compatibilism

[Immanuel Can]

second, I don't have to demonstrate or verify diddly: every person readin' these words, and the billions who never will, demonstrate agency, causal power, free will all the damned time

we can argue about why and how man is a free will, but there's no argument to be had that man is anything other than, or less than, a free will

Sounds like something that, say, an omniscient God might post. You're not Him, are you?

Now, now, iambiguous...that's a cheap shot, and I'm going to call you on it, because I think you're better than that.

This is the point both Henry and I have been trying to make to you: you, all by yourself, can observe that every human being acts as if he/she has free will. You're doing it, right now, in fact.

And THAT is why it is not in dispute. It has nothing to do with belief in a Supreme Being of any kind. It's a totally empirical observation, one you cannot deny.

So my counsel is that you either step up and answer it as such, or admit you can't. Those are both honest plays: but accusing your interlocutor of a secret agenda is just ad homimem and irrelevant.

I'd prefer to see you step up with an answer. Running away from the empirical facts, simply throwing shadow on your questioner, is not legit.

Time to ante up.

[henry quirk]

Biggy,

What actual hard evidence do you have that explains human autonomy?

A rather large evidence of free will is you, writin' posts in a forum, wherein you choose your topic, you choose your approach to the topic, you choose your tone, you choose the words to communicate meaning.

Either you choose (are a free will, have causal power) or you're a Rhomba.

As I say: we can argue about why and how man is a free will, but there's no argument to be had that man is anything other than, or less than, a free will.

-----

Mannie,

Now, now, iambiguous...that's *a cheap shot

*meh...just a sparrowfart, like most of the post...not worth the mention.

[Belinda]

"Free Will' is a religious doctrine which is made for the purpose of being able to blame individuals for their sins. Social control in other words."

Good shit, but we wouldn't say that it was 'made' by the religious, rather it became weaponized by the religious.

The illusory feeling of freewill developed much earlier than the concepts of gods and spirits and shit. You might say it's a phenomenological quality of experience that comes with the evolution of (our) complex brains.

Only much later as divisions of labor were established in societies, and hence the religious parasite class (shamans, oracles, mystics, monks, priests, preachers, etc), was it discovered by that class that they could control and manipulate other members of society by integrating a fear of god or spirits into the feeling of responsibility and guilt that came with the illusion of freewill. This was their most essential form of power and how they maintained their station in society; by combining these two fundamental deceptions. Well that and making predictions (about battles, harvests, seasonal changes, etc; you could pretend you had special omniscient powers and if you guessed right about something, everybody was like 'holy shit look at this this dude right here. I think I'd like to give him some of my money'), giving blessings, faith healing, and advising leaders.

I accept your revision, thanks. I also appreciate your courteous manner when you disagree.

[iambiguous]

...if you start with the assumption that scientific evidence itself [or the lack thereof] is but an inherent/necessary manifestation of the only possibly reality in the only possible world, the "whole view" is too. As is truth. If everything that scientists [and you and I] think, feel, say and do are just so many dominoes set up by whatever brought into existence the laws of matter themselves, then, if it's composed of matter, nothing is excluded. Not even the human brain. We just don't fully understand how lifeless matter could have possibly evolved into living matter evolving into us.

Right.

So "science" means nothing more than "whatever the physical-material causes produced." Reason, judgment, consciousness, logic, recognition of evidence, and, as you say, truth itself, are all just "an accident of physical-material causes." But the problem, then, is we have no justification in believing ANY of them.

Or, the problem is that those who champion free will have no capacity to demonstrate definitively that anything we believe, we believe only because matter in the human brain is such that human beings [unlike any other matter we are aware of] are able to opt to believe something different.

It always comes back to one's initial assumptions about the laws of matter themselves. What is "covered" and what is not? In other words, what if all of our assumptions are?

And, sure enough, those such as neuroscientists -- brain scientists -- are hard at work trying to figure that out. But nothing anywhere near defintive seems to have emerged from the news sources I am familiar with.

Why should we believe the accidental byproducts of an indifferent universe? On what basis should we even believe they're related to truth?

Why should we trust anything our own brains seem to "cough up," in this unguided, uncaring process of physical-material causes bashing into each other?

Well, as Henry insists, we just do trust certain things about the choices we make. We just know that they are of our own volition.

And, here, don't you come back [compelled or not] to God?

You have to, I think.

Well, you would certainly have to if you want your free choices to revolve around a "soul" able to differentiate behaviors as either sinful or not sinful. And if you convince yourself that sinful behavior is Judged by God such that immortality and salvation are on the line.

That is, unless one is willing to settle into Determinism and truly disbelieve all the offerings of one's own mind. The intelligibility of the universe and even of one's self must be nothing but an illusion, if all we have here is the collision of physical-material accidents.

Or unless "settling" itself is something we do or do not do wholly in accordance with what our brain is never able not to command of us.

So let me put the question bluntly: If free will is an illusion, and Determinism is true, then how is it possible that 100% of all people who have ever lived have lived on the basis of their belief that free will is true, and 100% of the Determinists have been unable to live, even for a short time, as if their Determinism were true?

I'm asking for your empirical-sociological explanation of that observable fact.
And your answer was as follows:

From my frame of mind, you want an answer to your questions...all the while presuming that your questions and your answers really are the default here in these exchanges.

To which I have to say, no, not at all. I chose my wording very carefully.

And around and around we go. Your assumption that your own understanding of what you choose here is not wholly determined by your brain wholly in sync with the laws of matter. And my assumption that perhaps it is wholly determined by your brain wholly in sync with the laws of matter. And then the extent to which, as with Henry, one simply scoffs at those who refuse to think the same as he does. As though he is any closer than we are in establishing this...scientifically? experientially? experimentally? ontologically?

And, if he believes in a God, the God, his God...teleologically?

I require no presumption on your part: just an observation we all can recognize, and which you cannot possibly avoid making too, if you're looking at the situation at all. I'm asking you how -- not from my perspective or anyone else's, but from a purely observational standpoint -- you can account for this fact. That's all.

It's not a question of what we presume or observe here but what is presumed of us by our brains themselves. Ever and always taking us back to the profound mystery of human consciousness itself. There is no default conclusion here yet. Or, given free will, that is all we would be talking about.

Not only that but presuming that your questions and your answers are opted for freely by you because you don't live as though determinism were true. As though that "proves" that determinism itself is false.

No, I'm not making any positive claim for my own case here. I'm just asking how you, working as a Determinist, explain that observable fact to yourself.

I don't work as a determinist so much as take a profoundly problematic "existential leap" to determinism "here and now"...given all the factors in my life that predisposed me to I think as I do. Thus, given free will, the next post I read here, or the next article I read in Philosophy Now, or the next conversation I have, or the next experience I encounter, might persuade me to think other than as I do "here and now".

But: the same for you too.

Okay, but how about the teleological component here? Do you link that as well to what you believe about...God?

Well, you're assuming there IS a "teleological component" in reality, and while I agree there is, I have to (in fairness to the other view) suggest that it's possible to think there's not.

Actually, what I am assuming is that, in a manner I have no capacity to truly understand, our exchange here involves at least some measure of free will. And, if not, it's all compelled to unfold given the only possible reality.

Certainly, if Determinism is true, then we cannot expect that a physical-material causality would have some "objective" in mind in "creating" a universe and setting it on some "trajectory" toward a "goal." All that gets really implausible if Determinism were true.

But I do agree that if we want to believe there IS some teleological direction to the universe -- even if all we believe it actually is, is something like "higher evolution," or "spiritual unity," or some other such vague pseudo-goal -- we are driven back to thinking about a deliberate Creation.

For teleology is a purposive attribution. And how can a completely impersonal, non-conscious, non-intending universe have any "purpose' in existing?

Well, for those who do root their autonomy in one or another religious/spiritual font, I am either free or not free to take that discussion back to this:

1] a demonstrable proof of the existence your God, your Kingdom of Ends, your spiritual path
2] addressing the fact that down through the ages hundreds of Gods, Kingdoms of Ends and spiritual paths to immortality and salvation were/are championed...but only one of which [if any] can be the true path. So why yours?
3] addressing the profoundly problematic role that dasein plays in any particular individual's belief in Gods, Kingdoms of Ends and spiritual paths
4] the questions that revolve around theodicy and your own particular God, Kingdom of Ends or spiritual path

That and the discussions I've had with many in reconciling human freedom with an omniscient God. Arguments which may be entirely reasonable but beyind my own capaicity to grasp "here and now".

All the things "we don't know we don't know" yet. Or is that just a trivial matter to you?

No, it doesn't. But it does seem irrelevant to the question.

How can not knowing what we don't even know that we do not know about anything out on the end of metaphysical limb be irrelevant? I can't even imagine myself coming to think something like that.

For there are surely billions of things we do NOT know. And about them, we can say nothing. But there are also things we do think we KNOW. And it's only about those I'm inquiring.

Okay, that's one way to think about it. And if it works for you, fine. But it certainly doesn't work for me in regard to questions this big. And this profoundly mind-boggling quandary going back now for both philosophers and scientists thousands of years.

What's in the cup compared to what's in the ocean is like pondering what's in the 5% of "normal matter" compared to the what's in the 95% of "not normal" matter.

Or, rather, so it seems to me.

And the water in my cup adding up to moral nihilism revolves more around the nature of dasein...given human autonomy.

For me, it's not a question of evading this or that but of recognizing that the gap between "I" and "all there is" brings into focus just how utterly insignificant my cup is. Sure, it's all I've got, so make the best of it. But what might my "best" be in regards to questions such as this?

Instead, the overwhelming preponderance of us focus on behaviors that, in our interactions with others, the "best" is actually able to be more or less agreed upon. At the Olympics for example. Not many moral objectivists or moral nihilists there. At least not in regard to the athletic competitions themselves.

To me it's somewhat analogous to reading the first few verses of Genesis and then attempting to explain Christianity.

That would actually be a pretty good way to start. For the whole Christian narrative is actually buried in the first three chapters of Genesis. But one doesn't see it until one looks back.

But, with regard to the God of Moses and Abraham, there is also the narrative of the Jews and the Moslems. Their reading of the first few verses. The "case" they might make regarding their own "one true path" to immortality and salvation.

So, yes, given the manner in some understand so-called "hard determinism", everything is just cause and effect re the laws of matter. Everything is just so many dominoes toppling over onto each other. Everything is destined/fated to unfold in the only possible reality. Including us.

Yes, that's the point.

I'm confused as to how you can state it like this, but not see the inevitable corollary of that depiction of things: it is that your own cognition is nothing but that. So you are not "thinking," but rather "being-made-to-think-you're-thinking" by material forces. And your cognitions are oriented to causal, not truth.

That's because, given the fated/destined conclusions of many hard determinists, we are never confused or not confused about anything at all other than in a fated/destined manner. Just another assumption. Like the assumptions of the free will advocates or the compatibilists. All "at one" in the only possible universe.

2] addressing the fact that down through the ages hundreds of Gods and spiritual paths to immortality and salvation were/are championed...but only one of which [if any] can be the true path. So why yours?

I don't see how this is remotely relevant to the problem of Determinism. Why would we think a Deterministic universe would have to apportion all beliefs equal footing? It seems obvious to me it apportions them no footing at all.

Nothing at all is not profoundly intertwined in determinism if you are compelled by the laws of nature to understand determinism in the only possible manner in which you were ever able to. How could all beliefs not be interchangeable if they are the only beliefs possible? Same with the consequences of those beliefs given behaviors we were never able not to choose.

'Well, if you believe in Determinism, you'd have to think that all such beliefs were not just "equal," but "equally bunk."

Okay, but how would they not be essentially interchangeable in the only possible world? It's not whether nihilism is bunk or not but that bunk itself is just an inherent/necessary manifestation of reactions we have that are wholly compelled by brains wholly in sync with the totality of Reality itself. The "human condition" being but an unimaginably tiny and insignificant component of "all there is".

Sans a God, the God, my God, anyway.

That's still the mystery [for me] regarding compatibilists. How, in particular, they are able reconcile determinism with moral responsibility. It simply makes no sense to me. Compelled or not.

Well, I couldn't agree with you more.

Compatibilism seems to me to be a form of intellectual cowardice -- a refusal to let go of the consolations of Determinism while being totally evasive about the implications in it one doesn't like. But I see that no rational account can be made of Compatibilism.

On the other hand, if compatibilists, like all the rest of us, are born not made to be only what they could never not be, their accounts are no less as rational as the accounts of those who reject them. And some are born to take comfort in determinism here while others are born to take comfort in free will.

Then back to why "on Earth" this came to unfold as it did. Back to the part where we ponder if there is anything at all "behind the curtain" with nature? Which is certainly the case with God.

Philosophy [from my frame of mind] isn't about what the conclusions I arrive at "gets me". It's about what seems reasonable to me.

Then you cannot be a Determinist. For Determinism holds that "reason" itself is nothing but a material cause-effect relation, and is not privileged about "unreason," which is also a material-causal byproduct of equal origin and equally null value.

Or I can only because...

And around and around we mere mortal go on our "puzzling" sojourn from dust to dust.

And then all the way back to "star stuff"?

Where does religion fit in here for you? Assuming free will is in fact the real deal.

That's a big question, but you've supplied part of the answer yourself.

If we believe in things like teleology, or even in things like consciousness, reason, volition, personhood, etc. we have no other possibility than to believe free choice exists. And if free choice exists, then we are drawn to the question, "How"? How, in a truly godless universe, does a thing like volition or reason or science or intelligibility or consciousness ever get involved?

So we are at that question.

Again, these are just a cluster of assumptions that you [like all the rest of us] make "intellectually". Or "philosophically". Assumptions that exist "in your head". Assumptions that [like all the rest of us] you are unable to take out of your head and through, say, the "scientific method" establish The Whole Truth empirically, "for all intents and purposes" when those like Mary are confronted with actual flesh and blood choices...to abort or not to abort.

Morally responsible or not?

[Immanuel Can]

Or, the problem is that those who champion free will have no capacity to demonstrate definitively that anything we believe, we believe only because matter in the human brain is such that human beings [unlike any other matter we are aware of] are able to opt to believe something different.

No, that won't do at all.

The first clause, "those who champion free will have no capacity to demonstrate definitively that anything we believe," asks for "definitive demonstration." But no such thing is possible even in the most rigorous science: so it's demanding that free will meet a standard it can ask of no other kind of knowledge. All human knowing is probabiltistic, not "definitive demonstration." And the probability of free will being true, given the faults of Determinism, is much, much higher than the probability of Determinism being true.

As I say, nobody has ever been able to live as a Determinist. That counts very heavily against Determinism being true at all...at least by a fair, probabilistic calculation.

The second clause in your objection won't work either. It reads, "...we believe only because matter in the human brain is such that human beings [unlike any other matter we are aware of] are able to opt to believe something different."

This requires us to believe that there is a new kind of "matter" in the universe, which you call "human brain matter," which is discontinuous with ordinary matter, in that it can produce volition (you word is "opt to believe,") which then presumes free will. So you've created a funky new meaning for "matter," one that any Materialists will ask you to justify, and then sold out Determinism to free will anyway, if you adopt that line of thinking.

So some better response is surely required there.

It always comes back to one's initial assumptions about the laws of matter themselves. What is "covered" and what is not? In other words, what if all of our assumptions are?

It does. But assumptions are not all equal.

Some assumptions favour the facts and data...others lack the expected data or reasons, or are inherently vacuous because unfalsifiable on any test...like Determinism is.

And, sure enough, those such as neuroscientists -- brain scientists -- are hard at work trying to figure that out. But nothing anywhere near defintive seems to have emerged from the news sources I am familiar with.

You are correct. But the problem is that you can't equate things like "soul," "identity," "reason" or "consciousness" with brain matter. There is, contra Gilbert Ryle, some kind of "ghost in the machine." Studying the "machine" doesn't seem to tell us anything about the "ghost" in it.

But what would one expect, since "ghosts" are not "machines"?

But consciousness and these other entities are decidedly unlike ghosts in this way: that while few of us ever claim to have experienced a "ghost," all of us experience these things every single day and all the time. Your typing of a response is, as it seems to you, an act of your "consciousness" employing your material fingers to type to its intended purposes, at the behest of your will.

Why should we believe the accidental byproducts of an indifferent universe? On what basis should we even believe they're related to truth?

Why should we trust anything our own brains seem to "cough up," in this unguided, uncaring process of physical-material causes bashing into each other?

Well, as Henry insists, we just do trust certain things about the choices we make. We just know that they are of our own volition[./quote]
"Just know?" "Just know?"

I agree we do indeed know it -- experientially, if no other way. But surely no Determinist is going to let you dismiss Determinism with a "we just know," unless you can back it up with something better.

Well, you would certainly have to if you want your free choices to revolve around a "soul" able to differentiate behaviors as either sinful or not sinful. And if you convince yourself that sinful behavior is Judged by God such that immortality and salvation are on the line.

That wasn't my point at all.

My point was merely that you, in your argument so far, have left no possible Deterministic explanation adequate to deal with things like "consciousness," or "volition" or especially "teleology," (even though you have invoked such terms yourself). And if that's the case, then one has to turn to some kind of hypothesis involving a deliberate Creation, just as you suggested.

No more assumptions than the ones you have, yourself offered are necessary to take us there. And I'm agreeing with you on that.

Or unless "settling" itself is something we do or do not do wholly in accordance with what our brain is never able not to command of us.

Well, "settling" is something a rational mind does when faced with a best-evidence argument, and Determinism does not leave any place for rational minds or arguers to mount them or settlers to settle on them.

So bringing in Determinism illuminates nothing here. It just means that what you and I seem to be doing here -- discussing, thinking and concluding -- are all actually impossible.

But surprise, surprise...we're doing them right now!

And around and around we go.

No, we don't.

I've asked you a question. It's premised on nothing but the empirical observations you and I both can make, and neither of us can rationally evade.

So why won't you answer, if answer you have? As I said...

It's not a question of what we presume or observe here

Not of presumption: of observation. And yes, that is exactly what my question pertains to.

I don't work as a determinist...

You're not answering the question. I didn't ask you how you "work." I asked you how you reconcile the argument for Determinism with the observable fact of its unworkableness in real life. That's all.

Actually, what I am assuming is that, in a manner I have no capacity to truly understand, our exchange here involves at least some measure of free will. And, if not, it's all compelled to unfold given the only possible reality.

Those are irreconcilable postulates. But one of them must be what you really believe is true -- at least "believe" in the sense of "live your life as if true," -- rather than the other. And it's clear to me that you're actually operating on your assumption of free will.

Determinists never argue. They can't.

Well, for those who do root their autonomy in one or another religious/spiritual font,

I don't do that here. I have asked of you no such assumption.

I've only asked what you make of the undeniable observation that nobody lives like a Determinist. And that, you won't answer.

Okay, that's one way to think about it. And if it works for you, fine. But it certainly doesn't work for me in regard to questions this big.

The Atlantic is big.

It's biggness is of zero significance to whether or not I can actually get a portion of it.

But, with regard to the God of Moses and Abraham, there is also the narrative of the Jews and the Moslems.

The Jewish Torah is identical with the Christian Bible. It's the first five books of the OT, verbatim. Jews and Christians have no disagreement at all about that fact. It's the New Testament where the division occurs, not books that tell of Moses and Abraham.

The Koran, if you read it, is manifestly wrong. It can't even get the details of the OT straight, and the OT precedes it, by manuscripts thousands of years before the Koran. Meanwhile, the Koran has absolutely no manuscript tradition preceding the Koran itself, and departs from the ancient Jewish records and also from the New Testament, in numerous significant passages and in total structure. The Koran contains none of the actual Torah, in fact. Mohammed didn't even really know Torah. He only knew what he thought the various Jews and Nestorians in his region believed, and he got it all badly wrong.

You can confirm that for yourself. But I can give you obvious examples. I have a Koran here, as a matter of fact.

Okay, but how would they not be essentially interchangeable in the only possible world?

Oh, it's very, very unlikely they would be. Almost nothing in the material world is genuinely "interchangeable" with anything else. Why would we expect religious, philosophical or scientific books to be? Some are bound to be better than others. It all depends on their relative relationships to how things actually are, of course.

That's far more plausible.

Again, these are just a cluster of assumptions

No assumptions. Just observations.

Time to answer, if you can.

You cannot help but observe, and in fact exemplify here, that nobody can live as a Determinist. Everybody always lives as if free will is true. Again I ask: what is the consequence for the likelihood of Determinism being true?

[iambiguous]

Biggy,

What actual hard evidence do you have that explains human autonomy?

A rather large evidence of free will is you, writin' posts in a forum, wherein you choose your topic, you choose your approach to the topic, you choose your tone, you choose the words to communicate meaning.

Either you choose (are a free will, have causal power) or you're a Rhomba.

As I say: we can argue about why and how man is a free will, but there's no argument to be had that man is anything other than, or less than, a free will.

Of course, I'm not here to argue that we don't have free will...only that given all of the existential factors in my life that revolved around me thinking about determinism, I have come "here and now" to believe that if the human brain is just more matter then how do we explain how it is not subsumed in the laws that all other matter seems clearly to obey.

It's like "somehow" you just know that you are free...intuitively, viscerally. Then all you do basically is to assert your own assumptions here as though anyone who doesn't think exactly like you do about it is either "a liar or a nut".

Arguments like mine then become little more than sparrowfarts, not even worth mentioning.

And this sounds like something I'd expect from someone afflicted with an authoritarian mentality.

But here the discussion is "only" about one of those "metaphysical" topics that have fascinated and exasperated philosophers now for centuries.

Where the authoritarians among us can become dangerous is in regard to conflicting moral and political and spiritual value judgments. Here they set themselves up as fully qualified to differentiate those deemed to be "one of us" [the good guys] from those construed to be "one of them" [the bad guys].

The danger revolving around situations in which, in any particular community, they are the ones with all the power.

So, just out of curiosity, do you fancy yourself as being the authority here on such things?

A Rhomba?

[henry quirk]

biggy,

I have come "here and now" to believe that if the human brain is just more matter then how do we explain how it is not subsumed in the laws that all other matter seems clearly to obey.

And I have come to believe -- after years of a cheerful, but vacant, nihilistic materialism -- that man is sumthin' more than a bag of dirty water.

A Rhomba?

An appliance: a robot floor cleaner.

[iambiguous]

Or, the problem is that those who champion free will have no capacity to demonstrate definitively that anything we believe, we believe only because matter in the human brain is such that human beings [unlike any other matter we are aware of] are able to opt to believe something different.

No, that won't do at all.

That won't do for you because given the manner in which some are compelled to understand determinism you are compelled to understand it only as the laws of matter command it. Then back to all that we don't know about the human brain as matter here. Then around and around we go "thinking up" arguments we may or may not have ever been able to opt not to think up.

Arguments -- intellectual/philosophical assessments -- like this one...

The first clause, "those who champion free will have no capacity to demonstrate definitively that anything we believe," asks for "definitive demonstration." But no such thing is possible even in the most rigorous science: so it's demanding that free will meet a standard it can ask of no other kind of knowledge. All human knowing is probabiltistic, not "definitive demonstration." And the probability of free will being true, given the faults of Determinism, is much, much higher than the probability of Determinism being true.

As I say, nobody has ever been able to live as a Determinist. That counts very heavily against Determinism being true at all...at least by a fair, probabilistic calculation.

The second clause in your objection won't work either. It reads, "...we believe only because matter in the human brain is such that human beings [unlike any other matter we are aware of] are able to opt to believe something different."

This requires us to believe that there is a new kind of "matter" in the universe, which you call "human brain matter," which is discontinuous with ordinary matter, in that it can produce volition (you word is "opt to believe,") which then presumes free will. So you've created a funky new meaning for "matter," one that any Materialists will ask you to justify, and then sold out Determinism to free will anyway, if you adopt that line of thinking.

So some better response is surely required there.

How is this not just a set of assumptions derived from how you define the meaning of the words you use to defend the meaning of more words still?

In regard to the actual behavior here -- thinking up the words and posting them here -- you have nothing in the way of demonstrable proof that your rendition of the human brain is the definitive explanation. Instead, you are just like all the rest of us...embedded in the gap between what we "think up" in our head about these things and what we can't actually prove empirically, materially, phenomenologically is true.

In fact, it is the remarkably astonishing nature of the "new matter" we call mind, that continues to baffle us. What to make of the gap between "I" in our dreams and "I" in the waking world? Are they just manifestations of the same immutable laws of matter?

How does your own "educated guess" here stack up against mine and others?

Against God's?

It always comes back to one's initial assumptions about the laws of matter themselves. What is "covered" and what is not? In other words, what if all of our assumptions are?

It does. But assumptions are not all equal.

They are if all of our assumptions are but the embodiment of the only possible reality.

Some assumptions favour the facts and data...others lack the expected data or reasons, or are inherently vacuous because unfalsifiable on any test...like Determinism is.

Again, as though this subjective assumption in and of itself debunks determinism. Subjective because you have no way in which to determine how close to or how far away from it is from the objective truth. What does it even mean to speak of the objective truth in a No God world? But that too is just another assumption.

And, sure enough, those such as neuroscientists -- brain scientists -- are hard at work trying to figure that out. But nothing anywhere near defintive seems to have emerged from the news sources I am familiar with.

You are correct. But the problem is that you can't equate things like "soul," "identity," "reason" or "consciousness" with brain matter. There is, contra Gilbert Ryle, some kind of "ghost in the machine." Studying the "machine" doesn't seem to tell us anything about the "ghost" in it.

No, the problem remains that until the "hard guys" are able to explain mind and matter ontologically you and I may or may not be equating what we do [about anything] merely because we were never able to opt freely not to. The ghost may be just another domino for all we know. Mind may well be as mechanical to nature as a car engine is to us.

Then back to the mystery of matter and teleology. If mind is entirely mechanical to nature how and why did nature bring this about?

Again, with God, there's an answer. The answer. But with Nature in a No God universe?

But consciousness and these other entities are decidedly unlike ghosts in this way: that while few of us ever claim to have experienced a "ghost," all of us experience these things every single day and all the time. Your typing of a response is, as it seems to you, an act of your "consciousness" employing your material fingers to type to its intended purposes, at the behest of your will.

Back to you own assumptions regarding how we experience things. You take your own "intellectual/philosophical" -- theological? -- leap to one set of assumptions, others to conflicting assumptions.

Then we all become like the inhabitants of Flatland arguing back and forth about how to explain the existence of the world we live in.

Why should we believe the accidental byproducts of an indifferent universe? On what basis should we even believe they're related to truth?

Why should we trust anything our own brains seem to "cough up," in this unguided, uncaring process of physical-material causes bashing into each other?

Well, as Henry insists, we just do trust certain things about the choices we make. We just know that they are of our own volition

"Just know?" "Just know?"

What else is there around to call it? We dig down as deep as we can in grappling with the profound mystery of matter as mind. Then we take our own subjective "leaps" to particular sets of assumptions. Philosophers have been doing this now for centuries. Yet they are still fiercely arguing over which assumptions are the most reasonable. There's got to be a reason for that. But we'll no doubt go to the grave oblivious to it.

Then "the gap" and Rummy's Rule". As exasperating -- for some infuriating -- as it is, we just don't know what is ultimately true here.

It then perhaps basically comes back to what we want to believe is true. Yes, we have free will and that explains all the great things that I've accomplished in my life. No, we don't have free will and that explains all the miserable failures in my life.

Then back to Schopenhauer: We want what we do, but we can't want what we want.

Then, existentially, re dasein, we fit all of this into our own life.

My point was merely that you, in your argument so far, have left no possible Deterministic explanation adequate to deal with things like "consciousness," or "volition" or especially "teleology," (even though you have invoked such terms yourself). And if that's the case, then one has to turn to some kind of hypothesis involving a deliberate Creation, just as you suggested.

One deterministic explanation is this: that any explanation or lack thereof I either give or do not give was simply not within my capactity to freely choose. We don't "deal" with those things given the assumptions of the libertarians, but given my own assumptions about brain matter being wholly in sync with the laws embedded in all matter.

Or unless "settling" itself is something we do or do not do wholly in accordance with what our brain is never able not to command of us.

Well, "settling" is something a rational mind does when faced with a best-evidence argument, and Determinism does not leave any place for rational minds or arguers to mount them or settlers to settle on them.

Yes, and in regard to material interactions in the either/or world -- physics, chemistry, biology etc. -- what we settle on is often able to be demonstrated as that which all rational men and women are obligated to settle on. But in regard to the is/ought world, and Big Questions like free will vs. determinism what have philosophers settled on as the most rational assessment?

And around and around we go.

No, we don't.

I've asked you a question. It's premised on nothing but the empirical observations you and I both can make, and neither of us can rationally evade.

Are the empirical observations that we make of our own volition or merely neurological and chemical interactions compelled by our brains given the only possible reality? How do philosophers and scientists not go around and around here?

Though of course the theologians merely presume the circle itself is [ultimately] subsumed in a soul given to us by God. So that, omniscient or not, we are entirely free to either sin or not sin. Well, going back to what some construe to be Original Sin anyway.

I don't work as a determinist...

You're not answering the question. I didn't ask you how you "work." I asked you how you reconcile the argument for Determinism with the observable fact of its unworkableness in real life. That's all.

And I'm telling you that, given my own understanding of determinism "here and now", any attempt on my part to see your intellectual contraption with one of my own would result only in a set of assumptions which [like your own] is not able to be taken out into the world and used to explain definitively why we do choose the actual behaviors that we do. If my argument for determinism is correct it "works out" in being the only possible argument I could have made. Now, how on earth would you go about demonstrating -- empirically, experientially, experimentally -- I could have opted to make a different argument?

In other words...

Actually, what I am assuming is that, in a manner I have no capacity to truly understand [let alone demonstrate], our exchange here involves at least some measure of free will. And, if not, it's all compelled to unfold given the only possible reality.

Those are irreconcilable postulates. But one of them must be what you really believe is true -- at least "believe" in the sense of "live your life as if true," -- rather than the other. And it's clear to me that you're actually operating on your assumption of free will.

Again, what on earth can "irreconcilable postulates" mean if our world is the only possible reality? If all that I believe is true is all I was ever able to believe is true.

And of course I am operating on the assumption that I have free will. Thus the point I made about "click" above. Back again to how in my dreams I am absolutely positive that I have free will then too.

Determinists never argue. They can't.

Or, perhaps, because they don't come to the same set of assumptions that you do about the human brain [given the evolution of matter here on planet Earth], nothing that they post here qualifies as an argument.

More or less the path Henry is on here in my view. He too will ask you questions. And if your answer doesn't meet with his approval, it may as well be as though you didn't answer at all.

It's like, given free will, your rendition of the cup of water and the Atlantic Ocean is just "better" than mine. Your cup contains but a teeny-tiny portion of it but since that's not the same as having nothing at all your assessment of the ocean need be as far as it goes. Just as your understanding of the Bible, the Torah and the Koran need be as far as it goes with respect to Judgment Day. And yet however the God of Abraham is interpreted it's still the same God. It's still the same Judgment Day.

Okay, but how would they not be essentially interchangeable in the only possible world?

Oh, it's very, very unlikely they would be. Almost nothing in the material world is genuinely "interchangeable" with anything else. Why would we expect religious, philosophical or scientific books to be? Some are bound to be better than others. It all depends on their relative relationships to how things actually are, of course.

On the contrary, if everything in the world interacts with everything else in the world entirely as a result of the laws of matter then everything is interchangeable in that crucial sense. We may be different individuals living different lives but what we share in common is that the lives themselves are just different sets of the same dominoes.

[iambiguous]

I have come "here and now" to believe that if the human brain is just more matter then how do we explain how it is not subsumed in the laws that all other matter seems clearly to obey.

And I have come to believe -- after years of a cheerful, but vacant, nihilistic materialism -- that man is sumthin' more than a bag of dirty water.

Well, at least you may be able to fall back on the assumption that, given the laws of matter, you were never able not to post this.

I know that "here and now" I do.

A Rhomba?

An appliance: a robot floor cleaner.

Oh, a roomba.

[Belinda]

All men choose. Dog and cats choose. Rats and blackbirds choose. Spiders and ants choose. Trees and grasses choose.

But household appliances and computers have feed -back mechanisms only. Flushing lavatories usually have tanks with feed back mechanisms. These mechanisms have no choice as they can respond or not respond. Binary.

However feed-back mechanisms, cats, and humans have in common that they all are caused by chemical and physical reactions to have choices. Unlike simple feed-back mechanisms living things, including humans, have an array of choices. Humans, arguably, have a larger array of choices than plants and other animals. Each item in any man's array of choices is either caused or it's a random guess.

The more choices a man has the more free he is.

Many people still confuse man's comparatively large freedom of choice with 'Free Will'.

[iambiguous]

Two Conceptions of Free Will
Matthew Gliatto
Published in ILLUMINATION

The other conception of free will is libertarian free will (libertarianism). Libertarianism is the idea that there is a “ghost in the machine” inside our brains that makes decisions independently of all science and all circumstances.

Just as some tell us there's a God "up there" who set it all in motion? Maybe. But, so far, to the best of my knowledge, no scientist, philosopher or theologian has been able to actually introduce either one to the world. The ghost may well just be a machine going back to whatever brought existence itself into existence.

To be sure, the science and the circumstances matter, but the “ghost” has the final say. A compatibilist would hold that science — specifically neuroscience — could fully explain the process by which a person makes a decision and does something. But libertarianism says no: science isn’t everything. There is a ghost in the machine, and the ghost has the power to make decisions, and there is no scientific process that could explain what the ghost is going to do or how the ghost works.

But if science ever does fully explain the process, was science ever not able to fully explain it by rote? The ghost being the machine, it explains itself. That's the mystery. Matter becoming conscious of itself as matter becoming conscious of itself. Some then insist that "somehow" the ghost is more than the sum of the brain's part. An "I" emerges that transcends the machine...an "I" that shapes and molds the machine [the body] in order to carry out its own commands.

We simply haven't pinned down exactly how or why yet. And, until we do, we just have to accept that whatever "leap of faith" we take to free will "in our head", that will have to do.

(By the way, this “ghost in the machine” is often associated with some of the more traditional terms for a person’s source of identity, such as a soul, a self, an Atman, or a spirit.)

All of which may or may not be intertwined in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein. Compelled to or not.

[Immanuel Can]

...you are compelled to understand it only as the laws of matter command it.

Sorry, iambiguous.

Up to now, I've been proceeding on the assumption that you were interested in a good-faith, honest conversation.

I'd like to believe that, still. And I have no intention of insulting you, and I'm not going ad hominem. All the same, since you just never seem to respond to this question at all, I now have to start to doubt whether you are engaged in a serious conversation at all.

But you can straighted my "misunderstanding" out, if that's what it is; or, you can confirm it, if it is not.

Some four pages back, I posed to you a question you never answered. Then I posed it to you at least four times subsquently, in various ways...and again, you never answered it. But I think that any honest assessment would have to recognize it's essential to making sense of this issue. So I'm going to pose it again -- just in case you honestly forgot it, and otherwise did intend to answer it -- so that we don't lose track of what's important.

Let me add that I'm not going to ask you about my view or my assumptions. You don't really know those, anyway. I'm going to ask you only -- exclusively -- about the the viewpoint of Determinism, AS YOU SEE IT.

Your assumptions, not mine. Determinism, not anything else. So far, so good?

And here, again, is my question, cut-and-pasted from before:

So let me put the question bluntly: If free will is an illusion, and Determinism is true, then how is it possible that 100% of all people who have ever lived have lived on the basis of their belief that free will is true, and 100% of the Determinists have been unable to live, even for a short time, as if their Determinism were true?

Please answer the question if you can; and if you cannot, then just say so. Either way, I'm fine. Either is an honest answer.

Refuse to answer at all, evade and redirect, and I have to think I was wrong about the sincerity of your intention: there can be no other conclusion, I think.

The ball's in your court now.

[Immanuel Can]

All men choose. Dog and cats choose. Rats and blackbirds choose. Spiders and ants choose. Trees and grasses choose.

If you think that, then you do not believe in Determinism at all. You're a dyed-in-the-wool free-willian.

...they all are caused by chemical and physical reactions to have choices...

"Caused choices" is a phrase that makes as much sense as 'dry wetness" and "live corpse." It's a contradiction.

If the choices are simply "causes" rather than "taken," then they were never "choices" at all, by definition. And then, you're a strict Determinist; and all your assertions about "choice" turn out to be vacuous.

Humans, arguably, have a larger array of choices than plants and other animals.

No, by Determinism, no entity has ANY actual "choice" at all. They're all simply "caused" to do what they do, no matter who or what they are.

The more choices a man has the more free he is.

No: because in Determinism, no "choice" is actually a choice. They're all just predeterminations of the causal stream.

Given the incoherence of the above, B., I have to think you have no idea what "Determinism" and "choice" would actually involve.

[henry quirk]

A compatibilist would hold that science — specifically neuroscience — could fully explain the process by which a person makes a decision and does something.

The promissory materialist: Yeah, I know materialism can't explain the mind. I know the work of gentlemen like Wilder Penfield seems to say materialism can't explain the mind (becuz it appears mind and brain aren't the same thing). But I promise you, when science does more work in the future, they’ll prove I’m right.

Okay. Best quit jawin', then, and get to work.

[iambiguous]

...you are compelled to understand it only as the laws of matter command it.

Sorry, iambiguous.

Up to now, I've been proceeding on the assumption that you were interested in a good-faith, honest conversation.

I get this sort of reaction all the time over at ILP. I become the topic of discussion. As though those unable to understand why I am not willing or able to think about age-old conundrums like determinism/free will/compatibilism as they do, makes it all about one or another failure of mine.

Thus if a determinist argues in good faith that the exchanges unfolding here unfold only as they ever possibly could have, that assumption in and of itself constitutes an unwillingness to sustain an "honest conversation". Since I act as though I have free will that debunks determinism right from the start.

Well, no, it doesn't.

Meanwhile, I'm the first to admit that my conclusions here are predicated almost entirely on my own subjective assumptions. In other words, given my own unique trajectory of experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge, I have come existentially to think as I do "here and now" about determinism. Given the points I raised above.

I'd like to believe that, still. And I have no intention of insulting you, and I'm not going ad hominem. All the same, since you just never seem to respond to this question at all, I now have to start to doubt whether you are engaged in a serious conversation at all.

Doubt whatever you will. After all, if my own "intellectual contraptions" here are more reasonable than yours, it's not like you were ever able to not doubt what you must doubt.

Or are you a neuroscientist able to provide us with hard evidence to back up your own didactic assumptions?

Some four pages back, I posed to you a question you never answered. Then I posed it to you at least four times subsquently, in various ways...and again, you never answered it. But I think that any honest assessment would have to recognize it's essential to making sense of this issue. So I'm going to pose it again -- just in case you honestly forgot it, and otherwise did intend to answer it -- so that we don't lose track of what's important.

I responded to your question as my brain compelled me to. Unless you or others are able to provide me with substantial proof of how mindless matter evolved into self-conscious living matter on planet Earth and along the way "somehow" this matter acquired autonomy.

Evidence that goes beyond what amounts to a visceral/intuitive leap of faith such that "somehow" you just know this is the case.

And, sure, it may well be. Only a fool would argue that there is no possibility of this. Of course I may have free will here. But how is that squared with the fact that to the best of our knowledge the human brian is just more matter. Spectacularly atypical matter but, sans God, how and why did the ghost in the machine come to exist at all.

Your assumptions, not mine. Determinism, not anything else. So far, so good?

Come on, determinism may well be just another component of everything else. If all human assumptions are inherently/necessarily manifestation of the laws of matter than so too are all the questions and answers we pose.

Your problem is not what you think about all this but how chemically and neurologically to explain how thoughtless matter going back to the Big Bang was able to evolve into thoughtful human autonomy matter. To explain how the waking world reality is "just different" from the dream world reality.

Instead, for you, the default is always free will:

And here, again, is my question, cut-and-pasted from before:

So let me put the question bluntly: If free will is an illusion, and Determinism is true, then how is it possible that 100% of all people who have ever lived have lived on the basis of their belief that free will is true, and 100% of the Determinists have been unable to live, even for a short time, as if their Determinism were true?

Please answer the question if you can; and if you cannot, then just say so. Either way, I'm fine. Either is an honest answer.

Refuse to answer at all, evade and redirect, and I have to think I was wrong about the sincerity of your intention: there can be no other conclusion, I think.

The ball's in your court now.

My point is that your question, like my answer are both "at one" with the only possible reality. The ball is in nature's court. Has been, is now and always will be.

On the other hand, "what on Earth can that possibly mean?!"

Cue "the gap" and "Rummy's Rule" of course.