Well, in a “wholly determined universe” as I have [necessarily] come to understand it, the only answer that I am able to give comes directly from nature.
Right?
No one is obligated to see anything they don’t want to see. I am not out of line to say that it’s irrelevant to know whether 1+1 is true in the entire universe to know that it is true here on earth and is the basic building block of many physical structures.
Unless of course nature obligates you to want to.
That’s not how the word “obligated” is normally used. Obviously we have no control over what we desire or don’t desire. There you go again saying the same old thing as if it’s a new revelation.
How anything is used is normal. Why? Because it can only have ever been used as it in fact was used.
Right?
Thus…
And you are not out of line only because you were never really able to want to be anything here other than what you must be. Your own obligatory embodiment of nature. Then it’s back to the assumptions that nature obligates us both to make here.
You’re not obligated to say anything you don’t want to. Stop using the term in an unconventional way, which can only cause confusion.
Unless of course I am not able to want anything other than that which nature compels me to. And then [again] around and around and around we go.
It gets us somewhere because you simply dismiss all those “unknown unknowns” as irrelevant to that which you seek to convey here: that your own “progressive” future hinges on having enough people “choose” to grasp the author’s wholly determined point of view.
This new world is not dependent on your understanding specifically.
As though pointing this out has anything at all to do with actually responding to my point that you simply ignore all of the unknown unknowns that stand between what you think you know and all that can be known about these relationships.
I gave two undeniable principles that lead to the two-sided equation (which you have no knowledge about.) There are no unknowns that stand between the soundness of these principles. You do not know what you’re talking about iambiguous.
So what? “In your head” that makes the unknown unknowns go away. As though that need be as far as it goes. As though that actually does make them go away!
And you know what you are talking about because the psychological comfort and consolation that you cling to with the author and his “progressive future” has become the center of the universe for you now. Everything that grounds your own particular “I” in this particular assessment of these particular principles is what is now at stake here. I can’t know what I am talking about because if I do all of this might come crashing down all around you.
And the reason I’m not letting you…? Then around and around we go. Only I am more than willing to concede that my frame of mind here is beyond my own capacity to demonstrate as either free or determined. How on earth could I possibly know that given all that I am still unable to grasp about the objective relationship between “I” and “all there is”. If it is even objective at all.
The objective relationship between you and all there is, is irrelevant to the knowledge that life on earth moves in one direction only, rendering FREE choice an illusion, but a persistent one.
Asserting this as you do here is no less preposterous to me now than it was before. You reduce everything that can be known in and about the universe down to how you have come to understand things here and now on earth.
And then expect me and others to just go along with it while acknowledging that our reactions here are in fact beyond our control.
You may not understand many things that I do, and I may not understand many things that you do. So what? This has no relation to the undeniable nature of this discovery.
Again, as though merely insisting that this is true need be as far as you and the author go. You demonstrate nothing substantial. You can’t take someone through their day and explore the choices that they make other than by way of fitting them all into the intellectual assumptions you make about having or not having a free will. Nothing can be pinned down either experientially or experimentally.
How in the world can our choices be free when we are under a compulsion to choose what gives us greater satisfaction from one moment to another? This is an invariable law that cannot be broken.
Yeah, that’s my argument too. But how you are able to make it your own argument in turn basically encompasses the gap between us.
If there is a gap between us, there is NO need to close it. Your lack of understanding (the gap) will not stop this discovery from coming to light when the time is right. Do you think a lack of understanding of Edison’s discovery on your part would have prevented the lightbulb from being discovered?
As though the things that we think we need to do are not in turn only the things that nature compels us to think that we need to do. You want to make our “choices” the exception to the rule somehow. But I’m simply unable to understand why and how you think you accomplish this – can accomplish this – in a determined unviverse.
…when I say “determined universe” I am acknowledging right from the start that my own understanding of that can only reflect the gap between what I think it means and all that can be known about the universe that I am simply not privy to here and now. Anymore than you are. Only I am willing to own up to the “for all practical purposes” implication of that because unlike you I have not imagined some “progressive” future that seems to be predicated on others understanding these things as I do.
You’re off the beaten track. You sound like a nihilist very determined to prove that a progressive future is not something we can achieve.
I’m off the beaten path only because nature put me there. I call myself a nihilist only because at this point in time nature compels me to. Instead, my assessment of moral nihilism in ILP revolves around the assumption that I am in fact [up to a point] autonomous. I am able of my own volition to conclude that moral and political values are rooted existentially in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. And embedded out in a particular world historically, culturally and experientially.
And that the behaviors you deem to be a prerequisite for “peace and prosperity” are precisely the behaviors that others hold in contempt.
You said in a determined world there are no victims. I said yes there are. I get what you’re saying when looked at in total perspective, but who in the world can see it this way when they have been attacked and left for dead?
My point is that in a determined universe as I understand it here and now those who are left for dead and those who leave them for dead are like the characters and the guests in West World.The characters are wholly programmed to think and feel and say and do only what they must. While the guests presume that they are free to do these things autonomously. The show then explores what happens when the two worlds begin to intertwine.
But: in a determined universe [again, as I understand it] there is no distinction between the characters and the guests. They are all compelled to think and feel and say and do things as nature commands given the immutable laws of matter.