From my frame of mind [which, admittedly, may well be wrong], it’s not what she is saying in a wholly determined universe that really matters. Instead, it is whether or not she was ever free to say something else instead. Just as it is not how I react to what she says that matters. Instead, it is whether I was ever really free to react in a manner other than I did.
This going all the way back to whatever propels/compels matter – all matter including the human brain/mind – to unfold only as it must given those ubiquitous “laws of matter”.
In other words, how do we fully explain the relationship between the brain and the mind? And then, for the faithful, the soul.
Let’s say blame leads to more pain. Part of why we blame is to make things better. We can’t help but think that.
Again, imagine a hypothetical universe in which aliens who reside in an autonomous zone are observing us on Earth — a planet embedded in a wholly determined zone. They note this exchange in which we discuss things like blame. But what they observe are thoughts and feelings and utterances and behaviors that were only ever going to unfold as they do. In other words, from my way of thinking, as though here on Earth we are all just the equivalent of Nature’s dominoes toppling over onto each other. Yet they note in turn how the evolution of matter on Earth into life into human brains has created a matter actually able to convince itself that blame is embedded in what we were compelled to call “free will”. But that’s just a psychological illusion inherently, necessarily embedded in an ontologically determined reality. At least on our planet.
Whether we learn or not, whether we change or not…what on earth does it mean [for all practical purposes] to speak of this as unfolding “unfreely”?
It makes sense to you and to her and to others in a way that I simply don’t get. But she makes it appear to me that I could get it if only I’d “come around” to her way of thinking. Meanwhile she is acknowledging [or so it seems to me] that there is no way in which I was ever free to come around.
I’m clearly missing something here that somehow I am able to not miss. But how exactly would I go about that in a wholly determined universe?
That is a direction things might inevitably take. Bringing this up and communicating this would be one of the causes leading to other people, unfreely, realizing this, especially when coupled with their experiences.
Might inevitably take? Okay, how is that communicated by mere mortals to Mother Nature? The entity that seemingly commands all matter to unfold per her “laws”?
Isn’t that a powerful reason why mere mortals invent Gods? That way the dots can be connected – connected teleologically – between Mother Nature and a “meaning”, a “purpose” behind existence itself.
Only for all practical purposes in a determined universe we could never have not invented the Gods.
Determinism does not mean that organisms cannot learn or change. It simply means that their changing is determined.
Yeah, and [for me] that is exactly what the autonomous aliens are telling themselves. They note changes that were never able not to be on planet Earth.
Meanwhile, they report back to their superiors on the home planet and they are judged as to how accurate their assessment is. And then blamed for the parts they get wrong. Why? Because they actually were free [up to a point] to not get it wrong.
And here is where I then switch gears from things able to be gotten right or wrong in the either/or world, and things only able to be judged as right or wrong in the is/ought world.