Free Will

[henry quirk]

It's not at all the case that most *complex ideas cannot be explained in the simplest available terms.

*And all of what is touted as complex, isn't. We get hoodwinked not only thru big words but also thru big ideas.

There's nuthin' out there that can't be clearly understood. Foist up the most complicated notions, from any sphere, and, I promise you, those notions can be understood by even the most sub-normal among us, if the notion is broken down and conveyed simply.

[Immanuel Can]

It's not at all the case that most *complex ideas cannot be explained in the simplest available terms.

*And all of what is touted as complex, isn't. We get hoodwinked not only thru big words but also thru big ideas.

There's nuthin' out there that can't be clearly understood. Foist up the most complicated notions, from any sphere, and, I promise you, those notions can be understood by even the most sub-normal among us, if the notion is broken down and conveyed simply.

Well, yeah. Like all the meally-mouthed codswallop of the Critical Theory set, the SJW's boils down to very simple axioms, like:

1. Everything is about power.
2. Everyone is defined by race...or sex...or some other such superficial distinction.
3. All existing orders are oppressive.
4. All authorities are always evil.
5. If we blow everything up, history will make progress, even if we have no good ideas of our own.
6. Human beings deserve to be equal, regardless of what they do, have done or are willing to do. We will make them equal by first making them all unequal.
7. All marginal people are "communities," and all are good -- so long as somebody can be accused of "oppressing" them (by our definition of "oppression,") in any conceivable way.
8. Socialism is good. The only reason it has always been evil in every single real-world case in which it has ever been practiced is that the people who were in control of it did not do it right. We (Western, middle-class types) now know how to do it, even if we can't explain it to you.

And so on.

But no SJW is ever going to frame them with such simplicity and clarity. Because the minute you do, they are exposed as as stupid and barbaric as those ideas actually are.

Instead, they're going to say something like, "The cosmopolitian allies of marginal communities, in their legitimate striving against oppression and the overcoming of historical injustice, must collectivize and engage the global governmental welfare mechanisms against Capitalist imperialism, and disrupt the dominant narratives and institutions, if a new Socialist order is to arise by which we ultimately overcome intransigent systemic inequities."

And the "useful idiots" in academia will nod sagely, not really grasping at all what is being proposed -- because nothing concrete is -- and stroke their beards, and declare that what has been said is prophetic and sage.

That's how you earn plaudits in the academy today.

[henry quirk]

It's not at all the case that most *complex ideas cannot be explained in the simplest available terms.

*And all of what is touted as complex, isn't. We get hoodwinked not only thru big words but also thru big ideas.

There's nuthin' out there that can't be clearly understood. Foist up the most complicated notions, from any sphere, and, I promise you, those notions can be understood by even the most sub-normal among us, if the notion is broken down and conveyed simply.

Well, yeah. Like all the meally-mouthed codswallop of the Critical Theory set, the SJW's boils down to very simple axioms...

...

And so on.

But no SJW is ever going to frame them with such simplicity and clarity. Because the minute you do, they are exposed as as stupid and barbaric as those ideas actually are.

True, very true. Unfortunately, I'm thinkin' some of these meally-mouthers might say sumthin' like this..

There are times when one has to reach for a more sophisticated, lengthy, esoteric kind of term. There is a measure of jargon that is involved in all specialized areas of study. And that's legit: one needs some recourse to technical terms when the discussion becomes exceedingly technical and deep.

...in self-defense (not pickin' in you, guy...just sayin' we, on our side, gotta be careful how we self-defend...the devil can and does twist everything to suit himself).

My point: when we reach for the more sophisticated, lengthy, esoteric kind of term mebbe we need to think twice about it.

Context is important: if the PN forum were a by-invite-only academic settin', then, yeah, I would expect dense esoterica; but this forum is open to all -- stuffy, fulla poop, academics; crazy people; the artsy-fartsy; fools; *suckers; and not particularly well-educated but chockablocked with common sense & recalcitrance folks like myself. Sure, there are many dry as a two-week old turd dead threads here, vomited of out an academician's musty brain (like an ugly, smelly, birkenstock-wearin' Athena emergin' from the forehead of Professor Z. Eus) but it's the rockin' & rollin' threads, fulla vulgarities and a frothy mix of good, bad, and ugly thinkin', that capture attention, and these nasty, low-brow, threads are philosophy (the act of), moreso than them dead turd-threads.

We can write lively and on-the-mark without jargon, no matter how legit or neccessary it might seem.




*there's quite a few of those, in-forum

[Belinda]

In my experience reputable expressive literature is honest , elegant, and often beautiful.

Really? Well, I wasn't taking about them, but you are a very trusting soul if you think being "expressive" means that nobody's going to "express" evil things...particularly since you mention Hitler (presumably Mein Kampf) as an examplar of the kind of literature you recognize as powerful.

This argument began with my request to use philosophers' jargon.

Orwell advises us to use technical terms where necessary, and otherwise, avoid unnecessary obscurantism. I agree. No jargon when you don't absolutely need it. None for mere effect, none to impress the naive, none to hide one's real meaning. Say it simply.

I very much support plain English. Unfortunately philosophy is (like law, and medicine) historically an upper class pursuit and that is why many of philosophers' useful shorthand terms are Latinate or Greek instead of Anglo Saxon.

No, that's not the reason. It's not at all the case that most complex ideas cannot be explained in the simplest available terms. The reason many academics resort to jargon when they could use plain language is that they want to impress the naive and the jargon-loving peers they have, to seem erudite when they're really just being conventional, or not to be held to the specifics of what they're talking about.

In other words, an actually intelligent person could surf to Phoenix on the waves of horse-manure surging out of academia today.

Actually I was thinking of old films of Hitler's speechifying together with the Nazi decor which looked to me as if a lot of Germans were edified by it. I have not read Mein Kampf.

I am at present struggling to understand the philosophy of Heidegger by way a commentary by another philosopher who is easier to understand. It is true that Being and Time is very difficult to understand. However I am not eccentric enough to accuse Heidegger of pulling a fast one by means of long German words. If any philosopher could adequately explain Heidegger in primary school language he'd produce a best seller. Philosophy is difficult and cannot be understood by means of simplistic interpretations.

Any rubbish "surging out of Academia today" would fail to find a publisher. It is not easy to get academic books published especially if you are unknown or a bad writer.

[henry quirk]

Philosophy is difficult and cannot be understood by means of simplistic interpretations.

No, philosophy is difficult but can be understood, and done, by anyone thru simple explanations and plain language

[Immanuel Can]

Any rubbish "surging out of Academia today" would fail to find a publisher. It is not easy to get academic books published especially if you are unknown or a bad writer.

I wish that were true. Manifestly, it is not true. There has been a series of hoaxes perpetrated by skeptics who capitalized on the jargon used in SJW lingo to get papers published with deliberately ridiculous theses, just to expose the dishonesty and stupidity regnant in many of these journals. The lastest episode was performed by Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian.

They've shown us what's really going on: the truth is that, especially in some Humanities disciiplines, dishonest pseudo-scholars have been publishing nonsense for years and passing it off as real scholarship. And the editors and boards of the journals have been to stupid and propagandized to catch them at it.

Again, just go and read some of the stuff, and you'll see.

[Immanuel Can]

Unfortunately, I'm thinkin' some of these meally-mouthers might say sumthin' like this..

There are times when one has to reach for a more sophisticated, lengthy, esoteric kind of term. There is a measure of jargon that is involved in all specialized areas of study. And that's legit: one needs some recourse to technical terms when the discussion becomes exceedingly technical and deep.

...in self-defense (not pickin' in you, guy...just sayin' we, on our side, gotta be careful how we self-defend...the devil can and does twist everything to suit himself).

My point: when we reach for the more sophisticated, lengthy, esoteric kind of term mebbe we need to think twice about it.

Yeah, I'm agreeing with that.

But that being conceded, we also have to recognize that sometimes difficult concepts do require special terms. and that's legitimate so long as there's no alternative but to fall silent on that concept. PN is not the only place concepts are discussed, and not the only legit forum that exists. There's nothing inherently wrong with stipulating a special term to refer to something ordinary people are not yet familiar with. In fact, it's necessary, if knowledge is to progress. New terms are necessary for new ideas.

The problem starts, though, when the concept already exists, and a simpler, more common term is available, and people opt for the jargon term instead. Then, it's just that wave of horse-manure ramping up.

[Belinda]

Any rubbish "surging out of Academia today" would fail to find a publisher. It is not easy to get academic books published especially if you are unknown or a bad writer.

I wish that were true. Manifestly, it is not true. There has been a series of hoaxes perpetrated by skeptics who capitalized on the jargon used in SJW lingo to get papers published with deliberately ridiculous theses, just to expose the dishonesty and stupidity regnant in many of these journals. The lastest episode was performed by Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian.

They've shown us what's really going on: the truth is that, especially in some Humanities disciiplines, dishonest pseudo-scholars have been publishing nonsense for years and passing it off as real scholarship. And the editors and boards of the journals have been to stupid and propagandized to catch them at it.

Again, just go and read some of the stuff, and you'll see.

That is a genuine case of few bad apples, and not a case of institutional malfunction. Nobody claims academics are perfect people free from human failings. University teachers well know that university politics exist. Academia is not Heaven on Earth it's just another human institution. Some institutions are for power and other institutions are for objective truth, beauty and goodness. By their fruits you shall know them. You Immanuel, do not distinguish between a useless tree and a tree that gets wasps eating some of its windfalls.

[henry quirk]

The problem starts, though, when the concept already exists, and a simpler, more common term is available, and people opt for the jargon term instead. Then, it's just that wave of horse-manure ramping up.

Yes, exactly.

[Immanuel Can]

Again, just go and read some of the stuff, and you'll see.

That is a genuine case of few bad apples, and not a case of institutional malfunction.

No, it' isn't, actually. Go and read the journals, and you'll find that more than half of them at least are full of unnecessary jargon. And it's the worst in things like Women's Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Educational Studies and Critical Theory. Those hardly have a single article that isn't infected.

Just check. Go and read. Why argue when the facts are available for us both to see?

[henry quirk]

Again, just go and read some of the stuff, and you'll see.

That is a genuine case of few bad apples, and not a case of institutional malfunction.

No, it' isn't, actually. Go and read the journals, and you'll find that more than half of them at least are full of unnecessary jargon. And it's the worst in things like Women's Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Educational Studies and Critical Theory. Those hardly have a single article that isn't infected.

Just check. Go and read. Why argue when the facts are available for us both to see?

And the problem isn't confined to the soft sciences...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

[Terrapin Station]

It's not always clear what the "simplest" term for something is at any rate, especially given that unique words for the same (or similar) referents often have at least slightly different connotations. If we're dealing with something where fine-grained nuances are important--and that's certainly the case with philosophy, then a word that seems obscure or jargony might be better at suggesting those nuances. Some of those terms might make things more difficult for first-year undergraduates, and certainly for laypersons, but it's not reasonable to strap an academic discipline to a requirement that an average 12 year-old could understand it, as is often the advice for general writing that will appear in venues such as newspapers, popular websites, etc.

Some academic works are only going to be comprehensible to graduate students or people will equivalent backgrounds in the field.

[RCSaunders]

It's not always clear what the "simplest" term for something is at any rate, especially given that unique words for the same (or similar) referents often have at least slightly different connotations. If we're dealing with something where fine-grained nuances are important--and that's certainly the case with philosophy, then a word that seems obscure or jargony might be better at suggesting those nuances. Some of those terms might make things more difficult for first-year undergraduates, and certainly for laypersons, but it's not reasonable to strap an academic discipline to a requirement that an average 12 year-old could understand it, as is often the advice for general writing that will appear in venues such as newspapers, popular websites, etc.

Some academic works are only going to be comprehensible to graduate students or people will equivalent backgrounds in the field.

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. --Albert Einstein

This hubris of academic arrogance is breathtaking. The idea that higher knowledge is some kind of esoteric enigma only available to those initiated in the academic mysteries of, "graduate school," is typical of those whose minds have been completely lost to their obscene ideology.

Except for those who use academia as a resource for their own autodidactic learning, primarily in the STEM fields, academia destroys minds and corrupts all knowledge.

The entire corpus of recorded philosophy is the record of humanity's worst intellectual failures. All that goes by the name philosophy is a kind of formalized method of induced insanity.

It is not possible to use the language of the totally failed field of philosophy to explain the true nature of reality and knowledge.

Academia is the intellectual swamp in which all bad ideas are spawned and propagated.

After government, no institution is more dangerous or evil than academia.

After religion, no intellectual field is more corrupt than philosophy.

All ideologies are lies. The only difference between religious lies and philosophical lies are irrelevant details.

[RogerSH]

So no, identity isn't any kind of case or subset of causality at all. It's not a "special case of causation." It's a case of identity.

To avoid arguing about terminology, can we agree that continuity, if not a cause in itself, is a necessary part of causal explanation – as in explaining that you have a broken fishing rod in your cupboard because (a) you broke a fishing rod last year, and (b) the fishing rod in your cupboard is the same fishing rod. And surely you agree that the mind is a meaningless concept unless some degree of continuity is assumed?

Please bear in mind that my references to causality/determinism do not assume discrete chains of causes – that is just how we simplify matters to understand them. What determinism means in practice is that the whole of the state of affairs at some time is determined by the whole of the state of affairs at an earlier time. After all, the fact that I am typing this can only serve as a cause for your reading it later because it so happens that an undetected asteroid isn’t (I assume) about to destroy some vital part of the internet in the meantime – so this fact about the neighbouring part of space is also a contributory cause!

But what I'm pointing out is that it's misleading to say they "must have arisen out of something that was already in your mind." Because stuff that's "in a mind" is not "in material reality" the way that, say, neurochemicals are.

I do mean in a mental sense. Stuff like ideas, impressions, hunches, feelings. So how can that be misleading? I just don’t see that focussing on the mental gives any excuse for avoiding thinking about the possible logical relationships involved. Either some element of consciousness has a (present or earlier) cause or combination of any number of contributory causes, in which case each such cause is either something that was in the mind before or something external, or it arrives in consciousness for no reason at all. Each case has implications.

In creativity, for example, the creative mind imagines [1] something new, or [2] a new combination of things already known, but one that has not yet existed anywhere.

These are two significantly different cases [numbering added]. I am assuming for the sake of argument that case [1] doesn’t occur: that every apparently new idea is in fact an unconscious combination of ideas already known to the mind concerned, and asking what the implications would be. (First implication: there would still be room for creativity, as shown by case [2].

So to get back to the reason we are discussing this, I am saying, let us assume that dualism is correct, how can that rule out the possibility that the mind, together with its inputs from and actions upon the material world, acts in a deterministic way? Take Picasso as the example….

And this is why something like Guernica is so remarkable, in this connection. It is a conception of Picasso's, and we do not have any reason to suppose Braque or Cezanne, let alone any lesser or more distant artists, cold have produced it, even if we gave them a billion years. It would just never have come into their minds to do it.

Isn’t that exactly what I am saying? The whole of the nature & state of Picasso’s mind before the Spanish civil war plus the whole of his experience in the interim, such as his awareness of the events at Guernica, was a necessary condition for the whole of the nature & state of his mind when he began his painting of it, and hence for his ability to come up with it, I think we agree. (That seems to be your point.) How can you rule out the possibility that it was also a sufficient condition? That exactly his mind in the light of those events would inevitably produce exactly that painting? I’m not saying that was the case, just that the world wouldn’t obviously look any different if it was, and we don’t know enough about how the mind works to rule this possibility out.

In fact, it seems to me that you are conceding exactly that when you say “There is a way of understanding the situation, and one I believe is right, that soap bubbles and everything else are indeed products of the Divine "imagination," or better, "creativity." ” If everything is part of the original Divine plan, isn’t that a different kind of predetermination?

How can free will then be possible? I can understand three possible answers: (a) It isn’t, divine pre-ordination and free will are alternatives; (b) God deliberately left gaps in his plan for self-determining human free will to fill in; (c) human free will is actually the experience of consciously participating in God’s will. Option (b) hits the usual problem of chasing its own tail: the state of one’s will cannot be both what is chosen and what is doing the choosing. What is unchosen cannot be willed. If it is chosen by some meta-will, that in turn is unchosen, and so on. Option (c) can be restated: free will is the fact that there are frequently outcomes that are determined by a mind’s current state of will [which in turn is ex hypothesi occasioned by Divine pre-ordination] which is thereby free to be implemented. To believe (c) is to accept compatibilism between free will and pre-determination of the entire world, mental and physical together.

It seems to me that the rest of your post is more to do with dualism, and specifically theistic dualism, than with free will. There are important matters here that I hope we can get back to, because it seems to me that you are entirely misunderstanding what modern monists assume, but for the moment I want to stick to my claim that dualists should accept that free will is compatible with pre-determination of the entire dualistic world (e.g. divine pre-ordination), although not with pre-determination of the material world alone.

I’m sorry but I simply do not buy that theory of responsibility!

Then neither do you "buy" the theory of reward or praise. If you are not "responsible" for something good happening, then neither is it any credit to you when it does.

Yes, of course! I said I don’t buy THAT theory of responsibility, not ANY theory! I have recently outlined a theory of responsibility that makes far more sense to me over in the “ethics theory” section of this forum: "How Moral Responsibility arises from Consciousness".viewtopic.php?f=8&t=33508

[Belinda]

Again, just go and read some of the stuff, and you'll see.

That is a genuine case of few bad apples, and not a case of institutional malfunction.

No, it' isn't, actually. Go and read the journals, and you'll find that more than half of them at least are full of unnecessary jargon. And it's the worst in things like Women's Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Educational Studies and Critical Theory. Those hardly have a single article that isn't infected.

Just check. Go and read. Why argue when the facts are available for us both to see?

"Go read the journals " is a worthy challenge. I will not be reading any material that is badly written . I have my work cut out to read stuff that is well written.