…
Ehhhhh rrhlol… iguess?
ill check in tomorrow then.
Well cause and effect undermine any notion of anything being discrete, so how can we then point to something discrete as being a cause? Cause and effect is useful. Taken to its logical conclusion, we don’t end up with determinism, we end up with nonsense.
Well yes, all things include their causes. If were being discrete. And all causes include their effects and causes.
to be discrete only demands that we remain true to a definition in a discretely delimited context. No cause of a physical thing can be discrete, as no physical thing is discrete. But a cause in a logical clause about causality itself must be discrete.
(and/)or is this… absurd?
There’s no such thing as a discrete cause. OR clause. That would be contrary to James’s point “A” regarding affectance.
Again, though, belief in cause and effect is a pretty powerful tool. I assume this goes without saying. Not sure what belief in determinism does for us, though. Not much, I think. Nothing good, anyway.
This is running in circles.
Logic is within mind. There is no logic outside of mind. I am not saying you should abandon logic. I am saying what logic is.
Consonance is within mind, dissonance is outside of mind.
In other words, you chose to respond to this thread. And the fact that [in a determined word] you could not have chosen not to respond to it is, what, immaterial?
It’s always that a “choice” is made.
Of course, the beauty of living in a determined world is that even if others ridicule the opinions that you post here you can always argue that you could not have freely chosen to post anything other than what you did.
On the other hand, those who argue that only their own conclusions here reflect the optimal point of view are also in the same fucking boat.
Thus the masters coud have only been the masters and the slaves could only have been the slaves.
Still, the compatibilists among us will somehow reconcile that with “freedom”.
It’s also interesting to note that logic does not deal with anything real. Being completely detached from reality, it operates on the assumption that its propositions are true. This is why Socratic Method and Karl Popper’s falsificationism do not work: because logical contradictions can never tell you which one of the propositions is wrong. It merely tells you that something is wrong (internal inconsistency), but it does not tell you what is wrong (what does not reflect the real.) Those who think that logic is everything are prone to “resolving” logical contradictions by simply removing whatever propositions make the logical contradiction go away . . . and that is rather stupid.
I didn’t know that I had to respond until after I had made the response and submitted it.
And you didn’t know that I had no choice but to respond until you had seen my post. Neither did anyone else in the world.
Which explains why determinism is irrelevant. Determinism and free will look no different to the entity choosing nor to those entities looking at the choosing.
Those are the ‘philosophers’ who are always looking back at the past.
In fact, the masters could have been killed in a slave revolt. By looking at the past you know that they were not killed.
But that’s not life, that’s history. Life is lived in the present while looking towards the future.
The masters may be killed in a slave revolt today or tomorrow. Choose your destiny.
Life is lived in the present while remembering (learning from) the past and imagining (anticipating) the future.
everything.
Then thinking and speaking at all for you, is “a waste of time”.
You and ALL participants are a part of the cause of what takes place.
That would be a different determined world that isn’t going to happen because you are not going to make those decisions.
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How do you personally define “to affect” and “to cause”?
James,
" tentative wrote:
If you’re right, then I just need to grab a beer, kick back, and let the determined world have it’s way.
That would be a different determined world that isn’t going to happen because you are not going to make those decisions."
Wha? Are you suggesting that there is more than one deterministic universe? How many are there? How can determinism work if I create “a different determined world”? by my CHOICE of decisions? It sounds as if there is no universal determinism. It sounds as if a determined universe doesn’t exist.
There are an infinity of possible universes depending on how much you know about the immediate present and/or past. In QM those are known collectively as “the multiverse”. None of them actually exist until all present decisions are made. By that time one of the infinity of them is determined.
Quantum Physics fantasizers love to talk about the multiverse as if the alternate possibilities actually exist “in parallel”. But note, they refuse to define what THEY mean by “exist”. They choose to refer to existence as any and every possibility. They neglect to mention that all “possibilities” are determined merely by how much one knows of the present. They cover their ass on that one by claiming that it is the observer’s notice that causes one universe to become the current one in which he lives and until he notices, all of the other infinity of universes are still there, waiting to be noticed (ie. “Schrodinger’s Cat”). QM is actually entirely about statistical probabilities (always dependent upon one’s ignorance of the present), not actual reality.
So the point is that at every moment, as far as any human is concerned, there are an infinity of possibilities of futures, merely because no human (or any limited mind) could ever be aware of enough of the present to know which of the possibilities was the actual one and only future. There is only one that will arise, and people can guess some parts of it, but never the entirety of it. And YOU are a part of that whole unraveling of causes and effects.
You are both an effect from what was before you and a cause of what will come after you. You ARE the decisions that you make. You ARE the causes before you becoming the effects after you. You ARE those decisions. That is what you are made of. You are a part of the tumbling from the universe’s memory of yesterday into its memory for tomorrow.
And it doesn’t matter if you try to out-wit cause and effect. That too is merely a part of what you are and the decisions that are already being determined. You can’t out think yourself. The whole trying to be free of or even worrying about determinism and causality is merely a fool’s mind-game to play on the philosophically naive masses.
It is very much like a chess game against the greatest possible master player. If the greatest possible master chess player says that in 5 moves you are going to lose your queen, you can bet on it regardless of what you attempt. He would be able to do that because your options are limited and he can see them all or at least enough of those options to resolve that your have no way out: “If he is going to get out of the trap, and such he must try, he must pass through the only door, for there are no windows”. - Predestined.
Well, it’s an interesting theory. Sort of like throwing a rubber ball at the wall. No matter how random, determinism is the consequence. The cool part is that since we can never apprehend the totality of the moment, we’re off the hook. We can never know what the consequences will create. You can’t be right, but you can never be wrong. Your ass is covered no matter what. We just throw up the determinism umbrella and we’re living in the best of all possible worlds…
Schrödingers Katze:
As long as there is no observer who makes a measurement, the cat remains both alive and dead.
Kind of makes you wonder …
… what if 1000 people glanced into the box at the same time? Which one determined whether the cat lived?
I’m a bit late to the show and things seem to have quietened down a little, but please keep things civil.
When you feel sick, you focus on your feelings of sickness in order to direct the energy flow towards the corresponding part of your body in order to heal faster.
This has absolutely nothing to do with logic. By logic I mean logical reasoning. You are not reasoning when you’re focusing your attention on your feelings of sickness. You are simply using your Will Force to heal yourself.
Both logical reasoning and biological healing are assimilative processes, they just operate on different parts of the body.
Now, here, I am using biological healing to mean specific biological healing (the one that is directly related to the hypothetical sickness mentioned in the first paragraph.) But you can also use it to mean general biological healing, and in this sense, biological healing includes logical reasoning.
Body > logic.
Logic is only one aspect of reality. It is not everything. It is not reality itself.
To treat logic as if it is everything is to blind yourself. It is to be a horse with blinkers on your eyes. We call this tunnel vision.
It’s what Christians and other moralizers do when they try to determine the value of everything in terms of their herd morality.
When you do so, you acquire too much depth and you lose too much breadth.
You surrender to instinct. (Instinct has depth but no breadth.)
We just killed a few cats but they damn well deserved it.
Slow down there, Gunpowder. While the PSR is itself balderdash, that wasn’t my point. My objection is to your claim that that without it, we are incapable of rational thought. Firstly, both Liebniz and Spinosa relied on a theistic basis for their ideas of the PSR. It just doesn’t make sense without God. That’s one big fat assumption, that needs a defense.
But let’s take a look at mathematical reasoning. Is there any room for causation here? Does 2 + 2 cause 4? Do scientific proofs that establish correlation rely on causation?
By the way, I firmly believe in causality. I think that some events are caused by others. That doesn’t mean they all are. But even so, we are the arbiters of “events”. We decide where one ends and the next begins. In the end, if we are to subscribe to causality (and we all do) we have to ignore that there is really only one “event”.
I think you’re overselling the PSR, in other words.