actual causes as incompatible with what I said before, that is, that one acts “as if” one had a degree of freedom.
Sure, if you are going to adopt something closer to my own understanding of free will, which does indeed involve degrees of freedom existing within broader deterministic frameworks.
Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.
And then he proceeded to go about actually demonstrating that this is in fact true objectively for all of us. And to this day it is still the accepted explanation.
Not.
Once again that gap between “metaphysical views” regarding both the universe and our own place in it and all that we are still ignorant regarding both the world of the very, very large and the very, very small.
As for that “mental system of ideas”, does this revolve around the assumption that a Divine Universe possesses a teleological component of some sort? A meaning and a purpose that we all embody…beyond our control?
Let him explain it…
Which, of course, makes “Him”/“It” all the more problematic. And then the part where pantheists are able to connect the dots between the metaphysical universe and the day-to-day existential reality of human interactions. Which, to the best of my current knowledge, they have never been able to accomplish.
Next up…
So, given whatever you imagine “one infinite, indivisible divine substance” to be, how do those here who share Spinoza’s assessment connect the dots between his ideas and their own interactions with others. In particular interactions that result in or stem from conflicting goods.
The greater good view, or graded absolutism, prisming the absolutes out like a kaleidoscopic vortexical rainbow from the center of self=other… the condition for the possibility of individuality & culture. As long as the conflicting goods do not violate self equals other, then a compromise can be reached that makes everyone happy. But if one of the conflicting goods violates self equals other, someone is going to have to re-examine their position.
Was Spinoza like Kant with the word “nature”? Did Spinoza have the harmonic triads?
My hunch is Spinoza was a compatibilist, since he talks about being liberated from ignorance. He refers to Jesus as Christ, and seems to find value in Scripture, but he thinks the resurrection was spiritual, not bodily. I don’t think either pantheism or deism is the right label.
Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.
No, Spinoza pondered all of this philosophically and then “thought up” this “substance” in his head. Just as Leibniz “thought up” monads. Though, sure, it may well exist. And if there is anyone here who believes that it does, please, by all means, let him or her back up their theoretical assumptions/assessments with hard evidence. Especially the part where this cosmic substance “somehow” resulted in human autonomy.
But even here, in my view, Spinoza finds it necessary to “think up” yet another transcending font in order to subsume human interactions in his very own philosophical contraption.
Where’s the beef, Baruch?
Again, philosophically, that’s how he put it. And yet today, hundreds of years later, even science is still unable to sink this basket. And the nature of a triangle in the either/or world stays the same all the way down. But the nature of human interactions in the is/ought world?
In other words, the part where some are perturbed by the mere possibility that, to Mother Nature, we are just so many dominoes toppling over when “somehow” matter itself came into existence. And “somehow” resulted in us.
Then this part again…
Got that?
Okay, if you think you do, please connect the dots between this philosophical argument and the actual behaviors that you yourself choose in regard to conflicting value judgments.
How does cause and effect unfold when Mary aborts Jane? How might Spinoza have “put it”?
Well. That thar looks like the harmonic triads and the Venn of Import to me. Substance (yellow), essence (red), existence (blue). But I have barely even read what you just wrote so maybe I’m wrong and there’s a lot of equivocation going on. Especially if Spinoza thinks that Jesus‘s resurrection was merely spiritual.
Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.
[quote]David Hume’s Compatibilism
Yet in A Treatise of Human Nature, the Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume tells us that there is no conflict between determinism and moral responsibility. This conclusion can only be explained through his account of the term ‘determinism’.[/quote]
Another attempt on my part to – click – figure out how on Earth anyone can defend compatibilism in a wholly determined universe other than because they were never able not to defend it?
This is the part where I suggest that, perhaps, given the arguments of the hard determinists, human sensory perceptions and human reasoning are both intertwined in brains that are inherently intertwined in the laws of matter. Deduction and induction are then both interchangeable in that either “idea first” or “observation first”, what comes first and then what follows is entirely in sync with “the only possible reality”.
Mother Nature, in other words. With or without a teleology?
Okay, but what about basing it on the premises put forward by the determinists instead? Principally, Hume believed only what his brain matter compelled him to believe. The true mystery [for some of us] then revolves around how in a No God world matter itself “somehow” was capable of becoming conscious of itself as biological matter evolving well beyond instinct and libidos into…philosophy?
Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.
Ever and always however it would seem to come back around to how far back you go in an attempt to explain the mind. Back to God? Back to the Big Bang? Back to the multiverse?
Okay, but what if they were cannonballs? What if they were being used to kill others rather than to reposition a billiard ball? What if the balls being used were embedded in conflicting goods? Like, for example, those being used by athletes at the Olympics in competitions that might involve doping or transgender politics or cheating. Think Eight Men Out. Think Lance Armstrong. Think Tom Brady and Deflategate.
As for “the actual power or cause”, this takes us to the part where we focus in on why anything exists at all…or why it exists as it does and not some other way. The part, in other words, where we grapple with things like the ontological and teleological explanation for existence itself. If it even has one. Then the “four fundamental forces at work in the universe: the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force.”
Why?
And, sure, if one day scientists and/or philosophers provide us with the best of all possible explanations for that, they may be able to explain as well how biological matter was able to evolve into the human brain here on planet Earth.
