The Democrat Party Hates America

[Immanuel Can]

and yet they still claim it's necessary for us to believe it.

I never claimed this - which is why you're using the sweeping 'they':
to imply I said that which you know I didn't.

It was the obvious conclusion. Why back Determinism if, as you say, a) you know it's not scientific or defensible, and b) you're not actually telling anybody they should believe it?

But if you say you were not recommending it as necessary to believe, then I can agree with your judgment that far, I guess. I don't recommend Determinism either.

[Belinda]

Big Mike wrote:

So if someone claims determinism is unfalsifiable, I’d simply say: then falsify it. Show one event—just one—where a change in a physical quantity happened without any interaction. No exchange, no field, no force, no second object. A change from nothing. A truly causeless effect. That’s what it would take.

With another lexicon 'a truly causeless event' would be 'a miracle'.

Belief and trust in miracles belongs to a former age of the human past when people took it for granted that God sometimes intervenes to alter His own creation.

There was and still is a belief that God intervenes to alter His own creation , sometimes to punish wrong doing. That belief was useful for wielders of power to persuade lower orders of men to do as they were told. I submit power politics / indoctrination is why some people can't accept determinism.

[Immanuel Can]

'a truly causeless event' would be 'a miracle'.

No, a "miracle" would be an event with a cause, but with a supernatural one. To say, "God caused..." is not to say that something happened causelessly. That much is quite obvious, surely.

However, only in a metaphorical way can we speak of mind being a "miracle." For in a very real sense, there's nothing at all unusual about "mind." As hard as the concept may be for us to fully comprehend, we all do comprehend it on an experiential level: we all both have and use minds constantly. Ironically, to deny the existence of mind requires an exercise of mind.

So even a Determinist cannot deny the experiential reality of mind. It's just not possible. It's a performative contradiction of Determinism.

So we need not refer all the way to "miracles" to consider mind. All we have to do is to consider what you and I experience every single day and every single moment of our lives, and ask, "what is going on here?"

That physics gives us no purchase on an answer is not a slander on physics: physics itself never promised us more than access to physical mechanisms and realities; it never told us it was going to be the only road to knowledge, or to deal with non-physical realities for us. It just promised to get better and better at doing what it purported to do, namely, to unpack physical realities. Whatever is super-physical, such as mind, it made us no promise to unpack. We cannot hold physics responsible for failing to do what it never promised to do at all.

And we cannot deny the existence of mind. For only a mind can do that.

[Alexis Jacobi]

tl;dr

Got ya.

gtg bbl

We must come to some agreements if you desire that I dedicate myself to dismantling your pathology, and if you wish my help in guiding you in the process of putting yourself together again. Though fractured, though discombobulated, you must want, even if vaguely, to be reintegrated.

Your posts must be perfectly formulated. Clear sentences, proper punctuation, and (obviously) none of these infantile abbreviations. These especially make me very angry .

I cannot bear mediocrity! If you agree to improve, and demonstrate it, I will agree to beat you mercifully into some sort of shape a lucky damsel might bring home to mother. If not, I am afraid I can only ignore the noise coming from you.

Please. Show some respect. For me yes, but especially for yourself!

[henry quirk]

'a truly causeless event' would be 'a miracle'.

I see that over and over from determinists: causeless.

Who, on our side said diddly about anything bein' causeless?

We, the free willists, just attribute and identify cause properly.

[Immanuel Can]

We, the free willists, just attribute and identify cause properly.

Yep, that's exactly right.

We're not saying things happen without a cause. Our concept of "cause" is just more capacious than that of the Materialist. Their list of items included in The Real is just too crabbed and narrow to deal with things like mind, personhood, morality, selves, rationality, cognition, soul or logic. That's not our fault, it's theirs.

[Ben JS]

tl;dr

Got ya.

gtg bbl

We must come to some agreements if you desire that I dedicate myself to dismantling your pathology, and if you wish my help in guiding you in the process of putting yourself together again. Though fractured, though discombobulated, you must want, even if vaguely, to be reintegrated.

Your posts must be perfectly formulated. Clear sentences, proper punctuation, and (obviously) none of these infantile abbreviations. These especially make me very angry .

I cannot bear mediocrity! If you agree to improve, and demonstrate it, I will agree to beat you mercifully into some sort of shape a lucky damsel might bring home to mother. If not, I am afraid I can only ignore the noise coming from you.

Please. Show some respect. For me yes, but especially for yourself!

I confess:
When you're actually trying to be funny;
it's very effective on my simple, unrefined mind.

(You assume my sexuality - maybe I'm a pansexual enby, or an asexual ascetic in denial)

[Impenitent]

I knew a pansexual once, but they wok-ed away...

-Imp

[Darkneos]

Yeah. I get that. And honestly, that reaction makes sense—especially when the poetic surface of things gets peeled back to reveal something mechanical underneath. It can feel cold. It can feel empty. It can feel like the world just got smaller.

But here’s the thing: the world didn’t get smaller. It got deeper.

The way I see it, some people can stand the truth. Others can’t—or won’t. And I don’t mean that as a moral jab. I mean it as a temperamental reality. Some minds recoil when the myth dissolves. Others lean in. But truth doesn’t care how it makes us feel—it just is.

And what’s wild is this: the "machine" you’re talking about—this universe of atoms and energy, chemistry and neurons—it produced Mozart. It produced laughter. It produced people who cry at sunsets, who rescue animals, who fall in love and write novels and risk everything for people they care about. If that’s “just” machinery, then maybe the word “just” is the problem, not the machinery.

You can say love is made of neurotransmitters and evolved bonding behaviors. Fine. But it still rips your heart open when it’s lost. It still changes lives. You still write songs about it. If you could manufacture it in a lab, would that make it meaningless? Or would that just show you how damn powerful it is—so powerful we want to understand it, recreate it, preserve it?

Meaning doesn’t have to come from mystery. It can come from understanding. From connection. From the realization that, yes, we’re physical systems—but physical systems that care. That ache. That reach for each other, even knowing it’s all temporary.

That’s not less. That’s more.

So the question becomes: do you need “magic” to care? Or can you care even more, knowing how rare and fragile and astonishing this reality actually is?

Well...I get what you're trying to say. But what I think the point being made in the link and in other places I've heard about determinism (or more like physicalism/materialism from what you seem to be saying) is the what you're telling me now the story we put on top of it, not the reality. It's the "higher level model" (per the link) and not the territory.

That machine didn't produce Mozart because Mozart doesn't "Exist", it's just elementary particles and quantum interactions, only a lot of them. The same with laughter, falling in love, sunsets, all of this is "fantasy". In fact a favorite clip of mine makes the point I'm getting at, and other do too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPS5Yw_ ... annel=urza

Anything more than elementary particles is our storytelling at play, so they say (folks like the guy in the link). Those particles and interactions didn't really make anything so much as our storytelling does, the distinctions we draw, and all that.

Love is valuable because people believe it to be a force or something more than mere chemicals, it's why there is so much around it. If it could just be replicated in a lab it would lose value, especially when you consider the big deal we make about it and the people we love. It is powerful but it would be cheapened the same way having something readily available does. You only have to look at modern dating as an example, the plethora of options people have lowers they value and investment they put into dating and people because they can just get another one. You don't even have to go to dating, just look and how people with money behave when they break something, they just got whatever and replace it because they can.

In my mind, it doesn't make things deeper, ironically the more I know about something the less deep it becomes and the more ordinary it gets:

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/6BFkmEgre7u ... EPszhWkvQm
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/6BFkmEgre7u ... pZH2hgz59x

...Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
—John Keats, Lamia

The depth is in the unknown, the possibilities, the wonder and what could or may be. But once you know then the magic is dispelled, and you can test that psychologically. There is nothing astonishing about the known and well traveled paths, and most determinists I've meet sound the same.

In my case, knowing that love is a chemical made me lose all value for it, because it wasn't some cosmic force with meaning behind it but just a chemical. I'm not even sure I've felt it since realizing that, except for the few moments when I forget that fact. It's hard to look at the natural world, the ocean, the animals, insects, all of it and feel anything when it's just robotic interactions.

I don't really see wasps or butterflies anymore but just collections of elementary particles. The same with people. The feelings I have for things suddenly mean less because it's just a chemical reaction and nothing to do with the thing or person. There is no connection. Love no longer rips my heart out when I remember what it really is. Same with sadness....I mean...it's just a collection of particles and no one is really dying are they?

If the feelings you feel are just chemicals then what's to stop us from making a machine to just pump them into people to achieve the same result as actually doing the thing? I mean...if there is nothing fantastical going on there would be no difference right? Why DO anything when you can get the same chemical rewards from a machine?

https://x.com/Merryweatherey/status/1516836303895240708

(I'm just making a point)

In fact I'd argue that if humanity adopted determinism and reductionism we likely wouldn't have made it to this point in our society. What really did it was our penchant for fantasy and dreaming and magic. Making things more than they are, believing in more than mere reality before us, to believe in impossible things (to quote alice in wonderland). You just have to look at all the art and religion we have for examples at that (I get the point about religion but the point I'm making is that desire for something greater and beyond what's in front of us). Heck, I doubt science would have advanced much without imagination, since that is what drives people to explore things. Asking "what if this or that" or "could we fly" and creating that reality. That sounds like magic to me, as flowery as that might sound.

That said, it's not like I'm arguing against determinism, but when I look at the people who champion it I'm not exactly thrilled about the future of humanity, because what usually follows is obsession with optimization (just look at AI art and how machines are replacing everything human). I also know I can't really deny the results of the science, that would be foolish. But...it's all with a very heavy heart, so heavy it's hard to go on some days. Heck I'm starting to not even regard people as people some days, and the only way to get through is to forget about it all.

I mean...it's as you said about mind. If it's just a passive passenger that does nothing then it is real? If it's all just deterministic factors out of control then can we really say there is a person or being at all? It's just a reaction, a pattern of atoms, physics just being physics and nothing more. It doesn't feel, love, dream, anything at all. I mean if neuroscience is materialistic that means physics is the basis of cognition. There is no one, no human, nobody at the wheel (per the words of people I've heard). What difference is there between you and a mechanical toy?

Maybe it's irrational to believe in magic, I'll admit it. But...the alternative is killing my drive to live, and the people who often champion it don't exactly help in that department.

I'll end with a post made by someone who is also a determinist (and possible materialist)

Finally, worth mentioning is the British biochemist who has demonstrated that philosophy has not been fully divorced from science, Rupert Sheldrake (quoting):

"Here are the 10 core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.

Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, “lumbering robots,” in Richard Dawkins' vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.

All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains.

The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).

The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same forever.

Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.

All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not “out there,” where it seems to be, but inside your brain.

Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.

Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory.

Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

Together, these beliefs make up the philosophy or ideology of materialism, whose central assumption is that everything is essentially material or physical, even minds."

Now I've gone and depressed myself again...that's why I try to avoid talking about this. It's not that I'm saying it's false, but most days I'm better off forgetting like Hume mentioned.

Someone brought up free will and I'm not gonna get into that one because that really bums me out but here:

Whilst determinism may be unfalsifiable,
the concept of free will can be internally contradictory -
thus falsified by analyzing the propositions against each other.

I hear you. Really. But here’s the short version:

Yes, under determinism, love is chemicals. But so is music. So is joy. So is the feeling you get when you hold someone’s hand and your heart skips. The fact that it’s physical doesn’t make it meaningless—it makes it real. Not magic, but miraculous in its own right.

The machine did produce Mozart. The same way it produced you. Just because something is made of atoms doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. And yes, you could simulate love in a lab—but that doesn't make the real thing meaningless. It just shows how powerful the structure is.

You can call that a story. Fine. But stories are how we navigate the world. And this one happens to be true.

You don’t need magic to care. You just need honesty, and a little courage.

I think you might be misunderstanding what I'm getting at.

The story is what made Mozart, made science what it is today, made you and me. Because without that it's JUST elementary particles and nothing more. It's like what I said about how if it's all just physics then there is no you or me (IE no soul or essence). The story isn't true, like the link I mentioned was saying:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tPqQdLC ... 2ki6sSvAxu

You want there to be people, Mozart, love, and all that stuff but there isn't. That's only in the story, not "reality", per their words. Something just being atoms means it doesn't matter, the fact that it's physical means it's meaningless. Love and joy carry the weight they do because we believe them to be more than that, which is why your heart skips a beat, because you don't see a collection of atoms but a person.

The fact that we can make things in a lab does render them meaningless, you can look at how people treat something that is readily available to see that. I even gave evidence for that.

If you want honesty, that is what it leads to. Brutal and cold and unflinching. If you want courage and care then that's "magic". What you've talked about so far is not real, it's the story. That's what every determinist and reductionist (the two often go hand in hand) says, you're arguing for something that isn't determinism but more like a mix between what religion offers along with science.

I wish determinism was like that, but that doesn't seem to bear out.

[seeds]

And yes, you could simulate love in a lab—but that doesn't make the real thing meaningless. It just shows how powerful the structure is.

How in the world do you "simulate love" in a lab?
_______

[BigMike]

I think you might be misunderstanding what I'm getting at.

The story is what made Mozart, made science what it is today, made you and me. Because without that it's JUST elementary particles and nothing more. It's like what I said about how if it's all just physics then there is no you or me (IE no soul or essence). The story isn't true, like the link I mentioned was saying:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tPqQdLC ... 2ki6sSvAxu

You want there to be people, Mozart, love, and all that stuff but there isn't. That's only in the story, not "reality", per their words. Something just being atoms means it doesn't matter, the fact that it's physical means it's meaningless. Love and joy carry the weight they do because we believe them to be more than that, which is why your heart skips a beat, because you don't see a collection of atoms but a person.

The fact that we can make things in a lab does render them meaningless, you can look at how people treat something that is readily available to see that. I even gave evidence for that.

If you want honesty, that is what it leads to. Brutal and cold and unflinching. If you want courage and care then that's "magic". What you've talked about so far is not real, it's the story. That's what every determinist and reductionist (the two often go hand in hand) says, you're arguing for something that isn't determinism but more like a mix between what religion offers along with science.

I wish determinism was like that, but that doesn't seem to bear out.

You're drawing a sharp line between the story and the substance—as if “love” doesn’t exist because it has no mass or charge. But by that standard, neither does wetness. Or color. Or music. Or pain. Are they fantasies too?

In your use of words, love doesn’t “exist.” It’s not fundamental like a quark. And sure, it’s not. But love emerges from the physical, just like wetness emerges from water molecules. Not because atoms “want” anything, not because they aim at meaning—but because, by chance, some molecules formed biology. And some biology survived. Not because it was noble, but because it happened to work. Survival of the fittest, one step at a time.

The feelings we prize—joy, connection, heartbreak—those weren’t designed by a god or woven by a soul. They evolved. They slipped through the tight little eye of evolution’s needle because they helped organisms like us stay alive, protect kin, form bonds, and reproduce. That’s not fantasy. That’s history.

So yes, love is chemicals. But it's not just chemicals. It’s the result of ancient chemistry building layer upon layer, generation after generation, until eventually you had a brain that could feel heartbreak and write poetry about it. That’s not magic. That’s nature. And it matters—because it's all we've got.

When we die, we stop. The engine shuts down. No magic. No mystery. Just the truth. And the fact that it ends doesn’t mean it didn’t matter. Quite the opposite.

[Belinda]

'a truly causeless event' would be 'a miracle'.

No, a "miracle" would be an event with a cause, but with a supernatural one. To say, "God caused..." is not to say that something happened causelessly. That much is quite obvious, surely.

However, only in a metaphorical way can we speak of mind being a "miracle." For in a very real sense, there's nothing at all unusual about "mind." As hard as the concept may be for us to fully comprehend, we all do comprehend it on an experiential level: we all both have and use minds constantly. Ironically, to deny the existence of mind requires an exercise of mind.

So even a Determinist cannot deny the experiential reality of mind. It's just not possible. It's a performative contradiction of Determinism.

So we need not refer all the way to "miracles" to consider mind. All we have to do is to consider what you and I experience every single day and every single moment of our lives, and ask, "what is going on here?"

That physics gives us no purchase on an answer is not a slander on physics: physics itself never promised us more than access to physical mechanisms and realities; it never told us it was going to be the only road to knowledge, or to deal with non-physical realities for us. It just promised to get better and better at doing what it purported to do, namely, to unpack physical realities. Whatever is super-physical, such as mind, it made us no promise to unpack. We cannot hold physics responsible for failing to do what it never promised to do at all.

And we cannot deny the existence of mind. For only a mind can do that.

A supernatural cause is above nature by definition.

*What is natural is the system of deterministic causes and effects through time and through circumstances: * what is supernatural is above and beyond times and circumstances i.e.eternal.

Brains and minds are the objective and the subjective aspects of the same entity.

[Ben JS]

What is the difference between determinism and fatalism? I hear them used interchangeably but they often get attributed to meaninglessness.

Absent from forum for 5 months.
Returns to ask this question.
Shock.

Trying to think of someone recently who left the forum that had an axe to grind with determinists.

[Immanuel Can]

'a truly causeless event' would be 'a miracle'.

No, a "miracle" would be an event with a cause, but with a supernatural one. To say, "God caused..." is not to say that something happened causelessly. That much is quite obvious, surely.

However, only in a metaphorical way can we speak of mind being a "miracle." For in a very real sense, there's nothing at all unusual about "mind." As hard as the concept may be for us to fully comprehend, we all do comprehend it on an experiential level: we all both have and use minds constantly. Ironically, to deny the existence of mind requires an exercise of mind.

So even a Determinist cannot deny the experiential reality of mind. It's just not possible. It's a performative contradiction of Determinism.

So we need not refer all the way to "miracles" to consider mind. All we have to do is to consider what you and I experience every single day and every single moment of our lives, and ask, "what is going on here?"

That physics gives us no purchase on an answer is not a slander on physics: physics itself never promised us more than access to physical mechanisms and realities; it never told us it was going to be the only road to knowledge, or to deal with non-physical realities for us. It just promised to get better and better at doing what it purported to do, namely, to unpack physical realities. Whatever is super-physical, such as mind, it made us no promise to unpack. We cannot hold physics responsible for failing to do what it never promised to do at all.

And we cannot deny the existence of mind. For only a mind can do that.

A supernatural cause is above nature by definition.

Yes...and...?

Brains and minds are the objective and the subjective aspects of the same entity.

It's more complicated than that, B. Sure "brain" is physical: but a corpse has a brain, too. Yet it's missing something. You call it "subjectivity," but the truth is, that the ability to have a subjectivity is a product of mind, not a description of it: as is the ability to reason, to think, to choose, to cogitate, to perceive, to interpret, to identify, to do science and logic, and to hold an opinion.

The brain and the mind definitely interact. Nobody doubts that. But how they do...that remains much more difficult. We can, for example, track patterns of electricity shooting around in the synapses: but we can't tell from them what opinion is being formed, or how the reasoning is going, or what choice will ensue. Clearly, the physiology is not giving us the precise content of the cognition. And that's certainly super-physical, even if you don't like the term "supernatural."

See "the mind-brain" problem in philosophical research. There's a lot on it. I recommend starting with Nagel, just to grasp the issues.

[Belinda]

'a truly causeless event' would be 'a miracle'.

I see that over and over from determinists: causeless.

Who, on our side said diddly about anything bein' causeless?

We, the free willists, just attribute and identify cause properly.

Then does the supernatural cause , God, intervene in the natural course of events?