the conclusion that there is no freewill does not come about because one feels uncomfortable about being caught stealing a candy bar and wants to convince themselves that they couldn’t have done otherwise. the feeling of guilt is hardly a proof that there is freewill.
and while there is no such thing as freewill, there is no such thing as a ‘plan’ either. causality does not denote teleology. to think otherwise would be to anthropomorphize nature and give to it a deliberating will. it has no such thing.
but others can’t be blamed either if there is no freewill.
on the contrary, it’s those who still believe in freewill that demonstrate their lack of constitution and strength in having to blame and put to shame. behind every condemnation is a complaint, and behind every complaint is a weakness.
Change, contingency, outside influences, historical, cultural, and experiential contexts give us our predispositions that lead to the reasons why we make particular choices. None of this grants us free will (i.e. the ability to choose what is worse for ourselves) given the factors that are being considered when making a choice.
Determinism, the way it’s defined in the book, Decline and Fall of All Evil, does not mean we don’t take responsibility for our actions. It’s quite the opposite. Amazingly, when people know in advance they will not be blamed for hurting others without justification, they cannot do it. Responsibility goes up, not down. Determinism means not only not blaming others, but not blaming yourself for things past. It does not mean your choices are already in a fixed state where you cannot change and grow according to a continually changing set of circumstances.
I would like to add that the belief in free will was necessary, as part of our development, in order to justify blame and punishment that followed acts of crime, and also used as a deterrent before the criminal act took place. But now that we know man does not have free will, we are able to prevent from coming back that for which blame and punishment were previously necessary. I hope people will read the first three chapters, which shows how this new world can actually become a reality.
Well the belief in freewill did not originally begin as an expediency with which to place blame and justify punishment. It began with the emergence of self-awareness, and was a necessary error, you might say, in our reasoning. Only later was the belief found to be prevalent and then used for moral and judicial purposes. It was a ‘useful error’ in reasoning that was exploited by those who wanted to control others with the least amount of effort necessary… a kind of path of least resistance. One doesn’t need brute force to control if one can evoke in the other, a bad conscience. Making feel guilty is an extension of that effort without the need to apply coercive force.
therefore the fall waa really a quasi politicalcal effort to gain control and domination. through the manipulation of self impinged guilt unto the very created by the Creator. I wonder of the Holy Fathers saw this as a.scheme, or.they simply put it down to a magical existential imavoidaiility.
Was that close to an absolute proof of a.determined evolutionary stage of robbing man of even the semblance of free will yet holding him responsible none the less.; or was it a case of abstraction ex-nihilo of a semblance of compatible coincidental occurance which brought certain elements of both into a pre-conceived pre reflexive union, building up affinity rather then rather then intentional antogony?
So there is free-will, whether people want to accept that or not.
At the very least, there is blame. And that is because people do, instinctively, sub-consciously, search for causes. Causes can be anthropomorphic. Because people are responsible for their own actions. Although, again, people will deny self-responsibility.
describe and articulate what the state of responsibility is like and entails, please. is it some kind of state of mind… or is it a physical action? is it merely a thought in which the string of words ‘i am responsible’ crosses someone’s mind? also, would i need to ‘feel responsible’, whatever that means, to be answerable for what i do? that is to ask, is there any difference in ‘feeling responsible’ and ‘not feeling responsible’ as it pertains to my recognizing consequences for my actions, remembering them, and modifying my behavior in the future to either experience again or prevent said consequences? from a third person perspective, could i look at the way person x is acting and be able to say ‘this guy believes in freewill’?
what is the ‘mental state’ of responsibility… what is the phenomenology of responsibility? is it a kind of qualia? what is this strange state that only exists if the string of words ‘there is freewill’ crosses my mind?
the short refutation of freewill is this; natural laws operate seamlessly and there can be nothing random in nature… no ‘breaches’ or temporary suspensions of causality so that some other set of natural laws can suddenly and spontaneously intervene and affect events and affairs such that they occur in some other way than they were going to occur had that breach not occurred. there is no cartesian second substance acting on the material world… and even granting that there was… there would have to be yet another set of natural laws overseeing such interaction between these two ontologically distinct substances that are themselves unable to be suspended or breached.
Everybody, every organism, is ‘responsible’ for itself and its own body, physically. Pain is a primary instinct. Self-preservation and survival is the core essence of self-responsibility. In humanity, after evolution, people develop a much higher and more complicated sense of self-responsibility. People presume that “taking care of yourself, living well” demonstrates more self-responsibility. People who cannot afford basic amenities, do not wash and clothe themselves, are less responsible, or have no self-responsibility, likened to a child or cripple, instead of an adult. People do not respect those without self-responsibility.
So, self-responsibility is a state of power, implying respect. If somebody cannot think for him/herself, again, this demonstrates a low state of self-responsibility or self-care.
Being very self-responsible means that you would be an adult, have a degree of power, individuality, intelligence, self-care, and self-sufficiency. Independent, not dependent on others.
these answers are trivial contingencies of which every one there is at least one exception, if not more. i was looking for something more along the lines of a philosophical/metaphysical explanation, since that’s what the theory of freewill is derived from. concepts like ‘respect’ and ‘self preservation’ and ‘independence’ are an exercise in semantics and could be easily disassembled.
lol. the period in which i enjoyed debate has long since passed, something that ended with the realization that language games can’t be ‘won’. my participation at philosophy fora is just habitual and something subject to whimsical moods which are constantly changing. i no longer ‘roll my sleeves up’, so to speak, and prefer to just casually shoot the shit if i’m going to be on a forum. but there is no denying i’m a classic forum addict. it’s so bad i often find myself almost catatonic, staring blankly at some post with hamburger train on repeat, blasting through my earbuds.
then this argument with myself follows: what the hell is this? who is this guy? should i say something? but why? well what the fuck are you doing here if you’re not gonna say anything? because i’m addicted, asshole! then you should get into it. and waste my time? but you’re wasting your time sitting here staring at the page, aren’t you? look, if you’re gonna waste your time, make your time important so you can at least say you wasted something substantial. yeah but what do i do if the guy starts asking me questions and i gotta waste more time explaining something. so fucking explain it to em! but why, dude?! i don’t even know this guy… what the fuck do i care what he knows or doesn’t know? hey, ask yourself that question, not me. but you are me, that’s why i’m asking. so now your talking to yourself? alright i’m gonna go do something else now while you sit here and stare at the page.
Yes, but my point revolves more around those autonomous aliens noting 1] I misinterpreted peacegirl and 2] noting in turn how, given that earth is embedded in a wholly determined segment of the universe, there was never any possibility that I would have [could have] not misinterpreted her.
I type the word freedom here. I chose to type it here and now. No one forced me to. But: Was there ever a possibility that, 24 hours ago, matter unfolded in the universe such that I might have chosen to type another word instead? That I was ever free to? Going all the way back to that which explains matter itself as a component of existence?
Thus given my own understanding of determinism – which may well be wrong – it’s not whether or not she was “contradicting neuroscience or determinism”, but whether or not her posts here were compelled to be as they were/are given that the laws of matter are applicable to all human brains precipitating all human interactions. Including this unfolding exchange.
Okay, but the manner in which this is broached by her is seen by me as in fact the same sort of blame meted out by those who embrace some measure of human autonomy. Instead, in a wholly determined universe, all of our understanding, acknowledging, blaming, thinking, feeling, assuming, realizing, behaving, changing etc., would seem [by me] to be entirely scripted by nature itself.
Nothing is not determined.
Except that here and now no one seems able to actually pin that down.
People embrace the idea, the feeling that they are choosing their own life “freely”; but only because human thoughts and feeling – human psychological reactions – are in and of themselves wholly determined.
The mystery of mindful matter.
Yes, but notice how she never actually brings this “peace and prosperity and progress” down to earth. Instead, she has this idea in her head about how human beings should interact, and then, somehow, she has managed to think herself into believing that once others grasp what she and “the author” – her father? – are telling us, then, in fact, this is what the future will be. And this makes no sense to me at all in a wholly determined universe. Or, rather, given the way in which I have thought myself into thinking about it.
If they don’t, won’t, can’t “give it up” of their own autonomous volition, what no earth does “giving up” anything even mean?
Note to others: What does this tell you about him? And he’s done it before. He jumps into a thread, “sets me straight”, and then abandons the discussion.
Not that he could have ever done otherwise in a wholly determined universe. So, when you do think about it only as you ever could have thought about it, that let’s him off the hook, right?
Well, if human interactions are but the embodiment of nature itself unfolding only as it ever could, plan or no plan, nothing can ever be attributed to me as “my fault”. But, then, on the other side of the coin, nothing that I accomplish or achieve can ever be other than what it was always going to be as well.
It always works both ways. For both the “winners” and the “losers”.
But how frustrating it must be in acknowledging that, either way, no one seems able to demonstrate beyond all doubt which one it really is.
But then the beauty of human thoughts and feelings is that, given the evolution of life on Earth into conscious minds, all one need do is but to believe it is either one or the other.
Believing it makes it true. In your head. And somemany most are able to take that all the way to the grave with them. Indeed, somemany most even believing [here and now] that on the other side waits immortality and salvation.
Okay, but what predisposes all of this in a wholly determined universe? Is there anything in this exchange – any word, any argument, any post – that could ever have not been other than what it must be?
I keep coming back to the assumption that the human mind itself is just matter having evolved into the human brain actually able to convice “I” that it is something other than the brain itself. It is matter able to “will” to “choose” to “think” to “feel” to “behave” in an “autonomous” and “free” manner. But that is only just another manifestation of the laws of matter. Laws which scientists and philosophers and theologians [among others] grapple with, but seem to be no where near pinning down.
From my way of thinking, in a wholly determined universe, “better” and “worse” are just two more dominoes that the brain was compelled to concoct in the only way it can ever concoct anything at all.
Again, on this thread, it’s not how I see it, but whether the manner in which I think I see it [here and now] is but an inherent, necessary manifestation of the laws of nature unfolding only as they ever could have.
And, if that is the case, what “on Earth” would not be obligatory?
In other words, suppose, two week from now, I will have changed my mind and come to agree with everything that, say, peacegirl thinks about these relationships.
Will that in turn be only what was every going to unfold – what was only ever able to unfold – in this exchange?
Well, assume it’s not determined and working within that context, how would you see it?
Determinism doesn’t only result one way or any predictable way. If you want to make that delineation you should use the proper term containing that qualifier: pre-determinism.
X causes Y, but it was just as likely to cause A or B or anything else. There is no way to know which effect X will cause. Rewind the universe 1 hour and it will unfold differently. X causes Y, but why X causes Y can never be known, and all the evidence says there is no why.
Why is the electron here and not over there? There is no reason. If there were a reason, there would be a pattern, but the pattern is random, so there is no reason.
And if there were a reason, then the cause of that reason would have a reason and so on forever, so there is no way to get to the absolute cause of everything that it determines. Either it isn’t there or tat tvam asi.
