Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.
As long as they remain dueling deductions by and large, ideas can go in any number of conflicting directions. Also, by and large, the deductions themselves are dependent on the definitions given to the words that comprise the deductions. The difficulty here however is there is often no way in which to decide whose definitions are the correct ones. Why? Because over and again it comes back down to just more words and more definitions.
And – click – from my frame of mind this…
—is a classic example of philosophical speculation that is only able to be demonstrated given the definitions used to assert one assessment of Hume’s determinism rather than another. His conjectures back then are still just conjectures today. Perhaps we have come closer to a more objective understanding of the human brain. But it will take more than just philosophical arguments to convinced most of us. Unless, of course, the philosophical arguments themselves are just more dominoes falling.
Those “internal components” of the human brain that “somehow” mysteriously brought autonomy into existence? What some here call their “intrinsic Self”?
Cause and effect and correlations are so much clearly within our reach in describing the either/or world. But that “extra matter” or “different matter” comprising thec human brain is in a class of matter all its own.
And things are “happening” all over the universe. As though noting this need be as far as one goes in explaining it.
Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.
Okay, back to those aliens in the free will sector of the universe observing mere mortals on Earth in the wholly determined region of the universe.
Yes, they see us creating many things: works of art, Olympic games, election contests, scientific achievements, families, communities, global interactions and on and on. But only because none of us were ever able not to create what must be created in the only possible reality.
Unless, of course, Hume’s philosophy itself was no less an inherent, necessary component of the “human condition”…one that “somehow” fits into the creation of matter going back to…what? As though in our brains, over the course of biological evolution here on planet Earth, “consciousness, motivations and desires” just “became” autonomous.
Of course, in many respects this can be said of what we “experience” in our dreams. In my own dreams, “self-preservation, obtaining pleasure, and avoiding pain” are often present in my interactions with others. At least until I wake up and realize that these “experiences” were created entirely by my brain.
“In classical rhetoric and logic, begging the question or assuming the conclusion is an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument’s premises assume the truth of the conclusion.” Wikipedia
But, again, from the perspective of some determinists, whether something begs the question or not isn’t the point. The point is that either way it was never able to be otherwise.
Be that as it may, Nurana Rajabova assumes otherwise on the basis that we have determining power because we “actively take part in cause and effect relationships.” We seem to but do we really? Perhaps what seems like active participation is really passive observation. That’s what he must prove. He hasn’t, so, it is a fallacious assumption or question begging.
It’d be an assumption, yes. Assumptions aren’t demonstrated or proven. They’re assumed. I think we’ve all got them, there at the bottom of our arguments and beliefs. This doesn’t make them fallacious. Or, at least, now we need to prove - a verb I think is out of place in such discussions - that it is fallacious.
But actually, I think this is a category error. It seems to me arguments can be fallacious or not, and assertions/assumptions can be false or true, but not fallacious, because the latter means faulty reasoning is present. If I assume that my memory is at least somewhat dependible - which seems, at least, to be a useful assumption, but I can’t prove it is the case - I don’t think this can be fallacious. It can be incorrect, however.
My point, however, is that given my argument here…
All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was “somehow” able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter “somehow” became living matter “somehow” became conscious matter “somehow” became self-conscious matter.
Then those here who actually believe that what they believe about all of this reflects, what, the ontological truth about the human condition itself?
Then those who are compelled in turn to insist on a teleological component as well. Usually in the form of one or another God.
Meanwhile, philosophers and scientists and theologians have been grappling with this profound mystery now for thousands of years.
…proof is not likely to come about in our lifetimes.
So, sure, I challenge anyone here to prove that we either do or do not have free will.
As for us “actively taking part in cause-and-effect relationships”? Here I come back to dreams. I don’t know about your dreams but in mine it’s like I’m not dreaming at all but am actually experiencing these interactions as I do when wide awake. Yet these “experiences” were entirely created by my brain.
Criticising Strawson’s Compatibilism
Nurana Rajabova is wary of an attempt to dismiss determinism to keep free will.
On the other hand, in a world where everything unfolds only as it ever could have, justice and injustice are deemed by some to be interchangeable. The rewards and the punishments continue, but what does it really mean to be rewarded or punished for something you were never able not to do?
In other words…
Still, those who argue this are no less in the same boat as those who argue the opposite. And, again, that is bacially all they are…arguments for or against free will.
And, thousands of years later, philosophers are still at it. And though some may be convinced that their own theoretical assessment encompasses the most rational frame of mind, most of the time they are demonstrating that up in the theoretical clouds.
Well, theoretically anyway. And all I can continue to do is to ask those who believe this to bring their philosophical conclusions “down here” and note how they themselves would explain to Mary that even though she was compelled to abort her unborn baby/clump of cells, she is still morally responsible for doing so.
As we say in the Bible belt, “you’re preaching to the choir, brother.” Has the question advanced an iota since Kant presented reasonable arguments for both sides? Well, now we have AI machines that think and learn based on algorithms. Isn’t that what my mind is doing? Oh, but I just decided to type that.
The dream is an excellent analogy often used by Vedantists going back at least to the Upanishads. Everything in my dream is a product of my mind. And there seems to be people or animals acting independently. When dreams are analyzed there seems to be an intelligence behind the stories they create. And yet upon waking the story comes as a complete surprise-one which the dreamer needs the help of an analyst to understand! So, the discovery of the Unconscious is one way to go in favor of determinism. Behaviorism, wherein behavior is the result of the contingencies of reinforcement. I listened to Daniel Dennent in a discussion with Sapolsky on this recently, and I swear Dennent’s compatiblism strikes me as built on the same question begging. It must be because society and the legal system are built on a premise of free will. Is question begging better when a whole society does it?
Okay, but this thread revolves more around pinning down whether we preach to the choir of our own volition or whether we preach to it because we were never able not to. Then those compatibilists who argue that we are both determined to preach to the choir and are still responsible for doing so.
felix dakat:
Here’s what many will not accept, however…that AI is to us what we are to nature. Still, as we see robots becoming more and more like human beings, we may reach the point where the difference gets narrower and narrower.
felix dakat:
Same here [for me]. In our dreams we are oblivious to the fact that we are dreaming. And some of my own dreams are nothing short of mind-boggling. A couple of night ago, for example, I had one of my many “work dreams”. A lot of them because I worked there for 27 years. Anyway, in the dream, I am having this discussion with my old boss. He shows me this article about importing goods from China. And there I am reading sentence after sentence and engaging in this long-drawn out discussion about Fancy World and J-Wells and Yao Wei and Zhang.
Now, if this was just a recollection of an actual experience I had there, that would be one thing. But while the context was familiar, I was making points to him I had never even thought of then! Points that had he listened to me back then the business might not have almost went under.
Felix da kat:
As I noted above, from my frame of mind, many things that philosophers note about free will beg any number of questions. In other words, in regard to the answers they provide, it is simply assumed that their premises are by default the starting point.
I can relate to this. Compared to what others report my recall of my dreams is pretty poor. However, I recently had a dream in which the story’s level of complexity was so great that I concluded that the “writer” was way smarter than me. It was like Shakespeare. Now that could be an illusion. But, perhaps the dream experience correlates with what authors experience when the imagination takes over and the stories seem to write themselves.
Neuroscience shows that 95% of the processes necessary for the maintenance of life are ongoing in our bodies without our awareness of them. So ordinary waking consciousness is the tip of the iceberg.” According to cognitive science most of our thought is unconscious, not in the Freudian sense of being repressed, but in the sense that it operates beneath the level of cognitive awareness in accessible to consciousness and operating too quickly to be focused on. “ (“ Philosophy in the flesh, the embodied mind and it’s challenge to western thought” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson). They point out that according to the “folk theory of essences”, objects have natures defined by sets of properties that determine their behavior. So each person has a moral essence that determines his or her moral behavior. Moral essence of a person is called their character. People are born with or develope in early life, essential moral properties and habits that stay with them for life. Such properties are called virtues if they are moral properties and habits and vices if they are immoral ones. The collection of virtues and vices attributed to a person is called that person‘s character. “ When people say she has a heart of gold or he doesn’t have a mean bone in his body or he’s rotten to the core. They are making use of the metaphor of moral essence. That is, they are saying that the person in question has certain essential moral qualities that determine certain kinds of moral or immoral behavior.”
This kind of soft determinism is very common in practical everyday thought… I’m sure I default into it at times when I’m not questioning things philosophically. I observe the same people who champion free will falling into this mode of reasoning when not arguing against determinism.
Are dreams an indication of how the brain functions in the wide awake world? Damned if I know. But how can it not boggle the mind just how reality in dreams so closely resembles the reality of the wide awake world?
At least mine do. The things I’ve thought, felt, said and do in dreams are often so extraordinary, I’ll wake up more convinced than ever that maybe, just maybe, my brain really does sustain only the psychological illusion of free will.
felix dakat:
That’s another aspect of the human condition we cannot wrap our minds completely around. It’s not like there’s this Real Me inside my brain directing the heart, liver, kidneys and all the other biological functions that are autonomic to do what they do. And, yeah, the next time someone here does something involving conflicting goods – my “thing” here – let them breakdown in some detail where their conscious mind ends, and their subconscious and unconscious minds begin.
Then the part where – click – given free will, the Real Me is able to “weed out” the contingent parts of identity that, in the is/ought world, are attributable far more to the historical and cultural parameters of “I”, rather than any deontological philosophy that “weeds out” many things as well…up in the philosophical clouds.
As for this part…
felix dakat:
…we can only take a more or less blind “leap of faith” given both The Gap and Rummy’s Rule.
felix dakat:
Here I can only come back to Mary aborting her unborn baby/clump of cells. If anyone here is a soft determinist, would you hold her morally responsible for a behavior she was never able not to “choose”.
Criticising Strawson’s Compatibilism
Nurana Rajabova is wary of an attempt to dismiss determinism to keep free will.
Back to that again. But if every single thing we think, feel, say and do is “somehow” compelled by whatever explanation there is for the existence of the laws of matter themselves, then justice is just another inherent/necessary manifestation of the only possible reality in turn. And, as well, some are compelled to argue for this, others against it.
Or, as I am more inclined to suggest, when these theoretical dicussions make contact with actual flesh and blood human interactions…relationships that go well beyond a world of words. Unless, again, this too is just six of one, half a dozen of the other.
But what they can’t pin down is whether or not the claim itself is just another domino toppling over on cue going back to…the Big Bang? The multiverse?
Unless, of course, “somehow” the soft determinists among us are able to convince me that compatibilism actually makes sense.
Then the part where I argue that accepting something as true solely because you were never able to reject it as false makes sense…how?
The part that continues to [compelled or otherwise] baffle me the most:
That in and of itself might be no less entangled in the gap between what we think we understand about the human condition and all that we don’t even know about existence itself.
Criticising Strawson’s Compatibilism
Nurana Rajabova is wary of an attempt to dismiss determinism to keep free will.
[quote] Strawson’s Argument
Before we get into the specifics of his paper, we should note that Strawson has a slightly idiosyncratic compatibilist position. Unlike other compatibilists, he does not identify as a determinist. In fact, he denies that he even understands the thesis of determinism. Instead he argues that even if determinism were correct, that still would not take away our sense of moral responsibility, since for Strawson the question of the justification of moral responsibility is internal to “the general structure or web of human attitudes and feelings” (‘Freedom and Resentment’). [/quote]
On the other hand, how does that, for all practical purposes, actually manifest itself in our interactions with others? After all, for any number of determinists, our “sense of reality” is no less wholly compelled by our brains than is our “sense of moral responsibility”.
Alluding once again to those mysterious “internal components” [which may well exist], but how do these intrinsic, integral aspects/functions of the brain – chemically and neurologically and electrically – become intertwined in “the general structure or web of human attitudes and feelings”? It’s like finally pinning down once and for all where God ends, and mere mortals begin. Or where a Divine pantheist universe stops, and mere mortals start. Or pinning down in an indisputable manner where genes and nature give way to memes and nurture.
Or, perhaps, is Buddhism a more…reasonable approach here? How about monads?
Here [click] I come back to the argument many advocates of free will make…that “somehow” our emotions and our intuitions are “different” from the purely rational components of human brains interacting in sync objectively with others in the either/or world. “Somehow”, instead, our most deep-seated emotional reactions to things like abortion and nihilism and human sexuality simply “transcend” mere laws of matter. “Somehow” they put us in touch with that crucial Intrinsic, Spiritual, Natural…Real Me.
As I’ve noted before, even given free will, the way we think about conflicting goods is almost always in close proximity to how we feel about them…How we react to them “in our gut”.
After all, how many people here think/believe philosophically and ethically what they do about abortion, moral nihilism and human sexuality, but feel/intuit quite the opposite?
Someone arguing, “I believe that abortion is deontologically justified, but deep down inside me I feel it is mass-murder.” And then those fractured and fragmented as “I” am?
Or: “I believe that human autonomy is clearly a reasonable assessment of the human condition, but my gut tells me it’s all on automatic pilot.”
.
Well I knew I wouldn’t get a/ny response, but some things do bear pointing out… like them constantly changing the goal posts when someone says any/some-thing smart or ingenious and then shuts the conversation down.
For Strawson it manifests in our emotional reactions to the actions of others. Our attitudes toward certain acts.
Strawson wasn’t a determinist.
Who is alluding to ‘internal components’?
It seems like you are asking Strawson how is model works in determinism. Though he didn’t say ‘internal components’. You might want to read the whole essay.
How so?
They’d be part of the divine universe like everything else, at least in some pantheisms. There are a few…
Approach to what?
Leibnitz’s, Pythagorus’? Whose monads? This seems almost random.
Here [click] I come back to the argument many advocates of free will make…that “somehow” our emotions and our intuitions are “different” from the purely rational components of human brains interacting in sync objectively with others in the either/or world.
Is this the argument you think Strawson is making or do you mean this counters Strawson’s argument? I’m not sure it’s (doing) either.
“Somehow”, instead, our most deep-seated emotional reactions to things like abortion and nihilism and human sexuality simply “transcend” mere laws of matter. “Somehow” they put us in touch with that crucial Intrinsic, Spiritual, Natural…Real Me.