Freewill exists

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.

I have absolutely no clue why you’re LOLing this… by multiple definitions, the distinction that this essay and dictionaries try to make is that fatalism still allows choice, even though the end result is the same… it’s a form of theistic molonism.

determinism means that there is no choice whatsoever, all actions human and otherwise are predetermined at every point.

It was the definition of determinism that I was using when stating that it’s unfalsifiable.

You had inverse definitions for fatalism and determinism, when you stated, in argument to this point, that you weren’t a fatalist but rather a determinist.

Your LOL here is bizarre.

Your waffling on the lie to tell a truth doesn’t work when the truth is not speaking at all. You are now flailing at this point, and it looks more pathetic as each additional post comes.

right, and impossible, because nature isn’t a ‘determiner’. but this is no refutation of causality. it seems like it is because of the way you understand the word ‘determine’. it’s become a linguistic habit in philosophy to equivocate the words ‘cause’ and ‘determine’. first look at this excellent post:

okay so you got all that figured out now and the word ‘determine’ is out of the way forevermore. but can the same be said about what ‘cause’ means, and whether or not such a thing can be attributed to nature… and not just a ‘little’, but absolutely and completely.

the next step is to recognize the difference in meaning of the words ‘cause’ and ‘reason’. this is another linguistic habit that contributes to a misunderstanding of causality. we tend to think of them as the same, but they aren’t. only in the case of a deliberating determiner can there be a ‘reason’; urwrong finds himself at the mall and remembers that he wanted to go shopping. he then thinks of his reason for being at the mall as the cause for him being at the mall… but it’s not. not metaphysically, anyway. urwrong’s intention has no causal agency; it doesn’t make things happen in the physical world. the thought ‘i’d like to go to the mall’ corresponds with the action of going, but doesn’t cause it, because thoughts can’t be causes. and yet you’re certain that your reason for going was also the cause of your going. this is not your fault, but rene’s (descartes).

so since nature doesn’t determine anything, it has no reasons… and since urwrong is a determiner who doesn’t cause anything, he has only reasons… which, incidentally, he mistakes as causes.

are you picking up what i’m puttin’ down, dude?

Oh my goodness, this is one of the lamest arguments I’ve seen in a long time.

This entire post is moot if anyone just adds the word “non anthropomorphic” before they use one of these words.

I wanted to go to the mall be-CAUSE of two main reasons:

  1. A movie
  2. Go to a favorite restaurant for their pot-stickers

The movie wasn’t that great, but I had to see it anyway. The pot-stickers were delicious though, always a big treat, and made the whole trip worthwhile.

Pot-stickers were the first cause, the Prima Causa, the driving-force for going to the mall. To eat. To live. To add to my Will-To-Power.

Nuh-uh. your mom is moot.

And even on top of your want and desire or attributing value to the cause of going, you could have subconsciously wanted to go as well, which al it of times people subconsciously do things or something surfaces from that aspect of mind to the conscious mind, there’s multiple causations I’d say, in reality.

Just because words can refer to their means of communication, doesn’t mean the words aren’t still separate from their means of communication.

In computer programming, you have values but you also have addresses to where said values are stored in memory. You can create “pointers” to values, which hold value addresses as their value instead of the value itself, but pointers have their own address different to the address of the value, and you have to “dereference” them recall the actual value. Now, you might equally try to create a pointer to point to its own address (analogous to “I am speaking”, or any tautology) but even if compilers let you do this, the pointer value and the pointer address would give you the same value but this doesn’t mean values are addresses.

Overlap/coexist doesn’t mean convergence into the same thing. Operational equivalence isn’t complete equivalence: a good example that’s on topic is that Fatalism and Determinism could both be used to predict the future, so they are operationally equivalent, but they aren’t the same thing because how you get there makes all the difference. It’s like two routes of the same length to the same destination are not the same route: “I am speaking” is not the same as I am speaking (without inverted commas).

Your last two challenges have been fun! I had to give them some thought, keep 'em coming.

Do you mean Molinism?

I “loled” because it’s like me recommending that you go read something that you were saying in much the same words anyway - like telling a teacher to go to one of his own classes. I don’t think it’s bizarre to lol at something like that.

Yes Fatalism would allow choice and Free Will, and all kinds of feel-good stuff that isn’t actually true - it’s like a botch attempt to reconcile things like Free Will with the fact that things can be totally predictable (by Determinism), just for the sake of holding onto the feel-good stuff. Fatalism fits all the criticism said to be against Determinism, because Free Will advocates like the feeling of being in control, having a prima causa self that can decide ex nihilo, but under Fatalism it wouldn’t matter - which is demoralising . Determinism does away with the feel-good stuff by sticking to hard truths that can be reliably and repeatedly tested, which just so happens to fit perfectly with the fact that things can be predicted - even complex things.

There’s still choice in Determinism, but you need to examine what you mean by choice. I still choose to write this post instead of do something else that I want to do, but it’s because the four fundamental forces resulting in me choosing that - not because my prima causa self decided ex nihilo. Even if Free Will could be true, you still only ever choose one choice just the same as under Determinism, except under Free Will you “could have” just as easily chosen to do some other thing instead, even though you didn’t. It seems like you could have, and yet you didn’t for a reason, and no evidence that you could have chosen otherwise at that point in time will ever occur again because the time has gone. Choosing something different at a later point in time is not the same thing as choosing it at the previous time, because the determining factors have changed. Even if you could go back in time to choose the other choice, the determining factors would have changed. If you went back in time and had no recollection of it, and all determining factors and reasons reset as well, the reasons for you choosing your choice would be no different, so you’d still choose the same thing that you had your reason to choose just the same.

This is all Determinism really requires for you to get to grips with: a proper examination of terminology and what terms really mean (like “choice”).

But if all proper examination and use of examples to prove my point is “waffle” to you then stay in the dark all you like. Determinism is still the best model of what’s going on and Free Will is still full of contradictions. You’re just being determined to side with the contradictions at this point. It could change, given the right reasons being determined - but with incomplete information of exactly what’s stopping you, we’ll just have to find out. If anyone was able to follow the complexity of what’s determining each neuron in your brain to not see sense then it would be perfectly possible to figure out how to get you up to speed - difficult technology would be needed but it would be perfectly possible.

More interesting questions arise here though - what happens when such technology is possible and the exact complexity of Determinism behind people’s thoughts is cleared up? The potential for misuse is scary, but it seems this is most likely our future. On the positive side, we wouldn’t need to dance around in circles if a machine could simply process “oh this is the reason he doesn’t understand”.

It’s amazing that you wrote this immense post(which I enjoyed) without responding to the fact(in a previous post of mine (that determinism is by definition not falsifiable.))

You actually never quoted, nor have directly responded to that post. The post is here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194947&start=250#p2728904

I take that back… silhouette, you posted a snippet of it and then argued your definitions of determinism and fatalism in reverse

Oh ok.

Well to determine if something is falsifiable, you have to be able to devise a test that could show that it could be wrong.

To do that for Determinism, you need to define exactly what constitutes evidence that shows Determinism is not causing an effect: namely that effects are occurring for certain without cause.

This is problematic because the intention here is to not only prove a negative, but also to prove a negative in a general case rather than just a specific one. I suppose you could try, for example, to find certain circumstances where none of the fundamental forces show their expected effects, and you’d have evidence that in that specific case, Determinism doesn’t model what’s going on. But for the general case you’d need to show the fundamental forces don’t work anywhere - despite the evidence being overwhelmingly strong to support the theory that they do operate everywhere we test them. Determinism is getting proven all the time, even as we speak, but that’s not to say it’s impossible to prove it isn’t.

There could be proposed a new theory that supercedes Determinism, which would partially disprove it in the same way that general relativity disproves that time and space are absolutes, even though in everyday conditions you can explain things very accurately even if you assume they are absolutes.
But if you wanted to prove that Free Will was going on in special cases like the mind, as a better explanation than Determinism, you would have to prove that, given a reason to choose one way over another, the outcome was no greater than random. Experiments show that not only can choices be influenced, the illusion that you were making the choices yourself remains in tact. You could try and trick this experiment, and choose as randomly as you can, in spite of having a reason to choose one way over another, but then you would also have to prove your impetus to trick was similarly not caused by prior conditions to any degree more than random chance - because your impetus to trick becomes your new reason to choose how you do. So Determinism catches everything here.
Basically, even if something superceded Determinism, it wouldn’t be Free Will to any degree, and if indeterminacy was going on in specific circumstances alongside Determinism, it won’t falsify Determinism. But that’s not to say you couldn’t find evidence that Indeterminacy was actually going on everywhere and the seeming Determinism was all an illusion.

So given all of the above, it should be clear that it’s perfectly possible to falsify Determinism in certain ways, but even if you did you would not be proving Free Will in its stead - to any degree. It would be some “God-of-the-gaps” argument to try and say, given any lack of Determinism modelling what’s going on, that we can safely fall back on a predecessor model instead. That would be fallacious, resembling the False Dilemma fallacy.

This is why, given the perfect falsifiability of Determinism as I’ve just demonstrated, I only give credence to indeterminacy in its stead, and even then only in specific situations alongside Determinism. If Determinism ever is falsifiable, it will be to yield to the next evolution up from Determinism, whatever that may be, but it won’t be a step back down to Free Will to any degree.

Good, so you admit that Determinism is unfalsifiable by your own admission here.

Anything else…??

Yeah one more thing. Freewill is unfalsifiable too, and the principle of parsimony would lead us to avoid it in theory. It’s much, much more complicated than the theory of determinism. Occam wouldn’t shave with it, I can assure you.

How is the ability to attribute value from understanding/wisdom more complicated than cause and effect?

Why do you say “too”? Do you think Determinism is unfalsifiable?

What about the points I raised in my last post? I show quite clearly that you can falsify Determinism, even if it’s not without difficulty.
Like all things, you can prove outcomes that do not abide the by a theory, or better, you replace it with something else, which explains both what the previous theory explains but also what it doesn’t. This is what Determinism did to Free Will, and maybe one day something else will do it to Determinism but it won’t be Free Will.

It would be possible for an idiot to take my post to mean you can’t falsify Determinism (they’d be saying you can’t falsify anything if they tried to pull that one), but you’ve proven yourself to be far from idiotic, promethean.

Free Will is also falsifiable, you just show everything thought to be Free isn’t free - like Determinism did.