Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed May 28, 2025 1:29 pm
Walker wrote: ↑Wed May 28, 2025 1:22 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed May 28, 2025 5:03 am
That's exactly right. Human knowledge, or lack of knowledge, cannot change the truth or falsehood of Determinism. If the universe is predetermined, it's predetermined; if it's not, it's not. What we know or believe about it cannot change what's true, anymore than it can make the earth flat or round. It will be round (or more precisely, roughly spherical), whether we like it, or know it, or not.
Whether it is or not makes not a whit of difference when it comes to Determinism, or free will, other than as a thought.
"Makes a difference" to what? One may be equally deluded either way, but still, either Determinism OR free will will be the ontological reality, regardless of what one thinks.
It's arguably even more profound an issue than the roundness of the earth. After all, one can live
as if the earth is flat, and do it rather easily, and most people, historically, have done just that; and it would change very little, unless one was something like a medieval explorer, a cosmologist or an astronaut. For ordinary people, it would change nothing.
Actually living the path of Determinism requires understanding why it is and how it is that every action of every person, is the action that person has to take, at that moment in time, due to the influence of external conditions and internal conditions, internal being proclivities, attitudes, moods, desires, aversions, emotional state, and thoughts ... including deliberations that are normally called choice in those with that need. Applying this understanding to unfolding reality generates compassion.
For everyone, any thought or action that happens, has to happen, even the apparent thoughtless actions of spontaneity. To say things could have been other than what happened is wishful thinking that does not account for all elements of the situation.
Some of the internal conditions can be guided if the person has the need to do any guiding (pain and discomfort being an indication of need). For example, lush and interesting external conditions can occupy attention, so many astronauts of the mind need spare surroundings until that river of need has been crossed and surroundings become superfluous to focusing thought.
Just because living Determinism means doing what one must do every moment, as everyone does, does not absolve one from responsibility for one’s own actions … which is the very reason why so many folks say that life sucks.
If one must do anti-social things due to limited capacity, that is a consideration in the societal punishment, but the responsibility still falls on the doer if alcoholic blackout is the defense. For example, I just read that a paraglider in China suffered frostbite when he was swept up to a high altitude. Circumstances were beyond his control, he did what he had to do to land on terra firma, but now he must face the Commie music for breaking the Law of Ceilings for Paragliders.
What does any of this have to do with Determinism? The connection is about consciously living in the Reality of Determinism which says there are no accidents, which means living like a human being rather than like a walking, talking pork chop with fantasies that things could have been different, and rather than distilling life to the dualistic simplicity of right choice or wrong choice based on the same unknown (and thus open) future that Determinists face.
The real question is, what does Determinism have to do with this thread?
No, Gary…the things they’ve actually done. Like lying about Joe Biden and his son, trying to elect K. Harris, failing on the border, defending criminals and terrorists instead of Americans, supporting wokeness, trying to preserve the bloated bureaucracy through which they’re bilking the America taxpayer, betraying blue-collar voters, jacking up the national debt, destroying the integrity of the military, mishandling Ukraine, collapsing the border, defending illegal-migrant drug lords, rapists and child-molesters, having to walk back everything they did during COVID…there’s lots of other stuff to pick from.