Freewill exists

The self awareness of an individual consists of its needs, values.
The baby knows it is something by wanting milk. Not until its own hands begin to matter to it (when it wants other shit) will it recognize hands at all. Nor its hands nor others hands.

A creature is aware of existing only to the degree that this awareness is necessary for its existence.

All modern “self-awareness” is illusion. As are all modern selves. You don’t know what you are until you know that you are, and this only happens once you really are. And modern society doesn’t really provide the environment for that.

HAIL ODIN

hey yo but that’s what it is. A convenience in an ordinary, non-metaphysical, convention of language. Of course there’s a ‘self’ and an identity… We talk of these things everyday. But when we transpose these concepts into philosophical language to use as a basis to defend metaphysical freewill, everything gets real sketchy. If these niggas is using the meaning of these concepts wrongly, then the conclusions which follow will be nonsense. I’m saying (and many other serious thinkers as well… Peter hacker, for instance) that the argument for freewill proceeds wrongly from the confused idea of what ‘self’ means.

In the end, you can speak of freewill in a non technical language all day, and everything is cool. But don’t take it into philosophy because it won’t fly there.

We can’t be sure there WAS a starting point. Aquinas could be terribly wrong in his ontological argument. But we do know that existence does not pertain to the essence of the modes which are human beings. While we aren’t contingent and causally necessary, fuck hold on gotta go. Be back later.

For good measure, the term “free will” originally simply means the gift of physical freedom, of living without constraints and being able to do as one pleases. As in, he does something not out of fear of punishment but out of free will.

In as far as we are discussing it as a metaphysical thing, it can either mean something nonsensical, some spark of divinity or something which is untied to any causality, or it can mean a being which is so in tune (resonant) with that which caused it, that it has become, in its self-perpetuation, a causa-sui.

The deeper question here is a logical-scientific one. It is: how can one particle determine the course of another, if it doesn’t also partly determine itself?

A famous criticism of Falsificationism was that it was not falsifiable itself.
So I guess we shouldn’t bother making sure knowledge is falsifiable and go back to simply claiming stuff that can’t be tested?

So the question is if things are only going to turn out one way, that we’re all going to believe what’s true and what’s not true, regardless of whether it actually is true - yet this goes for all stances, even Free Will. Even if Free Will could be true, and you decided every choice free from causal influence, whilst somehow also being influenced by your experiences/preferences/tendencies, and also able to influence causal events even though they don’t influence you, except in the ways they do (you get the picture), things would equally only ever turn out one way, and we’d all believe what’s true and what’s not true, regardless of whether it actually is true.

What’s the difference to the argument, whether Determinism can model exactly how the self is entirely influenced by causation, or if Will tries to claim that you’re both partly influenced whilst also not influenced at the same time?

I think the intention of the question is to frame “testing falsifiable truth claims” as only possible if you could have done otherwise, yes? If so, putting the answer of Free Will into the question itself commits the logical fallacy of “Begging the Question”. What’s really going on is that the consequences of testing amount to determining that you recognise truth from falsehood to your determined ability. The danger here to is to confuse Determinism with Fatalism, and to think that you’re destined to think and act the way we do regardless of what tests we do - this is not the case. The difference is that with Determinism you are determined to react to testing in the way you are determined to, and this causal chain can potentially be followed to work out the way someone thinks and acts in advance, where Fatalism claims in advance that one will think and act in a certain way regardless of any causal chain. Both can result in foresight, but the means to those ends are the difference: one depends on interactions, for the other your interactions are irrelevant - and it always tends to be the latter that Free Will advocates are actually protesting against, which they confuse as Determinism when it is actually Fatalism that they don’t like. I think the question probably wants to put Determinism in terms of Fatalism, like it doesn’t matter what you do, but in Determinism it does matter what you do. What gives this away is phrasing like “we are all just determined”, as if the core of Determinism itself (i.e. determining) was irrelevant.

What ends up happening is that those who are determined to want to test claims, and those who are determined to recognise truth from falsehood will succeed and outbreed those who fail in either or both of these respects. If you are determined to think and act the way you do, the ones that believe what is closest to “whether it is true” will proliferate, and the ones that believe what is less close to “whether it is true” will die out - that’s the real test. Natural Selection is a neat answer to the question, which is why there are a lot more determinists around today than there was even just a few millenia ago. It started with people reacting to situations largely instinctually, one case at a time. It evolved to the personification of consistent events in the form of multiple gods, who determined each type of case as the prima causa in their own field. It evolved to the consolidation of these forces into one God who was the prima causa for absolutely everything all at once at all times, except able to give you your own limited ability to be a prima causa and therefore solely responsible for your own decisions, to be tested and judged by God Himself - the birth of guilt. These days, Free Will advocates still hold on to the idea that they are their own prima causa who can choose ex nihilo like “God Himself”, often after the death of God in their everyday lives with more and more Secularism around the globe. Intellectuals have learned to quantify and harness the forces formerly attributed simply “to God”, allowing Compatibilists to simultaneously think of themselves as a prima causa as well as being able to harness Determinism - the best of both worlds. But really they are only yielding the creations of the Determinists who understand how causation works through everything, even “the self” - this is the next evolution. “Historical Materialism” in action before our very eyes (though I would correct “Materialism” to “Experientialism”) - that’s how you step back and analyse Determinism’s feedback upon itself.

So yeah, still 100% Determinism (only tentatively maybe less than 100% Determinism if and only if there is any indeterminacy at play underneath anything - order emerging from literal chaos, not just from complexity) - until we evolve not only out of Free Will altogether, with everyone not only up to the next step of hard Determinism, but also beyond to the next step after even that - assuming this is possible. But for now, yes, 100% Determinism.

We had a discussion? Why was I not informed?

I answered some of your questions, you responded that I made an interesting statement, and suddenly I’ve been Socratised between your response and your new claim? What are you, Bill Cosby? I feel violated.

I gather that you want to simultaneously claim I’ve contradicted myself, or at least resorted to a paradox, and that you Socratised me at some point previously to this - all in the same sentence.

Consider: are these statements logically equivalent?
a) This statement is false
b) This statement has truth, but is based on something false

For example, if you tell a fictional story that never happened, but it communicates a truth, is this communication a falsity?
The means were false, but the ends were truth.
“a” is flatly a logical paradox, where as “b” refers to two different things: (A ∧ ¬A) as opposed to (A ∧ ¬B).

I don’t mean to Socratise you back, so I hope I don’t get your hopes up and lead you on 8-[

What happens in society, isn’t that. It’s “this is truth” and it’s looked at as false until experienced with the correct variables that show it is indeed true. Trial and error. Ones vision is what creates a falsity, truth just is.

If you’ve been told a story that is truth, but looked at it as false, is it false? Based on ones /own/ vision of that story as literal instead of metaphorical? What if you don’t understand the language of the story being depicted? Do you still have grounds to claim what it is?

There’s debate amongst artists whether to leave art open to interpretation, or to deliver a message. Does the artist intend one or the other? And if they choose the former, of course the experiencer of said art has grounds to claim what it is. If the artist chooses the latter, then those grounds are removed from the feet of the experiencer. A political analogy might be a democracy versus a dictatorship. A democratic artist might insert intricate expressions of meaning into a story that might even be picked up by the observer - an attraction to the treasure hunter, or explorer types. A dictatorial one might do the same, in which case the experiencer has no grounds to claim what it is unless they pick up on exactly the intended message. The problem is: how do you know the intention of the artist? If they tell you, the piece of art may as well be dictatorial either way: either you are commanded to make up your own interpretation or you are commanded to receive the intended interpretation.

So what is the intention of the story?

This is the question that must answered before your question can be answered.

Innocence until proven guilty: I support this. “One’s vision”, yes, is an imperfect judgement - it opens up the possibility of falsity, and also truth - I would say relatively so, as Discrete Experience. Truth just “is”, indeed: Continuous Experience.

When Free Will is proven guilty, it was treated as innocent until then, and now not so. Using language in a way proven false, but to deliver truth: what then? Truth, from which language is abstracted, just “is”. Language lies that it is not “just is”, in order to transfer meaning for the purposes of utility - language is like vision: creating relative falsity/truthfulness in a transitive way: “true TO ” as oppossed to simply “True” intransitively.

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Its simpler to call that a metaphor, it doesn’t lie, its merely an intermediary between image and language, it has no intention to deceive.

Deception occurs when literal and figurative levels are conflated, onto singular levels, whereas multiple levels of metaphor present different meanings and images.

There usually is no intentionality involved, but a failure to express meaning and visualization on sensible levels.

In politics, art, the art of philosophy, or the philosophy art, a total absurd reduction may compete for manifest , or, exclusive dominance. It entails no will to intentionally deceive, its primary manifestation belongs to primary syntactical usage.

There is this simple distinction which logic and.language require by definition, before the advent to complexity can be argued with political and aesthetic overtones.( transcendental)

Merely a necessary logical requirement of arguability, of a image/language related analogy. Similarity posits the argument within strictly linguistic analysis, without recourse to the imagination.

Ref:
Metaphoric Connections and Incubation :
Our personal inner language depends of the imagination to make connections and enable
expression. Egan (1992) concisely describes the work of the imagination by saying that
“imagination lies at a kind of crux where perception, memory, idea generation, emotion,
metaphor, and no doubt other labeled features of our lives, intersect and interact” (p. 3). In fact,
the imagination is the intersectiion itself.
Lakoff and Johnson (2003) describe abstract concepts as having “a literal core but
…extended by metaphors, often by many mutually inconsistent metaphors. Abstract concepts are
not complete without metaphors. For example, love is not love without metaphors of magic,
attraction, madness, union, nurturance and so on” (p. 272).

Sillouette,

I just have a general statement for you that might not seem relevant … I’m saying this with all of your posts here swirling in at the same time:

“I am speaking”, is a phrase where reference and that being referred to, co exist, they overlap.

You tend to assume a law of mutual exclusivity, when there are in fact verifiable convergences.

Boy did you mess up your quotations just now :wink:

A metaphor literally means carrying beyond, by derivation, so carrying beyond truth is a…? Well you could say that calling it a lie would be a metaphor :smiley:

Hyperbole aside, I think my message is clear: signifiers are not the signified, it would be a lie to say they were - so yes, it is deception to treat them as such. This is why I make the distinction. Logic is quite literal, I’m sure you will agree, so its use on the metaphor of language is only really appropriate in the realm of signifiers. Logic is derived from the greek for speech - it is language, and in older times all reasoning was performed when speaking. Speech, language, logic: it is abstraction… from the real/concrete.

Perhaps this is why language is most beautiful in poetry - where it is the metaphor of metaphors, metaphorically speaking.

I am not speaking of metaphore as meaning, but as a functional nexus.
And the point that meaning may be confined to a literal interpretation is well founded. But that strictly confines it to the most basic level of understanding.
The idea is Yours, when You introduced symbolically rich areas of experience dealing with aesthetics and politics. You are arguing meaning from both ends, comingling them.
That what You are doing is intentional, or not, comes up, in a formative sense, but not without the reductive residue, or where from it’s derived.
I did, after all, support my contention, at least in part. You’re not taking it
in consideration, shows some of either, denial and identification of expurgating fault. Most probably it is honest, but within an unresolved, unconscious source.

The sign/signal analogy is interesting in situ, but in a transcendental sense can be ‘transferred’ to a ‘hunter becoming the hunted’ scenario.

Both of us, intentionally are trying to get it some nexual content of truth, ultimately related to the question of free will, generally within shifting contexts of awareness, morally satisfying congruence within defined levels of conscious-sub conscious modality, where agreement is the preferred object. I use object within the transcendental ideal and not intention, for transcendent object appears as more functionally constituted, whereas intention and intentionality can present another can of beans to dissect.

Logic doesn’t exist independent of reason. One can exercise logic, without reason. Which is done, a lot with science only valuing the empirical and then science wonders why they have no answers to certain facets of reality and the existence of psyche. That’s where philosophy comes to play and the consistency of reason and logic through diversity is where one may solidify the answer as empirical by observing the consistency. How can subjectivity synchronize otherwise? Typically it doesn’t, unless executing logic and reason together of which leads diverse paths to the same truths.

There is a reason Spock and Kirk did well together, it wasn’t because they relied solely on logic.

Like how many associate the Bible and religious/mythological with literal and then say it doesn’t make sense. Yes, of course it doesn’t, when you look at it literally/logically and without reason. If you execute your search with both reason and logic and making sense of it is your intent, it will make sense.

Silhouette, you seem to have made the easily observable mistake of only thinking present tense and solely logical. Determinism is not the step that comes after freewill, you must assert us all as retards to not understand cause and effect exists, I’m near positive the cave men had that figured out when they discovered “fire hot”. If no consciousness, there’d be no understanding of fire or of cause and effect regardless, only a state of subconscious obeying of instinct.

Determinism was active before a free will, which was the subconscious state of which we did not understand but instead only had experience and knowledge of such experience, there was no understanding and responsibility, innocence by confinement of cause and effect with no wisdom.

You can point your finger now and say a free will does not exist, only because you’re not in a state of subconsciousness only now. You possess consciousness, basically, you can only say free will doesn’t exist, because you have a free will to do such. Consciousness was the will of which was granted freedom by the ability to understand ones own diversity/uniqueness and pursue wisdom in everything.

I’m not sure how one isn’t free when not confined in the first place… a dog is confined within its own system of habitat, it doesn’t understand unless through direct experience, we can understand without relying only upon direct experience, we have multiple methods.

Just semantics, all it is really. I don’t think we’re confused on what the self is, it’s the deep down suppressed individual that one may not be aware of in a given present moment unless reflecting upon past and future, one can live their entire life as a byproduct of environment and with an indoctrinated identity.

Silhouette,

You need to read something like this before you hinge your whole argument on it:

mytutor.co.uk/answers/10942 … -fatalism/

And you’re whole thing about needing to lie to communicate… why isn’t that a lie? If that is a lie, by its own axiom, then that means that you don’t have to lie to communicate.

so what was i saying before i was so rudely interrupted by my job, earlier. oh yeah… i remember.

okay so to be a self cause, a thing’s existence must pertain to the essence of its being such that it can be conceived of through itself… or as spinz puts it: ‘that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.’

what the heck does that mean? well it kinda means only a thing that has to exist is not dependent or constrained by anything else in order to exist… that is, it cannot be said to be an effect of any other cause because it’s existence is not granted or determined by anything else. it’s very nature involves existence, and this is not compelled or brought into being by anything. he goes on to say:

‘That thing is called free, which exists solely by the necessity of its own nature, and of which the action is determined by itself alone. On the other hand, that thing is necessary, or rather constrained, which is determined by something external to itself to a fixed and definite method of existence or action.’

human beings are one such ‘thing’. their essence does not involve existence - they don’t have to exist - and they can be thought of as a particular mode or modification of that thing which has as its essence it’s very existence. spinz calls it ‘substance’, and this exists prior to any of its modifications. a particular modification is causally necessary, but contingent insofar as it is not its own cause, i.e., it depends on something other than itself to exist. namely, the particular modification nature takes in the event that a human being comes into being. human beings are therefore posterior to substance and cannot be self-caused, since only substance, which has as it’s essence its very existence, cannot exist as part of something else… as an effect of something else.

this basically means that if a thing can be conceived of as non-existent, its essence does not involve existence. because we can’t conceive of nature (substance) as not existing, at least one thing has no cause prior to itself which brought it into being… while the human being, on the other hand, does not have to exist, and is neither its own cause, or free from being caused by something other than itself. ergo; there is no freewill.

i will now take your questions (which i probably won’t answer).

Lol, thanks for providing a link to an explanation that pretty much exactly re-iterates my points :-"

I mean, the clue is in the website pathing: “A-Level”. This may not be known to everyone here, but that’s the UK equivalent of high school juniors and seniors in the US - so one of the most basic of philosophical distinctions.

Why are you recommending I read something that says what I’m already saying? Or are you not reading what I’m saying?

And the “lie to communicate” thing, as I just explained in my response to barbarianhorde is a means not ends thing. The means are a lie, the ends can result in truth - just like all stories.

Are you saying humanity is separate from nature? If you imply so then no, we weren’t self caused. We are nature, conscious of itself, how is that not self causation? I am the very cause and effect of nature itself and it’s millions of years of trial and error of which bred more and more complexity. What’s consciousness if not conceived from itself and the levels of unconscious/subconscious? The idea is only labeled an idea to the conscious state of which was inevitable. We named what already had existed after it existed. Language doesn’t dictate that we were not indeed self conceived by nature itself, of which we are.

We are an infinitely long string of which is the self causation of nature, the inverting of consciousness, the mirror, the loop.

Ok and consciousness /has/ to exist for there to be an observable will, of which was self causation through nature itself. Yes, nature is a collection of different levels of consciousness, how do I know this? Well what are we, are you asserting there is no sub/unconscious state to man?

So explain, what’s external to nature and it’s layers of overlapping un/sub/conscious? Nature determined itself free, hence, consciousness… I really don’t understand how this is missed and why the separation of man and nature is still conflated or missed.

Human beings may not have to exist, but consciousness does due to its being inevitable to a timeless reality/existence of ever evolving complex change. So tell me, did man not come from nature or did it? Even if not human being, consciousness would have been manifested through nature, what are other species if not? What’s existence at all, if not progressive complexity in and of itself?

Consciousness is nature. Man is nature caused by itself… did we not /cause/ our own survival by adaptation and endurance? If not self caused, why not extinction? Like we haven’t seen other species perish?

The Simplest mistake can form an entire opposition. Man is not separate from nature, it is in itself conscious.

I agree, and that means “Determinism” is Unnatural.