Determinism

I’m merely describing my reaction to your participation in threads that include me. It seems true to me. On the other hand, all of this may well be embedded in a wholly determined universe such that these very words that I am choosing to type [and that you either are or are not choosing to read] may be entirely beyond our control as autonomous human beings.

Not at all what I deem to be a situation in which to explore the existential meaning of those words. How about something from the headlines?

Here are a few from today:

Republicans Cheer, Democrats Challenge Mueller’s Findings — politics
Trump’s misleading spin on the 2018 GDP growth rate — the economy
With its ties in Washington, Boeing has taken over more and more of the FAA’s job — crony capitalism
Rick Perry calls expanding nuclear energy “the real” Green New Deal — environmental issues
Why Congress isn’t expanding virtual health care — the role of government in our lives
Brits pretend they’re sick of Brexit. But truth is they’re obsessed — nationalism
Parkland student dies in ‘apparent suicide,’ police say — gun control
Powerball is up to $750 million — the fourth-largest jackpot in U.S. lottery history — gambling

How might words like those above be used in discussions of these issues?

Look, my point in regard to determinism is that sans human autonomy this very exchange could only have ever unfolded as it must. Thus all of the words that we use in it we are compelled to use.

Whether your frame of mind is more reasonable than mine would then seem to be moot. Both frames of minds are wholly [necessarily] in sync with the immutable laws of matter.

I am simply drawing a parallel between you liking or disliking flavor X ice cream and the points that you raise about me here. As I understand determinism, you are no less compelled to react as you must in either context.

Yet you seem to be criticizing me here as though I were in fact free to rethink all this through more clearly. To think like you do.

As though I do in fact have the autonomy necessary to change my mind. Which I may well have.

Then this part…

Nope.

We live in a world where value judgments come into conflict. And I believe my own opinions about these issues [like yours] are derived existentially from the life that one lives. Call these beliefs concoctions, call them something else. Call the manner in which we react to them pragmatic, call it something else.

And even though I don’t know the extent to which human autonomy is a factor in all of this, what could possibly be more important to know?

We explore it here “intellectually” on this thread, others explore it experimently using functional magnetic resonance imaging technology.

The jury is still out.

Then the sarcasm you often resort to when in “retort” mode:

“Golly gosh, as if I haven’t show I understand this, other issue many times.”

You often seem to get flustered in responding to me. Why is that? What is it about me that perturbs you? I have my own suspicions of course but I’m curious about what you think is prompting this.

I have never said that. Instead, what intrigues me far more is coming to understand how someone who [here and now] rejects objective morality, deals with actual moral and political conflicts in their life. In a way that allows them to feel less fractured and fragmented than “I” am. Given that they acknowledge [like me] that their own values are derived existentially from the lives they lived. And thus might have been very different. And, in turn, that there does not appear to be a way [philosophically] to determine how one ought to behave in any particular context.

All we can do here is to note examples of this from your life relating to issues like sport hunting and all the others above.

I am ever drawn and quartered in recognizing this. How are you less so?

Once I came to believe that my own value judgments are the embodiment of a particular life, no more or no less essentially reasonable than those who take an opposite point of view, I looked around me at a world in which political and economy power clearly propelled human interactions around the globe. It’s a political leap because in any number of contexts, I was excpected to take sides. But I don’t have access [as the objectivists do] to a “right makes might” frame of mind. Existentially, I have just felt more comfortable with idea of moderation, negotiation and compromise in the political arena. As opposed to the more blunt “might makes right” approach embraced by the dictators/authoritarians/thugs around the world.

Okay, you don’t call it a political leap. But the variables I point to are still there.

  • “I” is constructed existentially in particular historical, cultural and experiential contexts
  • “I” is ever confronted with contingency, chance and change
  • “I” is ever embedded in new experiences, new relationships, new information, knowledge, ideas
  • “I” is unable to establish a moral and political foundation said to be the obligation of all rational men and women
  • “I” is ever confronted with the nihilists who own and operate the global economy

I encompass “I” here on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529

How then is it not applicable to you and to others? In a particular context where you choose one thing and not another.

What on earth is he telling us here? A consent violated in what context, construed from what point of view?

You actually believe that this “world of words” “general description” “intellectual contraption” is “clearly expressed”?!

Or are you actually mocking him here?

If not, why don’t you and him discuss the existential implications of having your consent violated in what you construe to be a world unable to come up with an objective morality.

In an actual context that most here are likely to be familiar with.

Wow, iambiguous … I genuinely thought you were an artificial intelligence program, but look at that anger!!

You’re super pissed!

So here’s the deal iambiguous: leave Karpel out of it and debate me.

Even trixie saw the sketches of this debate and declared: I don’t think iambiguous can defeat that.

The thing is: you can’t

What I find additionally funny, is that you said, "why should I debate a person who knows that they’ve won, obviously they’re too close minded… and then you crawled back into your hole for a while.

I’m still here iambiguous.

Will is free, choice is not.
Will is thought, choice is action spawned out of thought, which attached to choice is preference of satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
If one never makes a choice but only lives in the mind, how can one be satisfied or dissatisfied?

Making a Choice also creates a cycle, cycles we see today are results of past choices which in turn effect people and they make choices and create more cycles. The point is to escape cycles of redundant mundanity. To break the cycle of a lack of free choice is to understand the cycle and ones own role inside of it.

The rarer ones who can break habit, expectations, and indoctrination, have greater willpower, and recognized by all as “freer”.

Those like the OP, who cannot break habit, expectations, and indoctrination, claim it is impossible. It doesn’t mean it is. Freedom is objective, not subjective. It is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of ability and choice, results and success.

Like an obese person who actually loses the weight. Most will not. Some can.

Because some people can break the mold, it means it’s possible, at least for a few.

Some people are freer than others.

Some people are freer than everybody else.

The nay-sayers, the cynics, the weak-willed (OP), will deem it all impossible, and cannot be reasoned with.

The parts I thought were clear and match my most common reaction:

That you want to be or be seen as a victim.
That it is implicit in many of your posts that all others or at least objectivists are stupid.
That your posts are ad hom - (since they go to motive, as a rule.)

I haven’t seen anyone else sum up my general reaction to how you position yourself in relation to others in such a concise and clear way.

As far as the not wanting consent violated, I understand what he means from other threads and I think he is correct. It was clear to me, given what he has written elsewhere. Yes, standing on its own that part of his post, without what he has written in other threads, would be hard to understand and very abstract.

Sure. I don’t disagree. That is the implication of determinsm.

Are you trying to say it is unreasonable of me to think you are not responding to me as other people do? If so, then this message should go to you also. I really don’t know what you are on about. Are you angry that a determinist gets irritated with you? Because you can’t help but be who you are? Is that what you are saying? You might want to mull over the irony in that.

Me, I black box determinism/free will.

You attributed a complicated abstract reasoning process to a preference of mine. I said that was silly and that it was more like preferring an ice cream flavor. My point is only stronger in the context of determinism. IOW exactly! they are alike. So you don’t have to make up some complicated hysterically convoluted contraption for my preference. I didn’t concoct an understanding of pragmatism to choose vanilla as my childhood favorite flavor. You see contraptions and complicated, very abstract mental thinky verbal ones when someone is different from you. Not everyone decides everything via working it out logically and in words in their minds. I did not sit down and decide my understanding of pragmatism and then apply this to the issue of free will and determinism. I find that it does not interest me much and no one has every said anything that pulls me away from my gut reaction. Maybe they will, but so far it is just like someone telling me I should be more interested in butterscotch.

This is precisely the kind of thing that Ecmandu is pointing out as a victim stance. Of course pointing out what I think it is the case, might change your mind. and yes, I think it is the case. You seem to be saying here 1) you can never change your mind because of determinism - which runs counter to all your ramblings about dasein and not knowing what you will believe in the future 2) that you are victimized if someone else asserts what they think is the case. 3) that no determinist can assert what they think is the case or they are victimizing 4) that I am a determinist.

I disagree with all of those.

You don’t need free will to change your mind. You do understand that right? You can learn, even in a determined universe.

Great. So when you assumed I had one, that was a poor assumption.

Oh, you are victimizing me. I should prioritize it like you do? The universe may be dtermined but if it is, I can’t help but not priortize it like I do. Poor me.

You do understand that you cannot possibly imagine it is correct to not prioritize finding the answer to dterminism vs. free will. YOu don’t justify this, but you express it. Which is fine, it’s just you don’t seem to notice.

Sarcasm and flustered don’t fit well together. They are both negative, generally, but they do not fit the same reaction.

I got annoyed because nothing I said indicated I did not understand something we have gone through many times.

Perhaps I am utterly determined to get irritated when someone continuously tells me things they have told me before as if I need to understand it and yet I have shown this before.
Perhaps I am freely choosing to get irritated.

I can live with either one of those being the case.

I’ve told you before. You repeat things you have said hundreds of times as if they are relevent when they often are not. You do not respond directly to points made, but they often seem to remind you of positions that you repeats, yet again. You attribute contraptions to things that do not require contraptions, whenever I suffer less than you - or seem to - or when I differ from you. You do not respond to points made about, for example your use of the term contraptions that do not match the dictionary definitions, but come back to contraptions and use it again the same way. I point out that I did not need to concoct an understanding of pragmatism to not be interested in finding the solution to determinism vs free will. Many posts later - in this last post - you agree with me. But you never conceded the point. Then right after agreeing you go back and start building an argument where is seems like you don’t actually agree. A couple of posts ago, I point out that you were assuming I had concocted some understanding of pragmatism to reach a belief that figuring out if determinism is the case is not that important. I discuss this as you see contraptoins where there are mere preferences. then I add that you have a habit of seeing contraptions when people disagree with you or suffer less. Your response included asking me for specific examples. BUT I HAD CLEARLY GIVEN YOU A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE. So it is as if you don’t read my posts. I find this irritating. And it is not an exception, I find it to be the rule. I do not find this to be the rule with other posters. I find your level of seeming not to read, when taking into consideration your intelligence, remarkable.

That’s the kind of thing that pisses me off. I do know what your self-serving interpretation is - since you’ve told me before.

I also find you fascinating. It’s embarrassing, but I do. Look, your points about dasein and conflicting goods are fine. Sometimes when you engage with specfic objectivists, it’s pleasant to watch. But your whole pattern of relating…I know you don’t understand why ecmandu would say something like that. You don’t come off as someone much interested in psychology or the specific kinds of introspection associated with that. Fine. But consider that certain things might be obvious to other people but not to you. There’s a boatload of cognitive science research that says this is possible and in general applicable to everyone, though some more than others.

Pehraps we are reacting to contradictions and confusions you just are not aware of because you focus on the everyman, the predicament we all find ourselves in, as opposed to wanting to know much about your own personal responses to trauma, emotional pain, isolation, existential crises, your parents, etc. I am not saying you should be interested in anything else. Your choice.

I am sayng that perhaps the way you feel victimized and position yourself as the brave person facing the extential void, mistreated by others who are triggered by the issues I raise and cannot face them…

That all that may be missing that we can actually see something about what you are doing and how it is not what you think it is.

Note: this is not an agrume to convince you. That would look very different. This is me saying: consider that you have a giant blind spot regarding what you are doing here. Cause sure looks like it.

When you ‘suspect’ you know why I get ‘flustered’ and ‘sarcastic’, it really comes off as just silly to me.

And that interpretation you have, this self protecting interpretation fits perfectly with Ecmandu’s summation of the way you position yourself in relation to others. If you want to call this all psychobabble, this is just you showing that for all your talk about dasein, in the end, you can no longer actually consider that it applies to you and how you behave. You have gotten beyond all that, since you are in the hole.

There is shit you just don’t want to look at and it shines in most of your posts. Or so it seems. There is something that does not fit, in some big way. Whetehr you are aware of it or not and exactly what it is, I don’t known. I suspect Ecmandu is right, but I am nto sure. I suspect that rage drives you much more than concern about finding the answers, though I suspect you don’t know this. This is all what is fascinating.

And every single post in response to me contains stuff that just adds to this. The avoidance, the repetition, the not fitting together, the positioning of yourself as the only of (of few at most) who can just be in the hole wihtout making up contraptions to comfort yourself, etc.

It happens over and over. And no matter who points it out, you go ad hom and say it is them not being able to face the hole. You say you aren’t sure, but you go there, sooner or later.

The fascinating thing is, as I think it: does Iamb truly no notice at least in his periperhal vision, that something else might be going on when he posts and relates to others here than what he puts forward? So the temptation returns: hold a mirror up. Nope, not that time. Hold up a different mirror, focused on something else. Nope. I mean, perhaps I should not be surprised. I have been quite oblivious to things that were obvious to others about me. We are good at defending ourselves. But there it is.

Then why incredulously lecture me yet again about dasein or the implications of determinism. If it was relevent it had to be a ‘seeing a need to remind me of these things’, if it wasn’t relevent, why bring it up.

I’ve told you all this before. Of course I cannot know how you and I are different, so there could be many different causes to why I am not in a hole. Maybe my form of PTSD and what I did about it is different from yours and what you did about yours. The way we emotionally react to things need not come from rationally reached cnoclusions. It seems implicit in your reactions to others that if they are different from you they have some kind of different ideology. This need not be the case. They could have less. I suspect that while we each think we have no access to an objective morality, you think you SHOULD find it and do every thing you can to find it. I do not have that contraption. I suspect you will deny you have that contraption and just repeat your incredulity that anything else could be more important like you did above. But you act like and often write like you follow a moral must. and it’s one I do not have.

I try to find out what I want - which, yes, can change - and achieve, allow for, create that and to prevent things that I do not like. Stuff you do also. I just don’t add on some of the goals you seem to have.

IOW

I also do not

I do not have a contraption that says I must do that.

[/quote]
People disagree with me. If you move out into political discussions with preferences or morals, you will be drawn and quartered, or at least one will meet people trying to do that emotionally at least.

I am not saying life is easy or I have it all solved. It is fucking hard. I think it is possible you are creating extra problems for yourself and/or displacing pain about other things onto abstract philosophical issues.

Both sides do sort of exist, it’s just choice isn’t free but what reaction comes from a thought out of will of which never leaves the body?

Nothing because it’s ones free thinking inside their own mind, there is no reaction other than maybe for the individual, which that would most often lead to a choice.

Every choice we make is bound by reaction which is deterministic in this reality but our ability to think outside of cycles that are redundant and may repeat forever, we may break and escape from, which is a greater satisfaction in a sense, an unknown one and may not always be satisfactory as one may think or believe, but that satisfaction may come only from thought and not even making a choice and vice versa. Everything has a price.

I am not satisfied at this time, not by my choices but I am not satisfied with others, which effect me and my will.

So if one cycle can be broken or exploited, can all not be? This is what “god” is, doing what seems impossible or incomprehensible to others, there’s a lot more to learn of other cycles.

Hell, one may even be able to break the cycle of life and death. Spiritual knowledge I am not sure is achievable anymore, within this generation of humanity.

Okay, but can we agree that in a wholly determined universe, nothing that you or I or he has posted here was ever truly within our command as autonomous human being? After all, that’s the beauty of determinism [for some]: Everyone is let off the hook!

But let’s assume instead that we really do possess some measure of freedom in choosing [as opposed to “choosing”] our words.

Over and again I note that my interest in philosophy revolves around the question, “how ought one to live”. And in what [I presume] to be a No God world. That’s my “thing” here. And, over the years, I have honed my thinking down to points that I believe best encompass it. If that annoys some, they can move on to other. Or frequent only my quotes, music and film threads.

Evolved? What does that mean? For the objectivists of course others “evolve” only when they come to think more like they do. But I never construe my own frame of mind here as anything other than an existential contraption.

Victim? I’m down in a hole [in the is/ought world] and right around the corner is what I construe to be oblivion. Those are just facts of life for me.

Ad homs? Well, in polemical mode, I can surely come off that way. Ever and always provocative. But to call the search for motive a personal attack is a stretch. On the contrary, it goes to the heart of the matter for me here: “I” as dasein.

Here we will just have to agree to disagree. As I noted elsewhere I don’t often read his stuff because I do not have any respect for his intelligence given the stuff that I have read. Now, that’s just my own person opinion however wrapped up in an existential contraption.

But his “consent violation” is [to me] analogous to James Saints “RM/AO” or fixed crosses [Jacob?] “value ontology”.

I have no clear idea what on earth they mean. And, in particular, with respect to conflicting goods embedded in particular contexts.

Seriously, what do you think he means by it? Cite a few examples from your own interactions with others. And in the least abstract manner that you are able to.

Determinism leaves room for Ecmandu to describe you, for others to find this description useful, to notice experiences with others are better in some way - should that be the case. If you mean, we shouldn’t blame you for being the way you are or something well that cuts both ways.

But notice how the context has shifted. To you his post was just gibberish. I pointed out parts that I found potentially accurately descriptive. I list these parts.

Your response is ‘but I can’t help but be like that’

That has nothing to with whehter his post is gibberish or if it conveyed something bluntly and clearly.

this is a regular pattern I find with you. You shift the context all the time, and this generally includes you choosing to repeat something as if it is relevent, something you have said before, a number of times. Here the impications of determinism.

Of course it is fine to focus on what you want to focus on. But you don’t have to treat us as if we don’t exist and have motives of our own. You can simply say; I am not interested in that. What you do is treat everything as a failed attempt to solve one of your few main problems. And it seems like you simply cannot tell that other people have other goals. And this happens in threads that are threads you started either.

So here you frame our being annoyed as: they are annoyed because I limit my focus. Perhaps someone is, though I kinda doubt it.

It is that you respond as if there are ONLY your issues, so anything anyone says is a poor attempt to solve your issues. Here, as if the issue was whether you could have done something else and are you let off the hook by determinism.

I don’t know if I or he called it a personal attack. I called it ad hom, which it is. But then you go beyond this. In one on one interpersonal interactions, if someone seems not as upset as you or has beliefs different from you, you tell them it because your ideas make them uncomfortable. Yes, you sometimes then say, you might be wrong.

At a party I walk up to a woman and say ‘You are a slut and a whore’ then I say ‘I might be wrong, of course.’

It’s still a personal attack. Yours are nicer, but they are still personal attacks.

The consent violations discussion is a huge one.

Then, like me, are you willing to accept the “for all practical purposes” consequences of this? That neither one of us are really right or wrong here in a world where perceptions of right and wrong themselves are no less entirely in sync with the immutable laws of matter.

On the other hand, I acknowledge that human autonomy is also a possibilty. And that, in fact, one of us may well be closer to a more reasonable frame of mind. It’s just that here I note that gap between which of us is closer and all that would need to be known about existence itself in order to determine just how much closer to the whole truth one of us is.

Many here seem to just shrug that part off. Not me. From my perspective that gap [and all of the “unknown unknowns” that fill it] is the most important point of all.

We still have no way in which to determine definitively if determinism is our…fate? Or none that I’m aware of.

Still…

Huh? What I’m saying is that in a wholly ordered universe ever and always in sync with the laws of matter, whatever either one of us think, feel, say or do, is entirely determined such that we only “choose” to be “reasonable” or “unreasonable”. Or to “feel” angry. As for irony, how is that not just another domino derived from the human brain derived for the laws of matter?

Yes, and in a determined universe, you were never going to not black box it. You were never able to not black box it.

Those autonomous aliens note you pointing it out to us but then note that, in reality, you only “chose” to.

As with peacegirl, you say you understand determinism a lot like I do, but from my frame of mind you don’t understand the existential implications of it as I do at all.

In other words…

Again, in a determined universe [as I understand it now] this exchange is all just one more facet of nature’s “script” for us. Thus, things are only as “complicated” as nature itself is.

Then this part…

What on earth does it mean for one to be the “victim” or the “victimizer” in a world where one is only what one is compelled to be by dint of material, phenomenological forces beyond ones control?

Either that or, sure, I am completely missing your point in a world in which I am in fact free to rethink the exchange and come closer to your point of view. Or you come closer to mine. A world, in other words, where being more or less reasonable really does matter. Why? Because we really do have the freedom to make it matter.

Of course I understand it. We “choose” things. But if I change my mind only because I was never able to not change my mind [about anything] then, in turn, I “learn” only what I was never able to not learn.

You do understand that, right?

Here you seem [to me] to be in sync with peacegirl. This thing about “choosing” in a way that dominoes do not…even though the laws of matter embedded necessarily in nature are ultimately behind both the dominoes and the human brain.

Here I am basically stumped. What on earth does your point here even have to do with mine above?

A little help from others, perhaps?

In my view, this sort of “general description” critique can only be fleshed out by [over and again] reconfiguring the “intellectual” points being made into an exchange about particular conflicting behaviors in a particular context.

And [of course] in making the assumption that we do possess some level of autonomy. Otherwise I am “stuck” with the assumptions I make about a determined universe: that nothing in this exchange could ever have been other then what nature intended.

Then the mystery shifting to whether nature itself has any intent. The part about teleology and purpose and meaning in our lives. The part that [for many] includes religion and God and the human soul.

This is your own “existential contraption” in my view. You make me the issue and note all of these things about me that I simply do not recognize in myself.

Either bring these “issues” down to earth and embed them in a particular context or they are just more psychologisms to me.

Right. Like, from my point of view, I can’t suggest the same sort of thing about you.

Or [as with so many others I have encountered over the years] is the biggest blind spot of all here that I don’t see things as they do?

It’s all about me failing to view myself as cogently as you and others do:

What on earth does this mean? We would have to follow each other around from day to day to day and note our reactions to any number of things. Explaining to each other why we think we chose this instead of that.

Well, that’s not likely to happens. So, in my view, we can only brings things like “consent violation” “pragmatism” and “dasein” down to earth by imagining particular contexts in which we might make particular choices.

Let’s all agree on one and do it. See what unfolds when the words are forced to make contact with the world that we live in.

You call it a lecture, I call it trying to understand the manner in which we seem to share certain opinions about “I” at the intersection of dasein, conflicting goods and political power, and understanding the manner in which we don’t.

Such that [from my frame of mind] our choice to be pragmatists results in different perspectives on the existential implications of this: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382

How do you reflect on your own particular “I” here so as to appear [to me] to be considerably less fractured and fragmented. And thus able to sustain a more comforting and consoling frame of mind when dealing with your “self” confronting conflicting goods in your interactions with others.

On the other hand, often our frame of mind about the lives we live is embedded more in the actual set of circumstances that we confront day in and day out. If things in that regard [love life, sex, job fulfillment, family and friends, fulfilling distractions etc.] are going well for you, it is easy enough to bend your “philosophical” perspective to be more in sync with that. Or you may have “the glass half full” outlook on life and then circumstantially the glass tumbles to the floor and shatters. You are suddenly overwhelmed existentially with problems and ordeals. Then your philosophical bent shifts more in the direction of being in sync with that instead.

Well, my own understanding of determinism leaves no room for descriptions or blame to be anything other than an inherent, necessary manifestation of nature unfolding as it must.

And in cutting both ways it merely reflects that fact that nature’s way encompasses all of us. And this exchange would be no exception.

Only I have no way of really knowing for certain if I have no way of really knowing for certain because I am merely “choosing” what I am compelled to, or because I am in fact exercising my autonomy and choosing to think about all of this in a way that is not in sync with your way or his way. And that, in fact, either your way or his way or my way does reflect a more reasonable perspective.

No, my response is that I don’t know for certain if I can help to be like that. What I then do [as most do in turn] is to assume that I might possibly be able to freely choose to be something other than what I think I am here and now.

What we do here then is to make arguments that may or may not pull and tug us in different directions. And that has everything to do with how [up to now] I find his post to be but one more example of a “general description” “intellectual contraption” while you find it to be blunt and clear instead.

I would however never argue that my frame of mind in this regard is anything other than an existential contraption. A value judgment rooted in dasein.

You point this out to me but you won’t admit that this may well be but one example of your own existential contraptions. Or that we might be construing the exchange based on entirely different assumptions regarding what we think the other is misconstruing.

All you can do here is to note what you deem to be particular instances of this.

Thus…

Or the manner in which I react to something you post merely prompts you to assume that I am not interested in where you want to take things.

Again, bring these “you are the problem” observations into a discussion of actual human interactions. Then you can be more specific in noting when, from your point of view, I am “failing” to be interested in your take on something.

This is simply not sinking in. I don’t really understand what you are telling me here. I don’t know if determinism is a reasonable frame of mind, let alone the most reasonable frame of mind one can have about the choices we make when confronting the question “how ought one to live?” in a world bursting at the seams with conflicting goods construed subjectively from the perspective of “I”.

As folks like Promeathean75 have pointed out, I’ve been in exchanges with those I construe to be objectivists for many, many, many years. And I can only be honest in my reaction to them. And part of this flows from the fact that for many years in turn I was myself an objectivist. I know first hand what it means to have “I” begin to topple over and then break into pieces. I had reacted then just as I perceive them reacting now.

With you as fellow pragmatist however my reaction revolves more around how you manage to go about the business of confronting those with conflicting value judgments and not tumble down into the hole as I imagine it as the only reasonable manner in which to deal with “I” here as an existential contraption. Someone who recognizes that their own values are constructed largely out of the experiences that they have had in the course of living a particular life, and that there does not appear to be a way for philosophers to concoct anything in the way of a moral obligation.

I disagree. The connotations I wrap around objectivists is not the same [to me] as the truly disparaging connotations that revolve around callng a woman a slut at a party.

Okay, let him bring this down to earth. Let hm note a particular context in which human interactions involve actual consents being violated.

“Compatibilism”
Craig Ross in Philosophy Now magazine

One can imagine that, down the road, as we get more and more sophisticated in creating cyborbs, that line between real and artificial intelligence will become more and more blurred.

Is the Terminator free or unfree? Is there anything that he thinks or feels or says or does that is not entirely programmed by machines programmed by human beings?

Is there anything that you and I do that is not entirely programmed by nature?

Is there anything that nature does that is not entirely programmed by God?

How do we go about determining with any real precision where one component of existence ends and the other parts begins?

When we interact the closest we seem able to get to the “I” of others, is in making eye contact. You can stare into your own eyes while looking in the mirror. But: are you really seeing your “self” there?

That just doesn’t seem to be the end of it. But where else can we go until someone, someday can show us?

“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now Magazine

This is basically where I get stuck. Sam Harris the neuroscientist argues that the more we know about the human brain the less we seem to be free to know this of our own volition. Then others like Dennett weigh in with opposing points of view.

How then does Harris not see this debate itself as but in turn wholly determined? He takes on the theists as well as though their exchanges with him could ever have been other than what they were.

Think about it. When he gets miffed at a God world or a free will advocate doesn’t he step back and accept that his reaction is only as it must be? Doesn’t that make the gist of his argument but another bunch of nature’s dominoes toppling over like the dominoes that topple over when the Pope reacts to pedophiles in the ranks of the Catholic Church preying on children because they were never able not to prey on them?

What do I keep missing then when the so-called “compatibilist” weigh in and attempt to “reconcile” the two?

“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine

This is basically how I view “the immutable laws of matter” in a determined universe. Cause and effect is synonymous with the only possible reality. “Perfection” would be encompassed in the “brute facticity” of existence itself.

Only without that component we call a teleology. Matter has evolved into minds able to invent the word teleology but that too is only a “mechanism” embedded necessarily in nature unfolding like clockwork.

Just with [from my frame of mind] no clockmaker.

Then “I” fall over the edge into the “for all practical purposes” surreal attempts to make sense of that.

At least with a demon [or, more likely, a God] we’d have something to take it all back to. But in not having that here and now myself “I” am just completely baffled.

Which I presume is a frame of mind that I will take with me to the grave.

“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine

But: Was Dennett ever able to not question such certainty? And how is the “element of chance” understood as the same or different from “randomness” in the universe?

Instead, from my point of view, what is seen as “chance” or “randomness” is merely a reflection of the gap between what we think we know about reality here and now and all that needs to be known such that in a wholly determined universe even interactions in the quantum world would be entirely predictable. Either by God or by a mere mortal able actually to grasp both the theory and the practice of everything.

So: Does he pull it off? Or is his own argument in and of itself just another inherent, necessary manifestion of what could only ever be?

Then we head in the direction that peacegirl always seems to go:

Which is basically my point here as well. But she somehow sees this point as missing her point. And even though I am not able to not miss her point, I still seem to be “responsible” for missing it. In a way I am simply unable to grasp.

So, “for all practical purposes” in groping to grapple with why we choose the things that we do from moment to moment, what am “I” to really make of all this?

Are the words I am typing here just another more complex [and currently ineffable] manifestation of those dominoes toppling over mindlessly, or does the part about human minds/consciousness “choosing”/choosing in a way the dominoes do not make all the difference in the world?

“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine

In other words, the arguments here get us coming and going. We can never quite pin down “I”, let alone connect this “self” to a “will” able to be examined in a definitive manner.

Or are there people here who have managed to convince themselves that folks like Hume weren’t successful because they hadn’t “thought it all through” in the right way. Like they have. They’re absolutely positive they’re in touch with the one and only “me”. And that this one and only me is calling the shots when thinking, feeling, saying and doing things. Or at least the really, really important stuff.

And the irony here is that so much that does go on inside our bodies is on automatic pilot. All those parts and pieces going about the business of interacting, doing their thing, as though “I” weren’t even around at all.

Parts like this:

We see things. We interpret what we think they mean. We react to what we think they mean. And yet there is not a one of us here who has a sophisticated enough grasp on all this to note a detailed distinction between the brain doing its thing and us taking over.

We just know it’s in there somewhere. And the thought that we could never know anything other than what we are compelled to know by brains as mindful matter having evolved along with life itself on planet Earth is just too…

Well, we don’t know exactly what that means.

Not counting those here who bundle up their words into an intellectual contraption and call that the answer.

“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine

This is basically what it comes down to. What we see can only be grappled with by making particular assumptions about the relationship between matter as mind and mind as matter. But going back how far? To an understanding of life itself and its evolution on planet Earth? To an understanding of planet earth going back to the birth of the solar system…then going back to the Milky Way galaxy’s birth…then going back to the Big Bang…then going back to God…then going back to, well, what exactly?

That’s the part that [to me] is particularly exasperating. Our “will” – free or not – would seem to be only a more or less significant component of existence itself. Then the part that our own individual “I” plays in it all. How much more “infinitesimally insignificant” can that be?

And then there are so many different ways in which to approach it…

Always it seems to come back to that most extraordinary of nature’s inventions: the mind. Matter able to probe itself as matter intertwined in this particular something groping to understand if “I” itself is able to grope about autonomously.

The part in other words where the matter in the mind and the matter in all the rest of the body coordinate their “things” into producing someone like me typing these words on a laptop computer. Here and now.

And then “I” trying to determine if what I am going to do next – go grocery shopping – is only that which I am ever able to do next.

that endless regression is a great point against any objections to eliminative materialism… but even supposing there was some mind ‘in there’, some private theater of qualia inaccessible to everyone else and which only you can experience, how could you talk meaningfully about any of it?

i’ve always found wittgenstein’s point particularly insightful when he criticizes the common sense phrase: ‘i know i am in pain’. at first glance this should seem perfectly right… but then he says ‘we can’t speak of knowing outside of the context of doubting, therefore to say ‘i know i’m in pain’ is entirely senseless.’ wait what? let’s think about what he means here. so i can’t doubt i’m in pain - it hurts like hell… there’s no denying that - and i could say ‘i know i’m in pain’, but only under one condition; if i did not use the word pain as a representation of some content of experience, but rather simply to convey a sense in which the meaning could be used, and understood as such. so i’d be notifying others that i’m having a kind of experience. if not, the other would not be able to know the thing the word represents… and yet for other things i observe through inductive experience of which i speak about as ‘knowing’, e.g., ‘the milkman is here’ (something i could doubt… i may be hallucinating or a brain in a vat, etc.), the thing the statement represents can be experienced by the other. see the subtle difference between the statement ‘i know i’m in pain’ and ‘i know the milkman is here’? qualia… or as nagel put it, that problem of ‘knowing what it’s like to be a bat’, is a non-problem. even the bat can’t know what it’s like to be a bat, because there is no ‘bat’ in there that can be known or doubted. he can be a bat, and know he’s a bat, but there is no amount of private experience of the inner cartesian bat that would lead him to believe he, and only he can ‘know’ what it’s like to be a bat. for what about being a bat and a bat’s experiences can be doubted outside of inductive bat propositions made with a representational language? see what i mean? the same batesian dualism eventually stands to be critiqued by a battgenstein.

you can extend this little drill to demonstrate how the difference between representational meaning and use-meaning has caused so much trouble in philosophy. take the word ‘mind’. mind as something separate from the body, or an additional quality added to the body, or something the brain ‘produces’ and ‘has’… and then to speak about it with the same predication i would use to describe things in the world; the mind is free, or the mind is determined, or the mind is mad, or the mind is lost, or the mind is big, etc. i can know such expressions only as metaphor which become meaningful once i attribute to the expressions particular behaviors… which are ostensible uses of meaning that i learn through language/culture. but i can never know of something separate from these behaviors… something that exhibits such qualities as a thing might exhibit a shape or color or movement, etc. the mind as a ‘container’ of concepts. another senseless notion.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x86hLtOkou8[/youtube]