thoughts on determinism

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There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

Smilansky is convinced that free will does not exist in the traditional sense—and that it would be very bad if most people realized this. “Imagine,” he told me, “that I’m deliberating whether to do my duty, such as to parachute into enemy territory, or something more mundane like to risk my job by reporting on some wrongdoing. If everyone accepts that there is no free will, then I’ll know that people will say, ‘Whatever he did, he had no choice—we can’t blame him.’ So I know I’m not going to be condemned for taking the selfish option.” This, he believes, is very dangerous for society, and “the more people accept the determinist picture, the worse things will get.”

Dangerous? Well, if we do live in a wholly determined universe and all of this unfolds, the danger and the individual reactions when encountering it? Well, so what?

On the other hand, if we do actually have the capacity to make autonomous choices and an increasing number of us become convinced that we do not, that would become…what exactly? And that’s before we get to the argument of those like me. I can presume to have free will [and in fact have it] but it doesn’t make this freedom any less subsumed in the arguments I make regarding identity, conflicting goods and political economy.

Determinism not only undermines blame, Smilansky argues; it also undermines praise. Imagine I do risk my life by jumping into enemy territory to perform a daring mission. Afterward, people will say that I had no choice, that my feats were merely, in Smilansky’s phrase, “an unfolding of the given,” and therefore hardly praiseworthy. And just as undermining blame would remove an obstacle to acting wickedly, so undermining praise would remove an incentive to do good. Our heroes would seem less inspiring, he argues, our achievements less noteworthy, and soon we would sink into decadence and despondency.

Yes, it works both ways. We can blame others for committing evil acts but we were never able not to blame them. Anymore than they were ever able to not do those acts. And, in turn, evil itself is subsumed in a universe and everything in it literally at one with itself. Same with praising others for doing good deeds. All super heroes and villains become interchangeable in the only possible reality.

The stakes here could not possibly higher. On par, given human autonomy, with the existence of a loving just and merciful God or an essentially meaningless and purposeless world.

Take your pick.

Ah, but then go on to demonstrate why all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to pick the same thing.

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There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

Smilansky advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend.

Don’t get me started, right? In a wholly determined universe, society is compelled to defend free will that some are compelled to believe is true while others are compelled to believe it is not true. So that Smilansky is then compelled to advocate illusionism in an article that I was compelled to read in order to be compelled to post words that you are compelled to read.

The idea of determinism, and the facts supporting it, must be kept confined within the ivory tower. Only the initiated, behind those walls, should dare to, as he put it to me, “look the dark truth in the face.” Smilansky says he realizes that there is something drastic, even terrible, about this idea—but if the choice is between the true and the good, then for the sake of society, the true must go.

Now, suppose this is true. How then is the relationship between the true and the good any different from the relationship between two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom in forming a drop of water?

Over and over and over we can only get stuck [ontologically, teleologically] in the gap between the speculations of mere mortals here on planet Earth and the explanation for existence itself.

We come to conclusions that can only be predicated on assumptions we seemingly have no way in which to confirm either one way or the other. It’s just considerably more maddening to some than to others. But only because [some are compelled to insist] because nature commands it.

But: nature as a manifestation of God? God as a manifestation of nature?

Smilansky’s arguments may sound odd at first, given his contention that the world is devoid of free will: If we are not really deciding anything, who cares what information is let loose?

Exactly! Only we cannot seem to pin down just how odd arguments of this sort might be. After all, oddness itself is moot when everything is only as it can ever be. And caring about it is no less included.

But new information, of course, is a sensory input like any other; it can change our behavior, even if we are not the conscious agents of that change. In the language of cause and effect, a belief in free will may not inspire us to make the best of ourselves, but it does stimulate us to do so.

Again, this is always what I presumed peacegirl was intent on communicating to us. It seemed important to her to point out that the things we come to think and feel result in very real and undeniable behaviors that change the world around us. Had we not chose those behaviors the world would be different. And unlike the changes that occur when a volcano erupts or an asteroid smashes into earth the changes we bring about are as a result of actual conscious matter. Whereas my reaction was always, “so what?”. If we could never have not chosen the behaviors that the laws of matter compelled our brains to “choose” how, for all practical purposes, are the inevitable consequences of those choices really any different from the consequence brought about by mindless matter?

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There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

Illusionism is a minority position among academic philosophers, most of whom still hope that the good and the true can be reconciled. But it represents an ancient strand of thought among intellectual elites. Nietzsche called free will “a theologians’ artifice” that permits us to “judge and punish.” And many thinkers have believed, as Smilansky does, that institutions of judgment and punishment are necessary if we are to avoid a fall into barbarism.

Necessary because in assuming the existence of free will this allows us to invent new ways in which to interact that evolve over time from the nasty, brutish and short lives embedded in precarious dog eat dog law of the jungle interactions to what we now constantly debate back and forth regarding more civilized relationships.

Or necessary because it really doesn’t matter what he thinks – or what you and I think – because necessity here goes all the way back to the very beginning of whatever it is that the very beginning was.

Thus even a discussion of illusionism itself is no less an illusion in that the discussion was “fated” or “destined” to be what it is. Then the even murkier speculation about whether that is a manifestation of one or another teleological font that can somehow be intertwined in a determined universe.

Smilansky is not advocating policies of Orwellian thought control. Luckily, he argues, we don’t need them. Belief in free will comes naturally to us.

Again: Naturally in what sense?! It always boggles my mind how points like this can be raised without acknowledging that we seemingly have no capacity to ascertain whether or not we actually have any capacity to not make them instead.

Scientists and commentators merely need to exercise some self-restraint, instead of gleefully disabusing people of the illusions that undergird all they hold dear. Most scientists “don’t realize what effect these ideas can have,” Smilansky told me. “Promoting determinism is complacent and dangerous.”

Yes, again, to the extent that we do have some autonomy, convincing particular people in particular contexts that we don’t can result in in all manner of calamities. If you actually believe that those who are pursuing the policies of groups like the Proud Boys and QAnon and Trumpworld are entirely in sync with the only possible political reality unfolding in America today then you are convinced in turn that anything you might do or not do in reaction to it is “beyond your control”.

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There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

Yet not all scholars who argue publicly against free will are blind to the social and psychological consequences. Some simply don’t agree that these consequences might include the collapse of civilization. One of the most prominent is the neuroscientist and writer Sam Harris, who, in his 2012 book, Free Will, set out to bring down the fantasy of conscious choice. Like Smilansky, he believes that there is no such thing as free will. But Harris thinks we are better off without the whole notion of it.

All I can say to this is, “here we go again”.

Harris sets about to bring down “the fantasy of conscious choice” as though what he himself consciously thinks about it is not in turn an inherent manifestation of the fantasy as well. How can we be better off regarding the whole notion of anything at all if our thoughts and feelings of being better off were/are only as they were/are/will be anyway?

I’m trying to imagine Harris’s reaction to this? A reaction that is not inherently/necessarily the embodiment of the only possible reality. The mystery then still being the existence of self-conscious matter itself. In a No God world.

“We need our beliefs to track what is true,” Harris told me.

Now, given the manner in which I understand determinism, his need to suggest that, like our need to react to the suggestion as we do, is the only possible reality. It’s as though I was having a dream in which Harris and I were discussing this. In the dream everything seems entirely real. What I say. What he says. But it is all just the illusion of reality, given the evolution of biological life on planet Earth, culminating in the human species acquiring brains with the genetic capacity to dream…to create and then sustain these chemical and neurological interactions.

How then is the waking brain’s “reality”/reality different? And what if the difference that we intuit “in our gut” is all just part of the psychological illusion of free will.

Illusions, no matter how well intentioned, will always hold us back. For example, we currently use the threat of imprisonment as a crude tool to persuade people not to do bad things. But if we instead accept that “human behavior arises from neurophysiology,” he argued, then we can better understand what is really causing people to do bad things despite this threat of punishment—and how to stop them. “We need,” Harris told me, “to know what are the levers we can pull as a society to encourage people to be the best version of themselves they can be".

This is still all completely nonsensical to me. He starts with the assumption that conscious choice is fantastical. And then proceeds to choose words to create an argument in much the same manner that [to me] someone who believed in free will would.

As though there was a best version of any particular self out in a world that to me creates moral and political value judgments out of existential fabrications derived from particular existential trajectories derived from particular lives out in particular worlds historically, culturally and circumstantially.

And, here, presuming some measure of human autonomy.

And what on earth does it mean to discuss “what is really causing people to do bad things” when what is really causing people to think, feel, say and do everything is the fact that their brain is just more matter wholly in sync with whatever explains the so-called immutable laws of matter.

Again, a little help with this if you think you understand the point Harris and others are making that I keep missing.

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Compatibilism
From The Information Philosopher website

Compatibilists argue that determinism is compatible with human freedom, and that indeterminism is not compatible or at best incoherent. They feel (correctly) that there must be a deterministic or causal connection between our will and our actions. This allows us to take responsibility for our actions, including credit for the good and blame for the bad.

As long as the agent is free from external coercion, they have freedom of action, which is the compatibilist freedom we have according to Thomas Hobbes and David Hume.

This is it. This is the part I strenuously grapple with in order to understand how determinism and human freedom can be “compatible”/compatible.

Starting of course with the assumption I make that this assumption itself is only as it ever could have been. Just as what the compatibilists do argue is only ever what they could have argued.

I may think that I am choosing to type these particular words [and not different words] of my own volition but that is only because, given the psychological illusion of free will inherently built into the human brain through the evolution of biological life on planet Earth, I was never actually able to type different words.

Anymore than you were ever able to not read these words here and now because of your own free will you choose instead to go for a hike in the woods.

Compatibilists (or “soft determinists” as they have been known since William James) identify free will with freedom of action - the lack of external constraints. We are free, and we have free will, if we are not in physical chains. But freedom of the will is different from freedom of action.

Hard determinism/soft determinism. To some that’s like making a distinction between a hard pregnancy and a soft pregnancy. Being a lot pregnant or a little bit pregnant is still being pregnant.

How can the immutable laws of matter not be construed as an “external constraint” when they compel all matter to interact only as it ever could have?

As Arthur Schopenhauer once opined, "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”

Or: “A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.”

And, to the best of my current knowledge, neither philosophers nor scientists have fully untangled that conundrum. Of or not of their own volition.

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Compatibilism
From The Information Philosopher website

Many compatibilists accept the view of a causal chain of events going back indefinitely in time, consistent with the laws of nature, with the plan of an omniscient God, or with other determinisms. As long as our own will is included in that causal chain, we are free, they say. And they think causality in nature is related to the very possibility of reason and logic. Without causality, they say, we could not be [sure] of the truths of our arguments.

Here, if the causal chain ends in God, I can at least imagine that somehow this omnipotent entity is able to devise a way in which to reconcile what is said to be His omniscient nature and human autonomy. How exactly, I’m never quite able to pin down. But the arguments are out there and He is, well, God.

But going back to “other determinisms” in a No God universe? What the hell does that mean?

Same here:

Compatibilists don’t mind all their decisions being caused by a metaphysical chain of events, as long as they are not in physical chains.

How on earth are the existence of physical chains not inherently embedded in the existence of metaphysical changes?

Consider:

"Meta is a word which, like so many other things, we have the ancient Greeks to thank for. When they used it, meta meant “beyond,” “after,” or “behind.”

So, if there is a physical causal chain, then something described here as metaphysical would become the philosophical equivalent of God. The ultimate, definitive explanation for cause and effect in the human brain/mind/consciousness

Again, back to Mary “choosing” to abort her unborn baby. Someone please differentiate for me where the physical chain of events ends and the metaphysical chain of events begins in her brain at the moment she “decides”.

We think compatibilists should be classified according to the particular determinisms they think are compatible with human freedom. It is one thing to claim compatibility with physics, another to claim compatibility with God’s foreknowledge, etc.

Yeah, that works for me. Only this classification must eventually get around to encompassing the actual behaviors that you imagine are being “chosen”/chosen given particular contexts.

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Compatibilism
From The Information Philosopher website

Compatibilists don’t mind all their decisions being caused by a metaphysical chain of events, as long as they are not in physical chains.

You know what’s coming:

How is what the compatibilists “mind”/mind here not in turn part and parcel of the physical chains going all the way back to an explanation of/for the laws of matter themselves? After all, once it can be – if it can be – determined how mindless matter through the biological evolution of life on planet Earth came to create minds compelled by nature to invent words like metaphysical, that will just be but one more necessary manifestation of the only possible reality.

Unless of course my own understanding of a determined universe is wrong. And no one is more willing to acknowledge the possibility of that than I am.

An increasing number of compatibilists, often reluctantly, accept the view that random quantum mechanical events occur in the world. Whether in the physical world, in the biological world (where they are a key driver of genetic mutations), or in the mind, randomness and uncaused events are real.

Perhaps just as hard to grapple with rationally is the idea of a random or uncaused event. What, like, out of the blue, something just “happens”?

Biologically or otherwise, this seems to border on pure magic. Something “supernatural”. And how does one go about the reality of interacting with others from day to day while believing that at any time something can just – poof! – happen? With no cause. Also, in the course of living our lives, how often does this actually happen? Nothing pops into my own head of late.

Whereas the existence of mathematics and science and nature and engineering and technology seems to point unequivocally to an either/or order in which existential correlations are accepted for all practical purposes as though cause and effect is anything but random.

Other compatibilists, Daniel Dennett, for example, simply insist that such genuine irreducible randomness is not needed for evolution or for human freedom. Others point out that even if strict determinism were true (which it isn’t), compatibilist freedom of action, in David Hume’s sense, would still exist.

Oh, yeah, it exists alright. In intellectual contraptions like this. But what of genuine human freedom that is in fact able to be demonstrated by science and philosophy. Where is the definitive argument here that shuts down all assessments to the contrary?

It may exist. But I have not come upon it yet. Or have come upon it but failed to grasp it.

On the other hand, if they have truly resolved this age old quandary wouldn’t news of it be flying around the planet…being haled in every scientific publication and on every internet site?

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Compatibilism
From The Information Philosopher website

Quantum events introduce the possibility of accidents, novelty, and human creativity. Compatibilists who admit such indeterminism might very likely be convinced of a stronger argument for human freedom that still provides an adequately determined will.

You know, whatever that means.

First of all, imagine the gap between what science knows today about the quantum world and what it will know, say, 100 years from now. Compelled or otherwise. What appear to be accidents or random interactions may well reflect only the fact that science has not dug down deep enough in connecting the dots.

But it is certainly still the case that it will start with what science can tell us about the relationship between the seeming infinitely small and infinitely large worlds.

Whatever that means.

And however science can determine if what they do determine, they determined as a result of their own free will rather than as a result of never being able not to determine what they do.

That antinomy may well never go away, right?

Compatibilism explains the will. It cannot explain free. Our new mind model gets us both free (randomness) and will (adequately determined). The Cogito is genuine free will.

No, “here and now”, compatibilists, like determinists, like free will advocates make certain assumptions about the human mind. They start with premises they are still not indisputably certain that they were or were not compelled by the laws of matter to start with.

How does either a scientist or a philosopher come to objective conclusions about the human brain when it is their own brain that is tasked with providing them?

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Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.

Determinism, in the most common philosophical sense of the term, is “the theory that everything that happens must happen as it does and could not have happened any other way” (Cambridge Online Dictionary, 2019). This means that everything that happens was bound to happen including human actions, and this implies that choice is some sort of illusion. If determinism is true, this shatters our fundamental understanding of ourselves and the universe, not to mention our moral practices. Nevertheless, the conclusion determinists themselves come to concerning its implications for moral responsibility are not always the same.

“Some sort of illusion”.

Is that like saying that a woman has “some sort of pregnancy”? Wouldn’t it seem more likely that we either do or do not have the capacity to opt of our own volition, will, choice, preference, liberty, purpose, deliberation, etc., to behave in one manner rather than another.

Only it’s not for nothing that the free will/determinism debate is clearly one of science’s and philosophy’s greatest antinomies.

This thing:

Antinomy: a contradiction between two beliefs or conclusions that are in themselves reasonable; a paradox.

We just don’t know for certain, right? Instead, there are only those at both ends of intellectual spectrum who insist that we do know. Why? Because they know.

I merely focus in myself on the part that seems most important of all: free will or the lack thereof in regard to holding ourselves responsible for the behaviors we choose that result in human pain and suffering for others. If nature is entirely in command here, nothing that we do is ever not only what we ever could have done.

Good for the losers, bad for the winners, right?

Morally speaking, determinists are mainly divided into two camps, namely compatibilists and incompatibilists. The incompatibilists argue that determinism completely negates the possibility of agent causation, and therefore moral responsibility.

That’s me of course.

On the other hand, compatibilists claim that moral responsibility is still applicable under determinism. They are both contrasted to libertarians, who defend moral responsibility through believing in free will, dismissing determinism.

Here we go again: grappling with and attempting to grasp how on earth the compatibilists pull that rabbit out of the hat. In other words, being compelled by the laws of matter to grapple with and attempt to grasp that which I was never able not to.

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In Defense of Compatibilism: A Response to Edwards and Coyne
written by Ben Burgis at the quillette website

William Edwards frames the quarrel as an argument between thinkers who believe in free will and those who believe we live in an entirely deterministic universe. He argues that it feels like we’re in control of our actions in a way that makes us morally responsible for those actions but that this feeling is “dismissed as an illusion by serious, contemporary neuroscientists.” Rather than bowing to the verdict of the neuroscientists, though, Edwards recommends that we see the question of whether free will exists as “the Pascal’s Wager of the twenty-first century.” There’s “too much about the universe that we don’t understand” for us to be confident that the neuroscientists are right, so it’s appropriate for us to decide what to believe on the basis of factors other than evidence. Along the lines of Pascal’s original argument for belief in the existence of God, Edwards says we have much to gain and nothing to lose by understanding ourselves to be free and morally responsible beings. As such, we should believe that determinism is false.

Just came across this.

It’s as close as I get to grasping the position of the compatibilists. The hard determinists might be right but given that there is "too much about the universe that we don’t understand” none of us can really be certain.

So, sure, wager on something in the general vicinity of free will. Act as if you have it and, even if you don’t, it still doesn’t change the fact that here and now you bet that you do have it in choosing what you do from day to day.

Besides, even if you bet on determinism, it won’t change the fact that a part of you will no doubt still be upset when others do hold you morally responsible for doing things that they believe are evil. The punishment may be but another manifestation of the only possible reality but, again, your brain is hard wired to delude you into thinking it isn’t just.

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Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.

What’s interesting about the compatibilists’ position, is that they adhere to the idea that everything that happens is predetermined to happen, yet still argue for moral responsibility. One wonders, what is it that compatibilists are able to see that allows them to reconcile these two apparently contradictory theories?

Exactly!!!

There are two possible explanations. On one account, compatibilism may simply derive from an arbitrary standpoint and imply logically contradictory things. We see this in the accounts of those compatibilists who reject the notion of free will yet encourage people to live as if it exists. They say that even if free will does not exist, we have to act like it does.

Only nothing is really arbitrary in a universe in which matter interacts with other matter only in order to bring about and then to sustain the only possible reality. And isn’t that what those like peacegirl do? They’ll insist they firmly believe that no free will means human interactions unfold only as they ever could, but…

…but that [somehow] the part where they seek to embody their own “greater satisfaction” is not quite 100% in sync with it. And damned if I understand how they are able to convince themselves that it is not…other than in noting that this too is just another inherent manifestation of the psychological illusion of free will rooted in the mind-boggling mystery of the human brain itself.

How can you act like free will is real if the act itself is already determined by the laws of matter?

They also argue that moral practices are important for regulating people’s behavior. Yet they fail to explain to us how anything, including moral beliefs, can have a power in changing peoples’ behavior if the course of the world is already determined from the Big Bang. What we end up with is to me a logically contradictory view that can’t be explained outside of the realm of illusion.

Hear! Hear!

I think?

In other words, I just don’t know for certain if, instead, the problem may well be my own inability to grasp that what they are arguing is in fact more reasonable than my own point of view. Even though I am unable in turn to think myself into understanding how my own failure here can be anything other than the only manner in which I can know what nature compels me to.

However, compatibilism may also derive from purely semantic differences – in other words, from having a different definition for the term ‘determinism’. This can be why at times determinists talk over each other and derive completely different conclusions on ostensively the same subject.

Yo, peacegirl!!

As though semantic differences themselves are not necessarily ensnared in the only possible reality.

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Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.

Determinism in the Ordinary Sense

The first account of determinism, which is determinism taken in the ordinary sense, takes a unitary approach to the universe. According to this account, all things in the universe are connected by threads which are the laws of nature. The laws of nature act on the natural world only according to a path determined at or by the first cause, which may be the Big Bang or God, depending on one’s beliefs.

Of course what gets tricky here is that, depending on your beliefs, beliefs themselves may or may not be only as they ever could have been. Here no accounts are either ordinary or not ordinary. Words like “ordinary” are merely sounds that nature compelled the matter having evolved into human brains to invent in sync with all the rest of matter connected by threads — strings? – going back to God or the Big Bang. Which are themselves no less inherent/necessary components of the one and the only reality.

Hence, it would not be too much of a stretch if we said that this theory assigns the active power of choice only to the first cause. All other things are viewed as passive entities transmitting predetermined causal power from one to another. According to this theory, things are determined by this very first cause and happen necessarily and only according to the laws of nature. Therefore, things cannot happen any other way than the way they already do.

And what could possibly be more profoundly problematic than this? Whether we do have the real deal free will or it is all only as it ever could have been, we’re still “stuck” or stuck groping about to understand whether 1] existence had a First Cause or 2] it wasn’t caused at all but has always simply been there. And now here.

Really, take some time to actually think this through. How can there be nothing and then something and then everything? How can something always exist and never be caused to exist? Either way, it’s ultimately unfathomable.

Defenders of this theory resist non-physical explanations of thought and extend the laws of physics to the human mind.

Come on, get real. Extending the laws of physics to the human brain “in your head” by merely thinking yourself into believing it is true is no where near close to explaining how exactly those heavy elements produced as a result of exploding stars evolved into living matter evolved into self-conscious minds able to reconfigure those elements into the computer technology used to create an internet resulting in the creation of threads like this at philosophy forums like ILP.

We don’t even really know if the explanation is within reach of the human brain.

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Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.

Defenders of this theory [above] resist non-physical explanations of thought and extend the laws of physics to the human mind. Consequently, humans are viewed simply as a part of physics with no power of causation in their minds – no effective power of choice. In this sense, humans are simply pre-programmed ‘moist robots’ (a term coined by Scott Adams), created physically causally, and acting only physically causally.

Come on, who is kidding whom? Are we really expected to believe that the biological matter involved in producing a human pregnancy that is then aborted is exactly the same as the matter in the brain that discusses and debates the morality of the abortion?

Yet, okay, admittedly, given my own “here and now” assumptions about determinism, that is basically what I expect others to believe.

Only I don’t have any autonomous say about it in a determined world and, in a real deal free will world, I don’t have any possible way in which to demonstrate that my frame of mind is either the optimal or the only rational way in which to think about it.

Same with this intellectual contraption:

Our actions, be they evil or good, do not originate from us. We experience our thoughts, feelings and ‘decisions’ because we are determined to experience them at the particular instances we do. Even the wishes, desires, thoughts that we feel we are initiating by our power of choice are, in fact, completely outside of our power, since we have no power of choice. We have no choice but live through our predestined script, as the actors of that script. In this way, we are victims of fate. Upon this account, we would not be wrong to say that the first cause determined for each person living fourteen billion years after to have a particular feeling or emotion at any given time. Right now as I am typing this article, the speed with which I’m moving my fingers, the typos I make, and ‘choose’ to correct, were also determined at that very first cause.

Sound familiar?

What else is there here but to accept our surreal fate? Everything posted on this thread to date [including the dreck of late] is either from the minds of those – all of us for example – wholly in sync with the ultimately mysterious laws of matter or if there is an element of volition in the matter that has become the human brain, we are unable to grasp it in its entirety going back to an explanation for existence itself.

Try this:

If you want to know just how mind-bogglingly vast and mysterious the universe that we all live in is – and how infinitesimally insignificant we are here on planet Earth – tune in to the space programs on the Science Channel.

In other words, compelled or not.

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Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.

The seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) had similar metaphysical views. Spinoza understood the world as unitary, such that there is only one true thing or substance, which is both physically extended across space and at the same time involves a mental system of ideas. To Spinoza this substance is both God and nature. However, it is important to note that Spinoza’s God should not be understood as a superpowerful quasi-human being ruling over the world. Spinoza’s God is more the totality of everything there is. In this sense, different objects, including people like ourselves, are merely facets or modes of this one infinite, indivisible divine substance in which they all dwell.

Okay, so given his understanding here what are we to make of this:

“Baruch Spinoza, was a Jewish philosopher who, at age 23, was put in cherem (similar to excommunication) by Jewish religious authorities for heresies such as his controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible (which would formed the foundations of modern biblical criticism) and his pantheistic views of the Divine. Prior to that, he had been attacked on the steps of the community synagogue by a knife-wielding assailant shouting “Heretic!”, and later his books were added to the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.”
wiki

Are all of the human interactions that unfolded here historically in turn but “merely facets or modes of this one infinite, indivisible divine substance in which they all dwell.”

Spinoza comes to the conclusions that he did…but only because he was never able not to conclude anything other than that? In the only possible reality? Is this in sync with his conclusions?

In his Ethics (1677) Spinoza says that this substance’s essence explains its existence. In other words, it’s the nature of the ultimate substance of the world to exist; and all other things follow necessarily from this nature. Therefore all things are conditioned to act in a particular manner by God. Or, as Spinoza puts it, from God’s infinite power or nature “all things have necessarily flowed, or always followed, by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows, from eternity and to eternity, that its three angles are equal to two right angles.”

Again, the irony. A book entitled Ethics in a universe where the moral and political value judgments of mere mortals are but another manifestation of “all things have necessarily flowed, or always followed, by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows, from eternity and to eternity, that its three angles are equal to two right angles.”

Or, sure, I am missing something here that makes human ethics somehow qualitatively different from human biology and physics and chemistry.

Lastly, Spinoza tells us there is no free will. Even God, according to Spinoza, does not act through free will, but from its very nature or infinite power in such a way that all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by necessity. Put differently, things could not have been brought into being by God in any manner or order different from the way they have been brought into being.

So, Spinoza went about living his life from day to day convinced that everything he thought, felt, said and did was destined, fated, rendered inevitable in the only possible reality?

Is that what he proposed?

And did he also recognize that his conclusions were really little more than one of nature’s “thought experiment” insofar as he was never able to establish his own assumptions as those that all rational men and women were obligated to embrace.

How, here, was he not in the same boat that all the rest of are in given “the gap” above?

Including this part:

Given this strict position on predetermination and its rejection of free choice, these defenders of determinism claim that moral responsibility is not compatible with it. After all, how could moral responsibility be justifiable in a world where everything is determined by the first cause, and agents have no power of causation themselves?

You tell me.

[iambiguous]

Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.

David Hume’s Compatibilism

…in A Treatise of Human Nature (1738), 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’.

Back again to defining the meaning of the word determinism as though the meaning that any particular individual settles on is not the only meaning that nature compelled him or her to settle on.

In other words, the simply mind-boggling gap between what we think we know about mindless matter evolving biologically on planet Earth into mindful matter and all that there is to be known. And all the “amateurs” here – including me – speculating on something that [it would seem] only those such as neuroscientists conducting actual empirical studies and experiments into the functioning human brain would be qualified to assess.

Thus how on Earth could/would Hume be able to pin down himself the extent to which his own account is or is not but another inherent/necessary manifestation of the only possible reality?

Did he have a special insight allowing him to finally bridge the gap once and for all between correlation and cause and effect?

As for the is/ought interactions of mere mortals, given the real deal free will world, I’d be interested in discussing Hume’s conjectures here with someone you thinks that they understand them.

After all, from my frame of mind, given the manner in which I construe the meaning of determinism, moral responsibility among mere mortals on planet Earth is but another intrinsic component of the either/or world…entirely at the command of the laws of matter.

[iambiguous]

Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.

In order to understand determinism in Hume’s account, one needs to bear in mind Hume’s empiricism, which underlies all his philosophical inquiry. As an empiricist, Hume believed that our knowledge of the world comes only through sensory perception, not through innate ideas or intuition.

He was still no less stuck here [like all the rest of us are today] in acknowledging that he was unable to determine definitively if the distinction he made between empiricism and rationalism was only as nature compelled him to make it…or, of his own volition, he freely opted for one conclusion rather than another.

Unless, of course, he did provide us with a definitive assessment of determinism. One that has yet to come to my attention.

Can anyone here provide me with it…assuming that it does exist.

Based on this premise, he believed there are certain principles that help us acquire knowledge or know anything at all, for that matter. One of these principles concerns causation. As we go through life Hume argued, we constantly witness conjunctions of events: we see one thing following another on a regular basis. Based on this constant conjunction, we infer that there is a cause and effect relationship between them.

Here of course the discussion almost always revolves solely around interactions in the either/or world:

So we see one billiard ball hit another billiard ball, and the second ball then moves, and we infer a causal relationship.

Whereas far more fascinating is the speculation aimed at grappling with determinism in the is/ought world. The part where the is/ought world itself is only an illusion. The part where human moral and political conflict is basically the equivalent of those billiard balls interacting: only as we must given an all-encompassing ontological cause and effect applicable to all matter.

Such observations in turn lead us to a belief in causal necessity, a universal principle that every effect must be caused. Thus we assume that for an effect to exist, it is necessary that there must be a cause, and nothing comes out of randomness or chance: “The chance or indifference lies only in our judgment on account of our imperfect knowledge, not in the things themselves, which are in every case equally necessary, though to appearance not equally constant or certain,” Hume writes. From Hume’s rejection of the idea of chance being ‘in things themselves’, we can conclude that he was a determinist.

Okay, but, “for all practical purposes” how far did his own understanding of that go? That is basically what I keep attempting to inquire about with obsrvr524 above, in regard to James S. Saint’s take on determinism.

And, compelled or not, he refuses to go there. In fact in order to avoid going there I was able to reduce him down to the “wiggle wiggle wiggle” gibberish of this sort here: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 3&start=50

What is it about the implication of hard determinism that disturbs some more than others? For those like obsrvr524, they seem to accept determinism…except when it comes to their fulminating fanatic rants against the liberals. Then they are right and the liberals are wrong…as though determinism has nothing to do with it. Same with peacegirl and her no free will/greater satisfaction contradiction.

Or, rather, still a contradiction to me.

[iambiguous]

Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.

However, [Hume] was also a sceptic about causation in the metaphysical sense.

“Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality” . Wikipedia

See the problem? How on earth could he – could we – even begin to grasp causation metaphysically given the gap I note above? Isn’t that ever and always the most exasperating aspect of our “reality”/reality when confronted with determinism?

Yes, there are those here like peacegirl, the author, James S. Saint, obsrvr524 – and Sculptor? – who seem [to me] to argue emphatically that they have in fact closed that gap and present us with either the optimal or the only rational assessment of all this.

Which, assuming I do possess some measure of free will, I then construe to be but another manifestation of what I call the “psychology of objectivism” explored on this thread: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=185296

And then those like me who trudge on, even while acknowledging the seeming futility of the effort itself. Why? Again, in my view, that is rooted in the profoundly problematic parameters of dasein. The experiences that encompassed the particular and unique life that “I” have lived have simply predisposed me to come back to it over and over again.

Unless, in what still completely boggles my mind, nature really is behind it all!

[iambiguous]

Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.

…as we’ve seen, Hume argued that causal necessity is a relation that a mind comes up with based on the constant effects it perceives; but the mind is never capable of perceiving the actual cause. For instance, if I see one ball moved by another ball, what I experience is a ball in different positions. I infer that the movement of one ball was caused by the other one hitting it, but in reality I never perceive the actual power or cause – how one ball caused the other to move.

On the other hand, come on, in regard to material interactions in the either/or world it seems considerably more possible that there may well be a first cause. Call it God, call it nature. And in regard to why the balls do what they do in a game of billiards, science has been able to pin that down with an extraordinary degree of accuracy.

This sheds a light for us on the idea that Hume’s idea of determinism was different from either ‘standard’ determinism or Spinoza’s variety, which both relate everything back to the first cause. In Hume, we do not see any such long causality; rather, we see what we might call ‘potential’ causes for certain effects.

The potential to be right, the potential to be wrong. The part that the objectivists here refuse to accept. And the fact that there have been countless renditions of this first cause down through the ages, never seems to stop yet more from insisting that it is their own. Let alone own up to the obvious: that they have no capacity to actually demonstrate the existence of this first cause much beyond the assumptions they accumulate about it in their heads.

Or has one of them here accomplished this in a post that I missed. A link to it please.

One distinguishing aspect of Hume’s determinism, is that he never claims that any effect we observe today is the manifestation of a determination set by a remote first cause. The power of causation rather lies hidden in the various things that are in cause and effect relationships. In a sense, Hume tells us what we already experience in our daily lives: that, for instance, if you see smoke around, you know that something’s burning, even if you are not able to directly see the actual thing burning. So what he seems to mean by determinism is that if something happens, something else is bound to happen.

That’s always been my contention. We are able to note what we construe to be events/interactions either correlated or intertwined in a cause and effect relationship. But all we have at our disposal in explaining them is the information that we have accumulated. On the other hand, what of all the information that we have not collected that is pertinent as well in explaining it…fully?

And, in fact, how is our understanding of free will itself not embedded in what may well be one of the biggest mysteries of all?

[iambiguous]

Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.

It is this view of determinism [above] that allows Hume to see humans holding active creative power. Thus, in Hume’s philosophy, agents are not passive entities simply acting according to some script written for them at the first cause. For Hume, on the contrary, humans are free agents with consciousness, motivations and desires. He writes, “We are conscious, that we ourselves, in adapting means to ends, are guided by reason and design, and that’tis not ignorantly nor casually we perform those actions, which tend to self-preservation, to the obtaining pleasure, and avoiding pain” (Treatise, p.176). Therefore, as much as humans are determined by various causes in the universe, they also hold a determining power as they actively take part in cause and effect relationships.

Okay, how, experientially/experimentally, would he go about demonstrating this? Neuroscientists and others exploring these relationships today are still unable to pin down if what it is said Hume believes here is true. Again, unless of course someone here can link me to that definitive assessment. Although, come on, if science, philosophy and/or theology had been able to resolve it all definitively would it or would it not be discussed around the globe on any number of media outlets.

Yes, human beings would surely seem to be closer to “holding active creative power” then any other animal on the planet. But that’s not the same as fully explaining how lifeless matter evolved into living matter. Or how human consciousness itself was able to configure into free will. At least given how I understand it.

And what does Hume himself know about whatever it is that did cause the existence of matter…let alone the existence of existence itself. Instead, he, as with so many others, sat down and “thought up” a conclusion based solely on a set of assumptions that, so far, in so many crucial respects, are just “thought up”.

After all, do we or do we not “experience” pleasure and avoid pain in our dreams? I know that I do. The dream I had a few nights ago for example. There I “am” in a situation that was completely lucid to me. I’m at work in a company I was an employee in for 27 years. My employer is searching for me. Then in a sequence of events that were vividly real to me, I have to perform a task that will dissuade him from firing me. The turbulent tug of war between pleasure and pain, ever intertwined in my employment there, reached a point where had I not accomplished the task [placing a crucial order from our agent in Shanghai] it was over for me. I woke up barely able to distinguish between the dream world and the real world.

It is indeed this very point that allows Hume to reconcile moral responsibility with causality.

Again, as though he could provide us with the empirical evidence that does establish whether he “reconciled”, reconciled or “reconciled” moral responsibility with causality.

As I said, for Hume the term ‘determinism’ can be understood as implying that every effect must necessarily have a cause. But, causes are many and constantly evolving and humans do actively take a part in their creation. Human choices are not illusions in an already predetermined world. On the contrary, they provide determining factors – that is, causes – in an ever-evolving world, provoking events which we perceive as their effects.

Yes humans actively take part in their creations in a way that, say, volcanoes don’t take actively part in that which is created as a result of their eruptions. But how on earth can he have known for certain that human choices are not in fact but psychological illusions rooted wholly in a brain utterly in sync only with the laws of matter.

Though, sure, whatever that means.

[iambiguous]

Determinism versus Determinism
Nurana Rajabova is determined to sort it out.

Conclusion

Determinism is one of the perennial topics of philosophy, and its relatedness to human liberty and morality make it important to our daily lives and practices.

It’s really one of the most fundamental mysteries of all when contemplating the meaning and the purpose of existence itself. If we can’t be absolutely certain that any and all attempts on our part to reach our own conclusions here actually are our own autonomous conclusions – whether right or wrong – we can only basically flip the coin in our head and hope that even this result itself is of our own volition.

After all, even when Anton Chigurh flips his coin, the laws of physics are there to at least determine whether it must either be heads or tails.

Determinism is usually understood as rejecting the concepts of free will and moral responsibility, yet we see philosophers’ different conclusions on the subject. David Hume was able to reconcile the two seemingly contradictory theories of determinism and responsibility. This derives from Hume’s specific take on the term ‘determinism’, which does not reflect the standard philosophical definition, but rather only the perceived cause and effect relationship between events. But according to David Hume, human consciousness provides another factor than merely physical causation, allowing us to have moral responsibility.

Yes, if we put all our eggs in the technical conclusions basket that we concoct in regard to how we insist “determinism” and “free will” are to be defined, than the “for all practical purposes” implications can be many different things.

Your compatibilism or hers? Hume’s perceptions or someone else’s?

And, come on, did Hume ever pin down how the “consciousness factor” is actually able to transcend the physical interaction of matter in our brains? The part that many attribute to God? Or to our “soul”?

Or to some profoundly problematic factor in the Universe that those like Buddhists claim can take you all the way to Nirvana.

One thing, compelled or not, seems clear. The most important factor here would seem to be moral responsibility. Is it the real deal or not?