I challenge Biggy to an arm wrestling contest!
Thanks for letting me know Flannel Jesus, not that my posts aren’t a free for all. I would hope they would be used intelligently. I guess bad press is better than no press, right?
What site is PN? Iambiguous, why would you post my stuff on another forum where I don’t get to respond? I guess that makes you right because you have no opposition. 
From PN:
No, if in fact we do have free will “somehow” – re God or nature itself – then Mary would have the option to either abort or not to abort. What reason could there possibly be that she doesn’t if in fact “somehow” she does?
Instead, because neither you nor I are privy to the explanation for how and why mindless non-living matter did evolve into mindful living matter on Earth, we are both ensnared in the surreal nature of these exchanges. Surreal in that neither philosophers nor scientists have been able to determine if in fact we do have free will.
We could dream about exchanging assessments of free will…then wake up and realize that “reality” was created entirely by our brains chemically and neurologically. But what about the waking world reality? How do we establish unequivocally that this either is or is not autonomous?
Right. And in asserting this, that makes it true. When, in fact, you have no capacity even to pin down this distinction in your own brain. Can Mary start to think [about anything] of her own free will or is she compelled to think about only that which she was never able not to think of?
Do we opt to note the distinction between determinism and fatalism…fatalistically or deterministically?
And – click – how preposterous is it to insist that science has nothing to do with exploring this distinction itself!!
I’m grappling to make sense of a world in which we seem to have no definitive manner in which to know for certain if our explanations are in fact of our own volition or not.
And, more specifically on this thread, how those who call themselves compatibilists are able to reconcile Mary unable to not abort Jane with her still being morally responsible for doing so. How do they make a distinction between determinism and fatalism?
Link me to them. On this thread. And, sure, some here may provide arguments. But – click – that doesn’t mean they will make sense to me.
Huh?
First there’s the astounding vastness [and mystery] of the universe itself: youtu.be/m2YJ7aR25P0
Then there’s all the speculation about a “multiverse”…an infinite number of universes some suggest. Then there’s the simply staggering mystery of why something exists at all. And why this something?
And you’re asking me to provide reasons for what I think about Mary’s abortion…reasons that can pass scrutiny? Run by whom?
lol That is always such an important question to ask our self.
Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
Again, however, how far is he going with Nietzsche and determinism?
To wit…
"Here, the conviction that a human being cannot realistically be held accountable for their actions is the norm. This would be a world in which there is no longer any concept of criminal responsibility. No longer would blame or merit be possible. The task confronting humanity as a whole is to wrestle with and reckon with the consequences of this new conventional wisdom. There are good reasons to believe that humanity, confronted with this refutation of its most cherished and sustaining illusions, would ultimately destroy itself."
Think this through as I do…
If we cannot be held accountable for our actions, and our actions are a result of what we think and feel, then how is the task confronting humanity not the same thing? We carry out the task but we are not accountable – responsible – for doing that either. And did the author and Nietzsche bring determinism all the way back to themselves? The author wrote this article and Nietzsche wrote those aphorisms only because they were never able not to? And we are reading them because we were never able not to?
The quandary at the heart of it all?
Yeah, it can always work both ways. Despair because we must. But because we must despair it comes back to the illusion of despair. The matter that is my brain compels me to despair. But it’s all embedded in the mystery of my mind itself. I despair in my dreams. It’s all a chemical and a neurological despair. I’m sound asleep, not really feeling despair at all as I might in the waking world. But what of that despair in the waking world? Is that too all just the brain doing its thing in a wholly, totally inevitable world?
That’s the part I can never untangle in my head. That’s the part I can never be absolutely certain is a bona fide option for me.
Again, the part where the author imagines this somehow in sync with a world “where human beings cannot realistically be held accountable for their actions”…a world where “no longer would blame or merit be possible.”
Okay, an individual becomes one of the Übermensch…or an individual becomes one of the Last Men. So what? He can no longer embrace the merit of one or accept the blame for the other because merit and blame themselves are but inherent manifestations of the only possible world.
His perception is wrong.
Who said it was not the same thing?
So what’s your point? Man has been developing and all along his will has never been free, and man will continue to develop while having no free will.
Yea it’s doing its thing. Despair often comes from deep sadness which causes chemical and neurological changes. Chemical and neurological changes don’t cause despair. Despair causes chemical and neurological changes.
What’s to untangle? Dreams are an acting out of what is going on in the waking world. I’ve read that dreams are meant to help resolve our conflicts and fears. Everything is in the brain, but dreaming and wakefulness are two different states. We can’t be blamed for dreaming and we can’t be blamed for choices that we have no control over not choosing.
The reason he can no longer embrace the merit of one or accept the blame for the other is because they won’t be part and parcel of everyday life. Most compliments are given because there is so much blame. When blame is no longer part of the environment, neither will praise be chased after. Showing appreciation for a person’s accomplishments will still exist, but people will do things from an intrinsic desire to fulfill their hopes and dreams, not to get an external reward.
Sam Ruhmkorff
Hard Determinism
Hard determinism? Or, rather, free will determinism?
Or, okay, sure, it’s actually my own inability to wrap my head around compatibilism.
As though what people perceive as incentives they were free to opt not to perceive as incentives. After all, if “people who do good or bad things couldn’t have done something differently” than how do they manage to perceive things…other than as they must in turn? Aren’t our perceptions also compelled by brains wholly in sync with the laws of matter? We do what we do because of what we first perceive and then think about. But how are the reasons we come up with “to create an incentive structure that will determine [us] to act in the ways that we want” not embedded in Schopenhauer’s conjectures about wanting things being wholly in sync with wanting what we want. The brain sets up all of the dominoes such that everything that we think and feel and say and do topple over on cue. What we sense, what we perceive, what we reason, what we do.
And around and around the free will determinists go. We’re not free but “somehow” when we want things we are. We’re not free but “somehow” we “work towards things happening the way we want them”. We’re not free but “somehow” when we make decisions and praise and blame others we are.
Iambiguous: And around and around the free will determinists go. We’re not free but “somehow” when we want things we are.
Peacegirl: Wanting things doesn’t give us free will.
Iambiguous: We’re not free but “somehow” we “work towards things happening the way we want them”. We’re not free but “somehow” when we make decisions and praise and blame others we are.
Peacegirl: We are not free, never were, and never will be. Making decisions and praising and blaming others doesn’t change this fact.
Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
Yeah, that is basically the frame of mind that any number the sociopaths embody in their own day to day interactions with others. The “what’s in it for me?” game in which others are just a means to that end. And it’s beyond good and evil precisely because “in the absence of God all things are permitted.” Providing, of course, you don’t get caught. But that’s human justice. You might get tossed in jail. God and religion are then embraced in order to raise the stakes. Only even the sociopaths are as well wholly in sync with the only possible reality?
On the other hand, Nietzsche is often connected [philosophically or otherwise] to the Overman mentality. And here one chooses one’s behaviors with considerably more deliberation…sophistication. You are on the top and not the bottom because you deserve to be. You triumph because you are among the “masters of the universe”. It may be a game, but you are entitled to make up [and then enforce] the rules.
But then back to the part where Nietzsche is said to be…a determinist?
Or is this just one more attempt to make Nietzsche a compatibilist? The illusion of free will sustains life. But somehow Nietzsche’s own philosophy – his own thinking – is still more insightful than those who refuse to share it. How then is that explained?
The philosopher. The artist. The atheist. The myth-making religionist. And all while interacting with others in a “freedom-free world”.
Or is this all really about word games? Making words mean what you want them to mean [in your head] so that they all fit snuggly into your own “thought up” “objective” assessment of both Nietzsche and the human condition itself? Past, present and future?
Then for all practical purposes whatever this means:
The “no free will” game. He’ll move in the world…he’ll be a tempter and experimenter. He’ll do all of this while wholly in sync with the laws of matter…but not really. Only some of us are still rather confused regarding how exactly this “not really” works.
Defending Compatibilism
Bruce R. Reichenbach
at the Science, Religion and Culture website
[the focus here being on free will given an omniscient God]
Perhaps. But in regard to God where most of the faithful start is with the assumption that there is one. And that it is their God. And that their God is omniscient. Whereas while of course some philosophers start with the assumption that God installed an autonomous soul in them and that in living a righteous life they will end up in one or another rendition of Heaven, others do not.
Of course, that’s always my own point as well. Only, again, with God we are talking about a “starting point” pertaining to an entity that is alleged to exist, that is alleged to be omniscient, but that, to the best of my knowledge, has never actually been demonstrated to exist at all. Omniscient or otherwise. So, obviously, your starting point here can simply be something that you think up or others have thought up for you that “in your head” you believe. Anguish subsumed in more or less blind faith.
We’ll see.
But what does not change is that the author’s conclusions are still predicated on premises that he may or may not be able to demonstrate to be true regarding that which he construes to be God “in his head”.
Here is an interesting article about the [at times] complex, problematic relationship between the human brain and the human mind. A mind that, among our own species, is able to generate a self-conscious “I” that thinks, feels and behaves in any number of different ways.
washingtonpost.com/wellness … -symptoms/
By Richard Sima, Kelyn Soong, Caitlin Gilbert and Marlene Cimons in the Washington Post
[b]Actor Bruce Willis has been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a rare type of dementia, his family announced Thursday. The disease, also known as frontotemporal lobar degeneration, has no treatment or cure.
Willis’s family said in March that he had been diagnosed with aphasia, a communication disorder, and was retiring. In their announcement Thursday, Willis’s family said his “condition has progressed and we now have a more specific diagnosis: frontotemporal dementia.”
“While this is painful, it is a relief to finally have a clear diagnosis,” said their statement posted on the website for the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration. “FTD is a cruel disease that many of us have never heard of and can strike anyone.”[/b]
…
[b]Symptoms can vary and depend on where the abnormal proteins begin to accumulate — in the frontal or temporal lobe. It can take a few years for a patient to be diagnosed with FTD since the symptoms are varied and also may be seen in people with other diseases, the physicians said.
A patient with frontal lobe-focused abnormality would show behavioral issues of impulsivity and disinhibition. That’s called behavioral variant activity, which is the more common subvariant of FTD.
“For example, a polite person may become rude and a kind person may become self-centered,” said Andrew Budson, chief of cognitive and behavioral neurology, associate chief of staff for education, and director of the Center for Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System. “There may also be a lack of self-control that sometimes causes overeating of foods, such as an entire jar of mayonnaise, which one of my patients ate.”
Social disinhibition is one symptom, said Ryan Darby, assistant professor of neurology and director of the Frontotemporal Dementia Clinic at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “They may even commit crimes because of their disinhibition and socially inappropriate behaviors,” he said. “They lose empathy and compassion toward others.”[/b]
I often come back to “I” in dreams. We think, feel, say and do things in dreams such that while dreaming it is as though we are not dreaming at all. Instead, we wake up often amazed that the “reality” we had just “experienced” – as we might have experienced in the waking world – was totally manufactured chemically and neurologically by our brains.
But for Bruce Willis and others with this affliction it is the waking world brain as well that can, through this condition, compel them to behave in ways that they never would have freely chosen themselves had they not been stricken. Assuming of course that we do live in a free will universe.
And, as noted, this can happen to any of us. The autonomous self is taken over more and more by a brain that is simply doing it’s thing biologically.
Some determinists merely suggest that everything that we think we are doing of our own volition is just a psychological illusion that “somehow” evolved along with consciousness once biological life itself “somehow” happened.
_
I’m sure that we can all get a [impermanent] touch of the aphasias, in our lifetime… but permanently so, must be tough to live with.
That does go to show though, that the mind is truly manifested in the brain. I’ve heard some say otherwise. [shrug]
Also… does unpredictability and impulsivity equate to a freer will, in its unrestrictedness of causal actions? Seems so, to me.
Unpredictability and impulsivity do not equate to a freer will. In fact, just because something is unpredictable does not change the direction we must go even if the outcome cannot be predicted with 100 percent accuracy. The same goes for impulsivity. We have all, I’m sure, experienced doing something on impulse without giving it much thought, and may have regretted it afterwards. This in no way takes away from the direction we are compelled, by the law of our nature, to move, which is away from a dissatisfying position to a more satisfying position (even if it’s the lesser of two evils) each and every moment of time.
“Compatibilism” is true simply because the whole problem of free will / determinism isn’t really a problem at all. It is a false problem created by misuse of language and inadequate attempts to define the key terms in the discussion. Basically, sloppy thinking.
Free will / determinism is probably the single biggest time sink and waste of time in philosophy. It is clear that 99% of philosophers care more about picking fights in their own mind and fluffing their ego than they do about actually discovering truth. In fact they shy away from truth because that would mean an end to their fighting.
[quote=“HumAnIze”]
“Compatibilism” is true simply because the whole problem of free will / determinism isn’t really a problem at all.
Peacegirl: It’s a major problem.
HumAnize: It is a false problem created by misuse of language and inadequate attempts to define the key terms in the discussion. Basically, sloppy thinking.
Peacegirl: Very true, and compatibilism makes the most sloppy errors of all.
HumAnize: Free will / determinism is probably the single biggest time sink and waste of time in philosophy. It is clear that 99% of philosophers care more about picking fights in their own mind and fluffing their ego than they do about actually discovering truth. In fact they shy away from truth because that would mean an end to their fighting.
Peacegirl: This discussion is the most important in all of philosophy, although ego could be ruining it for everyone. That’s how destructive ego can be. Peace on earth is possible because of the truth that we have no free will, which is the golden ticket to peace, something we never imagined in our wildest dreams could be possible let alone actually become a reality! 
Slavoj Zizek and the Case for Compatibilism
Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis
“Incompatibilism is the thesis that free will is incompatible with the truth of determinism. Incompatibilists divide into libertarianians, who deny that determinism is true and hard determinists who deny that we have free will.” PhilPapershttps://philpapers.org
The “thesis”. Of course.
What on earth does it mean to “secretly make an unwarranted ontological assumption” when all of the assumptions that you do make you make only because you were never able not to?
We become entangled here because once you assume that everything we think, feel, say and do, we think, feel, say and do because we were never able not to think, feel, say and do them, nothing gets excluded. Nothing stands outside the entirely necessary reality embedded in the laws of matter. You may feel oppressed by this, but you were never able to freely opt not to.
But: the fact that matter evolved into human brains able to actually bring this up is easily one of the most profound mysteries of all pertaining to existence itself.
As though Dennett is himself the exception here?
For the hardcore determinists, how can anything at all be wrong if it was never able to be anything other than what it must be? Facts may be obfuscated by some but only because they were never able not to obfuscate them. One speaks of striving “freely” because the relationship between “I” and the world around me is but an inherent manifestation of nature itself.
It’s just that no other matter that we are familiar with is even close to being as peculiar as brain matter. And most exasperating of all is that it is brain matter itself that has to explain it. Which explains why so many turn to God. The ultimate source for explaining…everything.
Exactly. In a free will world we may not be able to accomplish a task or reach a goal because there are things in the external world thwarting us. We can feel oppressed and constrained by this. But in a wholly determined world 1] the obstacles were never not going to be there and 2] our feelings of “oppression” and “constraint” when confronting them are right on cue.
But [of course] all of this is explored up in the intellectual clouds:
Got that?
Okay, explain it to Mary above.
But what of those determinists who claim that our “free will” is but a psychological illusion emanating from a brain that compels us to think, feel, speak and act ever and always in accordance with the laws of matter. There is no internal and external reality. There is only the one ontological reality of what can ever only be.
Whatever “for all practical purposes” that means.
Defending Compatibilism
Bruce R. Reichenbach
at the Science, Religion and Culture website
[the focus here being on free will given an omniscient God]
Does it really matter how God became omniscient if in fact He is omniscient? We may as well ask how God came to exist at all. So, for me, it’s not how an omniscient God knew that I would be typing these words but how I can be typing them of my own volition if what I do is to be squared with an omniscient God.
And there you go. No God to the best of my own not omniscient knowledge, has even been demonstrated to exist. So we mere mortals with our mere mortal limitations regarding knowledge of this sort are tasked with suggesting “propositions” about the existential relationship between our behaviors down here and an alleged omniscient God up there.
See the problem?
It’s just the theological rendition of the fact that neither scientists nor philosophers know how or why mindless matter evolved in living matter evolved into us in a No God world.
Slavoj Zizek and the Case for Compatibilism
Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis
With those like Sam Harris, I would ask the same thing: how far do they take determinism? Does it encompass the fact that even their own beliefs…their books, their articles, their YouTube videos, etc… could only have been as they were? And that those who react either for or against their own points of view are equally included in the assumption that all human brains compel all human beings to think, feel, say and do things that are fated, destined. How do they make the distinction between fated, destined and determined?
Of course, most here know what I construe to be the most frustrating thing about the free will debate. The fact that the brains debating it still have no full understanding of how or why living, biological matter came to acquire consciousness evolving eventually into us. How the extraordinary matter that is a brain itself – matter able to be conscious of itself as self-conscious matter – could exist at all. Which, as I note, is why many simply assume it can only be explained through God.
To “resolve” it by way of intuition – “I ‘just know’ deep down inside me that I have free will” – works for some. But it can hardly be counted as actual proof of autonomy.
Or, again, so it seems to me “here and now”.
Imagine arguing about this nonsense.
Couldn’t be me.
Moral Responsibility Without Libertarianism
Lynne Rudder Baker
That’s often my point as well. And it’s the same with science. And, until theologians actually produce a God, the same with religion. Centuries go by and the quandary – antinomy – continues. So, I’m always the first to acknowledge that my own conclusions here are no less hopelessly problematic…sheer conjecture.
This, too, is also of most importance to me. No free will and no moral responsibility. That seems entirely reasonable to me. And I continue to struggle with grasping those who somehow manage to convince themselves that the two are reconcilable. And, in particular, “for all practical purposes”.
Thus…
That’s me again, isn’t it? Okay, you go up into the intellectual stratosphere and, philosophically, you concoct a theoretical argument revolving around brains and minds and dualism. A world of words as I like to call them. Meanwhile down here on the ground the words we have concocted relating to moral and political value judgments continue to sustain all manner of actual conflicting human behaviors. The part that produces actual consequences.
Okay, we’ll see…
In other words, truly familiar camps are delineated. Intellectually, philosophically, theoretically. Now, what do those in the various camps here have to say to Mary when she asks if she is in fact morally responsible for killing Jane?
Only, again, it seems to me, we must first assume that in bringing this up, we ourselves are not compelled by our brains to do so. Yet we seemingly have no way in which to establish that this is not the case. We’re in our own rendition of Flatland instead.