LOL
That’s interesting.
In this case, is there any way to change the game or to end it?
I have always been approaching it with the idea that if one could produce a shift away from a static “I” or absolute certainty or universal obligations, then the game would change. But maybe I’m completely wrong about it.
Pardon these long rants. I am working out this as I write. Thinking out loud. And who else but you could possibly understand.
But I do go on and on below. No worries if you can’t find the interest to go to the end. Imagining you reading this was part of me exploring a few ideas below and that was useful regardless. I think it is actually important because we all have a bit of iamb in us.
I think with most things, there needs to be some sense on both sides that there has been game playing. And the internet is not a great environment for change since both parties have so much control over what is shown. All self-doubt, fear, mixed feelings can be hidden and the best foot put forward. Calling out the game might affect someone, but I think that’s rare. And there needs to be some motivation for someone to want to end the game.
Of course this was mainly speculative fun. But I have found that responding to and thinking about iamb has led me to a lot, I mean a lot, of insight into people in general.
He even helped me today with the concept of Jouissance, Lacan’s version…
IOW at face value this is all about finding answers to important questions: how to resolve all moral claims - I mean, that would be great, we’d all get along and treat each other well - find out for sure if we are free or not, find a way to be authentic (have a capitalized ‘I’ and know what one wants. Important stuff, at least possibly. So the enterprise has a spirit of seriousness, even, ironically a moral imperitive. (implicitly he is claiming to be doing good: ‘how could anything else be more important?’ he has said a number of times.)
But when presented with experiential approaches to alleviating his pain - which has been presented as the motivation - he is absolutely not interested unless he can be convinced in advance that it will work for him and treats these attempts as objectivism and some kind of proselytizing situation. When present with philosophical approaches, there is often avoidance of actually dealing with the positions presented and they generally elicit him restating his positions.
He always makes it clear that he is not convinced - in a sense as if this is evidence. And then also gives out criteria for the solution that all rational people would be forced to agree.
IOW an impossible goal and also the first criteria gives him a kind of final say. Try to get me to believe something. See it didn’t work. As if his motivation and his experience and willingness to explore are necessarily unimportant.
So, perhaps, what is happening is actually what he enjoys. What happens is the main goal.
And Lacan was clear that even if one also experiences pain, it can still be because one enjoys, gets satisfaction out of the process.
He wants us to fail against him over and over.
Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t also want answers. I am sure he would also like to resolve conflicting goods, etc. But I don’t think that’s the main thing that is going on.
I am not quite sure what yo mean here. Like if you could convince him that we don’t need to be 100 percent sure to live and act, the discussion would flow better, we could get down to practical application…? Things like that. Yes, I can see that. I mean, that might work with someone else, or might work here in a year. Or those criteria of his might be part of the game, since they lead to dead ends. Or both.
I used to try to point out that he was, in fact, acting in the world, already. And that his choice of actions were based on things that he believed. If he was certain 100% about those beliefs, well, how? If he’s not, well, then he is acting in the world without being 100% certain, so it isn’t necessary. He could minimize even further his influence on others, by not posting here. He could protect the world even more from his actions since he cannot be 100% sure he knows how one ought to act. That line never got anywhere. Though it was interesting coming up with it.
I generally tried to treat the dialogue itself as moral ground and a concrete one. IOW for me Mary’s abortion is not concrete. Though i did respond to his requests for concrete actions I had made in specific situations with conflicting goods. This however, did not solve his problems (suprise surprise) and then he quickly forgot about it starting demanding I do it as if it never happened.
Since our interaction with his is a shared concrete experience and as concrete as possible since it is there on the ‘page’, it seemed to me the best possible set of examples. But he simply cannot follow such things. Even when presented with direct quoted evidence of what he did, he glides away from it and places the interaction in some other context.
So that failed too, though it was also interesting.
I and you have tried a wide range of approaches. Now we don’t agree about things. It’s not like we have some unified position on life.
I think though we share a common belief that we are doing nothing wrong by living. I think there is something very anti-life in what he is implying and doing. How dare you all go around, more confident than me - in different ways - and not suffer like I am.
For different and perhaps overlapping reasons, we don’t feel like we are doing anything wrong by being alive and trying to accomplish things and interacting with other people. And so the message is
Prove to me you are not sinning.
As ironic as it is for a nihilist non-objectivist to have that message.
Now most people think that the words they say are what they are doing.
But what we are doing is actually about the dynamics of the process of interaction.
So despite the irony, I think our nihilist here is telling us we are sinners. (though he may be wrong, lol, it is our job to convince him we are not sinners.)
And he gets pleasure when we fail to convince him. And even more pleasure if we get irritated.
Because it indicates we are not happy, he thinks.
I think he wants an answer that is absolute and objective and entirely satisfactory not just to himself but to everyone else
For he wants nothing less than a universal explanation for the question of conflicting goods in relation to human existence
It is doomed to failure as there is no such explanation as each individual has to decide for themselves what is true to them
Yep, that has been the general pattern over the years. In particular with the objectivists.
I’ve narrowed it down to three possible reasons:
1] I argue that while philosophers may go in search of wisdom, this wisdom is always truncated by the gap between what philosophers think they know [about anything] and all that there is to be known in order to grasp the human condition in the context of existence itself. That bothers some. When it really begins to sink in that this quest is ultimately futile, some abandon philosophy altogether. Instead, they stick to the part where they concentrate fully on living their lives “for all practical purposes” from day to day.
2] I suggest in turn it appears reasonable that, in a world sans God, the human brain is but more matter wholly in sync [as a part of nature] with the laws of matter. And, thus, anything we think, feel, say or do is always only that which we were ever able to think, feel, say and do. And that includes philosophers. Some will inevitably find that disturbing. If they can’t know for certain that they possess autonomy, they can’t know for certain that their philosophical excursions are in fact of their own volition.
3] And then the part where, assuming some measure of autonomy, I suggest that “I” in the is/ought world is basically an existential contraption interacting with other existential contraptions in a world teeming with conflicting goods — and in contexts in which wealth and power prevails in the political arena. The part where “I” becomes fractured and fragmented.
And, really, how long will many philosophers [objectivists especially] pursue exchanges that revolve around assumptions like this? They become philosophers to find answers. Then they bump into me. And I argue that, in all likelihood, answers to the Big Questions will never be known by them, or are compelled by nature, or, in regard to their interactions with others in the moral and political spheres, are but existential fabrications ever constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed in in a world teeming with contingency, chance and change.
But: That this, in turn, can only be my own existential contraption. At least until I come upon an argument able to convince me not to think as, here and now, I do.
My point is that it seems reasonable to connect the dots between the human brain as matter in sync with the laws of matter, and the behaviors I choose – any behaviors – as being entirely in sync with that in turn.
Only I acknowledge that I am not myself able to demonstrate that. Instead, on this thread, I copy and paste arguments made by others and react to them.
If he does in fact believe he is in possession of free will, how does he explain this beyond his “general descriptions”? Beyond what I construe to be his pedantic assertions about these relationships?
Only here and now I am “stuck” with believing that nature may well have compelled me to assert this myself. I just don’t know what to believe because I have no capacity to know what to believe for sure.
Over and again I point out I am not in possession of either the knowledge or the experience needed to demonstrate what seems reasonable to me “in my head”.
“I” here being an existential contraption. In other words, in regard to determinism, I am basing my thinking now on the actual confluence of lived experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge. Put all of these variable together and over the years “I” have come to believe what I do. I can only speculate as to how my thinking here and now might have been very different had the variables in my life been very different.
Thus: taking that into account, how do the philosophers and scientists come to pin down an argument that transcends “I” as an existential contraption, and arrives at an argument [complete with evidence] that finally pins down once and for all the extent to which “I” is in possession of actual volition.
Is he himself in possession of that knowledge and experiential background? It would seem that he certainly believes that he is. Otherwise where would he get the confidence to insist that those who don’t think like he does are morons and desperate degenerates?
To wit:
Come on, over and again I challenge folks to take the dictionary definitions of words – “freedom”, “justice”, “right”, “wrong”, “good”, “evil”, “determinism”, “autonomy” – and use them to describe their own interactions with others. Sometimes in the context of morality, sometimes in the context of free will.
So, was any particular Mary in any particular context free and just in opting for a particular abortion because abortion was the right thing for her to do given that she was free to opt not to have one?
Okay, Mr. Philosopher, what say you?
This thread merely focuses the beam on Mr. Philosopher demonstrating that whatever he says was in turn always predicated on the fact that he could have freely opted to say something else instead.
In other words, regarding what in particular and in what actual context, ought all rational men and women agree?
That’s preposterous. Cite something on this thread that I posted to indicate that this is how I react to him.
Yes, but you merely assume that you do have some measure of control over it and have freely opted not to be concerned about it.
You just know this. Even though I have myself yet to come upon an argument [backed up with ample evidence] to demonstrate that all rational men and women are obligated to share this argument as well.
Right. You observed it. So the fact that you observed it makes determining whether you observed it of your own volition…irrelevant?
Note to others:
A little help please. Is he making an important point here that I keep missing? What is he actually saying about describing something? Something that I fail to grasp given my own assumption that in a wholly determined universe, we can only describe what nature compels us to describe given that the descriptions themselves are derived from a human brain that is derived from the evolution of mindless matter into conscious matter that is no less embedded in the laws of matter themselves.
Mind is mysterious matter, no doubt about it. It may well be derived from the God that he believes in. Or there may well in fact be some component of the human brain that somehow was able to bring about human autonomy.
I’m just looking for the argument and the evidence able to convince me of that.
Okay, let’s try another context. One that most here will be familiar with. Describe for me the difference between Trump being “free” to argue that The Squad in Congress ought to go back from where they came, and, instead, him being free to argue it.
How is it fully determined that in fact this easily observed/described decision on his part is not but the psychological illusion of “choice”?
How are all of us here not in the same boat that I suggested above:
In fact, one suspects that his only recourse here [as with mine and probably yours] is to Google those folks who are in fact exploring this experimentally, scientifically, phenomenologically etc., and extracting the arguments most in sync with his own particular subjective prejudice.
How is this not “for all practical purposes” still the bottom line here?
No, I’m more curious about the extent to which those answers are actually within the reach of philosophy and science.
How would an answer that qualifies be expressed?
Clearly, in the either/or world of mindless matter, there are any number of relationships that “for all practical purposes” seem to be as close as we have come so far to being true objectively. In other words, true for everyone. Leaving aside that gap between these supposedly scientific and mathematical and logical truths and an understanding of existence itself.
But what of the is/ought world?
And what of the world grappled with in posing the Big Questions? Like the one that encompoasses this thread?
What of answers here?
How is it finally established that both the questions and the answers are not but a necessary, inherent component of a determined world?
Assuming some measure of human autonomy, how do you go about demonstrating that it is doomed to failure? Instead, you merely assert it to be so embodying what I construe to be the objectivist frame of mind. You have come to accept certain assumptions/premises about the human condition, and, thus, your conclusion follows from that.
But what is actually proven?
Let’s first see what you had to say about the last context that you brought up - Mary’s abortion.
That’s the extent of your analysis. An unsubstantiated accusation that her consequences are the result of my assumptions. A claim that you lack the knowledge and experience to demonstrate anything. And a bunch of questions.
Now you want to change to another context where your contribution will be just as meager?
No thanks.
Look what you wrote here :
and here :
and here :
and here :
Sounds like you are saying that he has absolutely nothing to support his statements - that’s it’s entirely a “world of words” or “web of words”.
Every answer provided is called an “intellectual contraption” by you.
I call intellectual contraption!
Don’t take the bait, biggs. He’s trying to contrap you.
Surreptitious, Phyllo (since you also responded to this and that’s where I saw this…)
Notice how surreptitious mentions objectivity, which would lead to a conclusion accepted by science and philosophy. Already odd. No, I’m more curious…and ends up mentioning science and philosophy which would be concerned with objective answers.
But here’s the really odd part.
Here he says he is not interested in the answer. He is interesting in how that answer would be expressed. Suddenly actual concrete answers, for example about how to live, or whether there is free will, are not interesting. What is interesting is how they would be expressed. IOW suddenly abstraction is the goal. (and, of course, if you had the answer, you would see in it how it is expressed)
Something bothered him about you pointing out what he wants. So, he disagreed, though partially by agreeing. And then shifted to wanting abstract descriptions about how answers, without knowing one, would be expressed.
And he will not or cannot acknowledge any of this strangeness or the ever gliding away from really responding to people he does.
I think he is damaged and I also think that the discussion is not what it is presented as.
The goal is not the results of the discussion. The goal is your failure.
And he can always tell you that you failed to convince him.
Discussing things with him is allowing an avoidance to be maintained. He’s hurting and this is the best solution he has come up with. A discussion that is not supposed to arrive anywhere.
Over and over and over again, I note that in regard to Mary choosing an abortion or Trump choosing to attack The Squad or you and I choosing to do anything at all, I have taken a subjective/existential leap “here and now” to the argument/belief that nature compels all matter to unfold in accordance with its immutable laws.
In other words, all the way up to me typing these words and you reading them.
But: I have no capacity to demonstrate why and how others ought to think that way too.
My argument with the objectivists is that they assert certain things to be true. And that, if others refuse to toe their own dogmatic line – to become “one of us” dittoheads – they become the equivalent of morons.
Now, your turn. How do you differentiate Trump being “free” to attack The Squad, from Trump being free to attack those women of color in Congress?
And how do you then actually demonstrate to us that you are either “free” or free to make this claim?
All I was asking of Mr. Philosopher – or Mr. Objectivist – was to note their reaction to a particular context in which a particular woman chooses an abortion.
Either in the context of a discussion of morality or a discussion of autonomy in a world deemed to either be or not to be wholly in sync with nature’s laws of matter.
My own assumption then being that human beings are in turn a part of nature. And, concomittantly, that human minds are a profoundly problematic component of the laws of nature that some are exploring experiementally, scientifically, phenomenologically.
Note to others:
Please peruse the examples he cites above and explain to me how my reaction constitutes “some crazy ideas about ‘freedom’ which he has completely fabricated out of a web of words.”
All I ask of him is that he bring his arguments about free will down out of the scholastic clouds and to demonstrate how he does in fact have some measure of autonomy when confronting the desperate degenerates in exchanges like this.
How are his arguments in regard to actual human interactions not basically just a world of words?
Note the many examples where, on the Free Will thread, he does in fact bring his intellectual contraptions down to earth.
If that’s true, then …
Calling you a moron must also be in accordance with nature’s immutable laws.
So what’s the problem?
Why are you asking me? Ask nature’s immutable laws instead.
And while you are at it, explain to them why you sometimes write the word ‘free’ in quotes and sometimes in italics. Cause I have no idea what you mean by it.
Oh, the reaction to a context is the important part of the discussion. That being different from what? A description of what is happening in the context?
For example : I love this car. I think this car is ugly. I think this car is underpowered. Versus. This car is red. It seats 5. It accelerates to 60mph in 2.5 seconds.
Is that it? You want the subjective reaction to a context?
Science only deals with observable phenomena so cannot provide any satisfactory answer to such a question
Philosophy does not answer questions definitively but does however explore the nature of human existence
Ultimately though there is no single objectively true answer that will satisfy everyone
That is because any answer however grounded in logic it is will always be subjective
Stating an obvious truth is not an assertion - namely that you cannot apply an objective metric to the human condition
Because there are no objectively true answers to the question of our existence or of how we should live our lives
If you disagree then say what are the objectively true answers to them - ones that can actually be demonstrated
Precisely And if someone does not toe Iamb’s line then he or she is an objectivist or using existential contraptions. In a determinist universe neiter Iamb nor KT people can help this kind of labeling. In a universe with free will both are choosing to label the others with pejorative terms. Iamb’s term is certainly more polite.
I think it must be a politeness issue. He thinks they should more politely put him down. And then add, sometimes, that maybe it is wrong to give them that label.
It’s a culture clash. In Iamb’s culture one should use nice sounding put downs and then say maybe I am wrong after insulting someone. It KT’s culture it is OK to be blunt and not to qualify insults.
It’s a bit like a stereotypical American meeting a Japanse person and having an arguement. Both come away feeling superior about their own culture’s way of dealing with disagreement.
Yes, but in his version of determinism, they have no control over what they do, including how they react to his criticism. They can’t change to being more polite. The immutable laws of nature would have to change them.
That’s how he reacts to criticism … “I’m not able to change”. He only has a psychological illusion of choice to change or stay as he is. There is no agent there making a decision and acting on it. Right?
What sense does it make to expect something different from others?
But it doesn’t need to make sense … it’s all a game anyways.
I’m not sure what he means by the question.
Maybe it’s an admission that words are not the way to get at an answer. Although he is completely obsessed with words and arguments, to the exclusion of everything else.
Maybe he’s looking for something like this reaction:
Whatever that is. 
Or maybe it’s just something to say so that the game goes on.
Yes. In a deterministic universe, a person could still change if something is pointed out or they experience something. Yes, they might not. But they might. When encountering something someone says, he will respond that he may be, for all we know, compelled. But without acknowledging that he is compelled, it seems, in such a way that nothing can effect him. This despite the dasein thing, which he bemoans because it means he might have his mind changed at any time.
I have seen this pattern a few times:
Phyllo or someone: Well, Iamb, you might be wrong because of X.
Iamb: perhaps I have been compelled to have the position I have.
Phyllo: OK, but now I have pointed out X.
Iamb: for all we know I have been compelled to only believe Y.
IOW the step where Iamb interacts with your presenting of X is skipped over as if determinism means, precisely as you say, ‘I am not able to change.’
When in fact these are two different things, as his repeated stories about how dasein affected him indicate. But in practice he is not malleable if determinism is the case (in his mind).
But that is not a consequence of determinism.
Now, of course, X might only change some minds. He might retain his belief in Y despite having chewed on X.
But he presents it as if minds cannot be affected as a rule.
And this is confused.
But I notice how this is a part of his metaphorically throwing up his arms and saying ‘How can we…’ know, change, understand, decide, find (for example what could be called more authentic in the self).
It is ever increasing the throwing up the hands gesture in his posts.
Which would be great if he said ‘I give up.’
But that would eliminate the process.
In fact, his “I” appears much less fractured and unstable than he makes it out to be. And compared to many people, it’s practically ossified.
And around and around he goes…
Thus it is just assumed that [somehow or another] the laws of matter embedded in the human brain work differently from the laws of matter in the stone.
Back to peacegirl’s point…
The stone doesn’t choose to roll down the hill but I do choose to roll down the hill myself in order to retrieve it.
I’m not just “choosing” to do so as the embodiment of the psychological illusion of volition, but am in fact able to weigh various options and really, really choose to of my own free will.
But how do I then demonstrate that the matter in my brain [in sync with the laws of nature] is not compelling me to choose only that which I was ever able to choose? Such that, in the end, both the stone and “I” were never going to not roll down the hill.
Well, I just assume that part. I just know it to be true. Just as I assume there is no God or other worldly entities “behind” my choice.
I don’t have to ever fully demonstrate any of this. I merely have to believe what I do. I merely have to mock all those who refuse to believe precisely what I do as morons.
Then back up into the clouds of abstraction…
How else but “by definition” is any of this demonstrated to be true? A world of words that merely expresses his very own “absolute order”. And it’s all “in his head”.
Compelled or not. A proper place for every word and every word in its proper place.
The concept of free will? Indeed, where would he be here without that part?
separate morality from free will
by Phil Goetz
at the lesswrong website
I actually do make an effort to make sense of arguments like this. And it either does not make sense or I am simply unable [up to now] to make sense of it myself.
From my own perspective [compelled or not], without free will any objections raised by any of us about anything at all – as with anything that might interest any of us at all – are necessarily embedded in the only possible reality.
Seriously, if morality does not require free will, would that not make morality as embodied in human interactions just another set of nature’s dominoes toppling over only as they must.
Those hypothetical autonomous aliens really do choose of their own free will to make note of human existential interactions in which morality comes up…but it is only to note how we are not aware that these interactions are not really of our own choosing as autonomous beings. And that’s because they know that we are not autonomous being.
Thus any terms that we “choose” to use in discussions like this are no less wholly in sync with the laws of matter.
And yet if Kant was unable to freely choose his view then any problems that are derived by anyone of us in regard to the value judgments that we are in turn not free to choose gets subsumed in whatever is finally discovered to be true about the human brain/mind/consciousness by those scientists who are actually grappling with that experientially/experimentally even as I, compelled or not, post this.