Philosophy Now Forum

seeds wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2025 11:28 pm _______

Notes: KIV
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Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2025 9:45 pm

Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2025 9:41 pm

seeds wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2025 3:17 pm
That's kind of like saying that the difference between life and death, or, better yet, the difference between existence and nonexistence is a difference of degree.

You make no sense, because you cannot apply some sort of scale of degrees to absolute polar opposites, for it is either one or the other with nothing (no degrees) in between.
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But a dead person has no free will whatsoever. The difference of degree concerning free will applies only to the living. For instance a newborn baby has less free will than a two year old.

A newborn baby, or a two-year-old toddler, or a 30-year-old adult, right on up to a centenarian, all have equal amounts of free will. And that's because "free will" is an intrinsic aspect of their "I Am-ness" (of their eternal "soul") which came into existence at the moment of birth.

Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2025 9:45 pm ...You talk about free will as if it were an indwelling ghost.

Yes, because that is precisely what it is.

However, I would reword that to say that free will is an indwelling (again, intrinsic) feature of the proverbial "ghost" in the machine.

Ironically, the phrase "ghost in the machine" is the opposite of how we should be viewing our situation, for, in truth, it is the machine that is the ghost (illusion) relative to what lies inside the machine.
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seeds wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2025 11:27 pm Furthermore, no disrespect intended, but I've never been able to get past Žižek's ssslurring and nose swiping long enough to ever understand anything he talks about.

Huar huar huar!

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sat Mar 01, 2025 12:39 am https://mindmatters.ai/wp-content/uploa ... Menuge.pdf

Good stuff there, henry, ---> right up my alley.
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I think people who become religious become so because that is what their ability is at that given time. Science takes understanding, religions take belief with no true foundation or evidence, and this they pass off as a virtue. If reason did not get them there, reason will not fluster them, it is a steady course of ignorance, sacred ignorance. Fast food security!

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sat Mar 01, 2025 12:39 am https://mindmatters.ai/wp-content/uploa ... Menuge.pdf

You can always depend on a theist to deliver the same BS. Mind is what the brain ponders and remembers; in short, the perspectives which the brain creates and subscribes to as experience and qualia including all its subjectivities. There is no mind without the brain's infrastructure and manufacture. The latter is the physical pedestal upon which the former is derived as content.

seeds wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2025 11:30 pm

Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2025 9:45 pm

Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2025 9:41 pm
But a dead person has no free will whatsoever. The difference of degree concerning free will applies only to the living. For instance a newborn baby has less free will than a two year old.

A newborn baby, or a two-year-old toddler, or a 30-year-old adult, right on up to a centenarian, all have equal amounts of free will. And that's because "free will" is an intrinsic aspect of their "I Am-ness" (of their eternal "soul") which came into existence at the moment of birth.

Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2025 9:45 pm ...You talk about free will as if it were an indwelling ghost.

Yes, because that is precisely what it is.

However, I would reword that to say that free will is an indwelling (again, intrinsic) feature of the proverbial "ghost" in the machine.

Ironically, the phrase "ghost in the machine" is the opposite of how we should be viewing our situation, for, in truth, it is the machine that is the ghost (illusion) relative to what lies inside the machine.
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While I disagree with your ontological stance I appreciate your seriousness, explicitness, and directness without that flippancy that spoils this forum.

You wrote : Ironically, the phrase "ghost in the machine" is the opposite of how we should be viewing our situation, for, in truth, it is the machine that is the ghost (illusion) relative to what lies inside the machine.




I too prefer substance idealism. What substance idealism implies for me is that there are two substances implicated: mind and matter, and that mind is that which makes order out of the chaos of sensory perception. God is not mind but is that which mind seeks out and creates as its main driving force. I think the difference between your idea of God and my idea of God is that is that God is all immanent whereas your idea is that God is the same today, yesterday and forever more.

Dubious wrote: ↑Sat Mar 01, 2025 4:56 am

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sat Mar 01, 2025 12:39 am https://mindmatters.ai/wp-content/uploa ... Menuge.pdf

You can always depend on a theist to deliver the same BS. Mind is what the brain ponders and remembers; in short, the perspectives which the brain creates and subscribes to as experience and qualia including all its subjectivities. There is no mind without the brain's infrastructure and manufacture. The latter is the physical pedestal upon which the former is derived as content.

While the positives you write about the brain are true, the brain (i.e. material , measurable stuff) is not necessarily the basic substance. Why not claim that body is created by mind. Both are true, mind and matter. The one is not the cause of the other : each is an aspect of nature, or in God-language each is an aspect of God, or in scientific -language each is an interpretation of bare phenomena.

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2025 12:27 pm

seeds wrote: ↑Thu Feb 27, 2025 8:41 pm

BigMike wrote: ↑Thu Feb 27, 2025 4:31 pm Is there, anywhere in the vast reaches of the internet, a philosophy forum where arguments based on observable, repeatable facts don’t get dismissed...?...Because if such a place exists, I’d love to hear about it. A place where people actually engage with reality....

Yes, there are such forums.

However, they're not called "philosophy" forums, no, they are called "science" forums, where closed-minded, superficial thinkers (such as yourself) can congregate to discuss the superficial features of what they collectively (and falsely) believe "reality" to be, when, in truth, they are merely focusing on and addressing reality's thin "veneer."

BigMike wrote: ↑Thu Feb 27, 2025 4:31 pm Frankly, the sheer cowardice of it all is exhausting.

Well, from my perspective, the actual "cowards" are those who are afraid to "think outside the box" of dogmatic and hardcore materialism.

Indeed, the "cowards of materialism" prefer the safety of the box-like enclosure of their familiar and measurable surroundings.

And even though they haven't the slightest clue as to how the box came into existence, their own self-imposed rules which determine who is qualified to remain inside the box, does not permit the insiders to even speculatively imagine what might lie beyond the walls of the box, for if they do, their coveted membership in the "Inside the Box Thinkers" Club® will be revoked.

BigMike wrote: ↑Thu Feb 27, 2025 4:31 pm The perpetual dance of “Well, we can never really know” followed immediately by “But I know determinism can’t be true” is the kind of dishonest nonsense that makes productive discussion impossible.

Hmmm, that kind of sounds like the person who implies that they "know" there is no such thing as "free will."

I personally have no problem in thinking that there are deterministic processes at play in the ongoing development and workings of the material universe.

However, the idea that these processes extend into the sovereign and autonomous domain of a human mind where the possessor of free will resides, is a step too far, and is the problem associated with the materialist's refusal ("cowardice") to venture beyond the rigid (but safe) boundaries of the abovementioned "box thinking."
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To be fair to BigMike, you seem to post like someone who believes they have incontrovertible proof that there is free will. how do you know there is free will? How do you know hard determinism isn't the case? Where's the scientific evidence? Does any exist?

There is plenty of incontrovertible phenomenal evidence. But the interpretation of that evidence is subject to the interpreter's ontological stance.

seeds wrote: ↑Sat Mar 01, 2025 4:09 am

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sat Mar 01, 2025 12:39 am https://mindmatters.ai/wp-content/uploa ... Menuge.pdf

Good stuff there, henry, ---> right up my alley.
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You're welcome!

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2025 2:01 pm God, I hate to admit it, but AJ seems to be right. I am dominated by moods. Sometimes those moods lead me to remorse and sometimes those moods lead me to argue with just about everyone. I have no allies; it's only me and I act as though I have to be more "right" than anyone else.

My understanding goes like this: everyone in the political and social world reacts emotionally to events and propositions. And we live in a mediated world (media) that exploits emotions and reactive sentimentality.

There are 2-3 incidents that can be examined to understand this. Pay attention to your immediate, visceral reactions when you read my references:

1) The Charlottesville protest (Unite The Right) and what happened there.

2) The death of George Floyd.

3) The killing of Ahmaud Arbury and the incarceration of the men who tried to apprehend him.

It is those incidents in which a “narrative description” is established, and built on and maintained, where the exploited emotional tendency is noticeable. These are incidents of mass-manipulation and involve exploiting the “moods” of the masses.

Each incident I refer to, when analyzed more closely than surface emotional reaction can allow, reveals a more complex situation. It cannot be presented merely through a “binary” good/bad interpretive reading.

I suggest that the entire populace of our country has been primed and inculcated in this sort of reactiveness. Why this is and how it came about requires study. It is not simple. You have to stand back from the entire horizon in order to examine it. But here is the key: the examination is really self-examination. One gets “emotionally married” to narratives and one invests personally in them. When these narrative pictures are confronted one is primed to “take it personally” and to react as if one’s own self is being attacked.

I do indeed suggest that in each of the incidents I numbered above that there is a fuller picture that when understood will change how one feels about that narrative picture presented by media and by the mob (as it were).

But that sort of analytic work is generally speaking beyond the grasp and capabilities of 99.9% of people. They have no time. The narratives and their import have been established and settled and are now history.

Many who write here do not have independent mental frameworks so all discussion usually becomes moody bickering. But usually the emoted reaction I refer to is in those controversial areas that are the hot topics of our day.

NB: The now on-going emoted interpretation of the Zelensky-Trump confrontation is I think nicely illustrative of this problem of being “primed to react”. How the conflict is framed, who frames it and why they frame it, are complex questions where, behind the scenes, massive interests jockey for position.

It is pretty stunning to read how the Opposition to the present administration portrays (interprets, spins) the blow-up.

Similarly how the Supportive Faction does the same.

But the actual incident, in a larger context, is “lost sight of” as emotionalized factions construct their proper and true interpretations.

It becomes irrelevant to the self-importance of those fighting it out in public as well as in their own heads … to the degree that their viewpoints become reactive and emoted. And the viewer, like at a staged wrestling match, take up the side they have been primed to take.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Mar 01, 2025 3:09 pm NB: The now on-going emoted interpretation of the Zelensky-Trump confrontation is I think nicely illustrative of this problem of being “primed to react”. How the conflict is framed, who frames it and why they frame it, are complex questions where, behind the scenes, massive interests jockey for position.

It is pretty stunning to read how the Opposition to the present administration portrays (interprets, spins) the blow-up.

Similarly how the Supportive Faction does the same.

But the actual incident, in a larger context, is “lost sight of” as emotionalized factions construct their proper and true interpretations.

It becomes irrelevant to the self-importance of those fighting it out in public as well as in their own heads … to the degree that their viewpoints become reactive and emoted. And the viewer, like at a staged wrestling match, take up the side they have been primed to take.

The political left aims to educate people so they can select the most reliable sources.
If you were a trained historiographer , or criminal detective, for instance, you would be aware which sources are reliable and which are not. It's not hard to know which sources are disinterested.

popeye1945 wrote: ↑Sat Mar 01, 2025 4:42 am I think people who become religious become so because that is what their ability is at that given time.

Isn't it more accurate to assume that people become religious due to the brain-washing indoctrination they receive soon after being born?

And regardless of the absurdity of the doctrines they are subjected to, most remain religious due to the even greater absurdity in thinking that the unfathomable order of the universe is a product of chance.
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