Philosophy Now Forum

Compatibilism is determinism with a slight modification for the sake of appearances and for our language use. It is a position taken because of the perceived need to have some idea of accountability or responsibility for human behavior.

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 1:00 pm

Compatibilism is determinism with a slight modification for the sake of appearances and for our language use. It is a position taken because of the perceived need to have some idea of accountability or responsibility for human behavior.

I don't think this is correct. It's not for the sake of appearances, or language or a need for accountability.

I think it comes from a recognition that libertarian free-will can't logically exist. Decisions and actions come from some state of the person and the situation. The only alternative would require random decisions and acts detached from reality. That doesn't seem to be happening. And it would be fatal if it did because evolutionary survival requires an adaptation to the environment.
So the only sort of free-will that seems to exist is a freedom from external pressure.
Why not just say that there is no free-will ? Because people are thinking and making decisions, so there is a difference between people and inanimate objects. Freedom and free-will describe that difference. Hard determinism says that there is no essential difference between a person and a rock.

As for accountability and responsibility, you don't need libertarian free-will to assign it.

Some person or thing does something. It gets a reaction from people.

At one point, I gave the example of a flat tire ... It's not morally responsible for being flat but it gets patched or replaced if we want to ride our bicycle or drive our car. We don't sit around saying " It's not morally responsible so we can't do anything about it".

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 1:00 pm I think it comes from a recognition that libertarian free-will can't logically exist.

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 1:00 pm Decisions and actions come from some state of the person and the situation.

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 1:00 pm The only alternative would require random decisions and acts detached from reality. That doesn't seem to be happening.

iambiguous wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2023 7:36 pm

read a few books by Oliver Sacks in order to note just how far medical afflictions can yank "I" into all manner of fantastical directions.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2023 1:15 amMebbe becuz mind is not a product of brain?

Though more in alignment with your point they do note that...

No -- click -- I'm suggesting that, given an introspective wild ass guess and given further the gap between what I think I know about the human brain going back to how it fits into all that I don't know about the existence of existence itself, if the human brain is wholly in sync with the laws of matter then how can everything -- anything -- that we think, feel, say and do not be an inherent component of the only possible world?

Now, basically, what you argue from my frame of mind is that this can't be true because it would be intolerable. As you noted above...

It's his basic idea that the brain and "laws of nature" compel everything that determinists and compatibilists think.

And therefore, all thoughts and ideas are equivalent and meaningless. True and false mean nothing. Reasoning is no different than non-reasoning.[/b]

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 1:29 amI have written about it many times in plain language and you still have no idea what I'm saying about determinism, compatibilism and free-will.

[Compatibilists] believe what they do only because they were never able not to believe it. So, compatibilists reconcile an inevitable, wholly determined abortion with moral responsibility but only because every single component of their brain, in sync with the laws of matter, compels them to? Is that what they are concluding? Not that moral responsibility actually is reconcilable with determinism, but that the compatibilists thinking that it is is?

It simply makes no sense to me "here and now" that if Mary was unable not to abort her unborn baby, that she can still be held morally responsible for doing so. Unless, when someone does hold her morally responsible, they do so, in turn, only because they were never able not to...in a world where all of our brains are entirely in sync with the laws of matter. And thus everything that we think and feel and say and do is but an inherent, necessary manifestation of the only possible reality.

Then "the gap" and "Rummy's Rule" in regard to grasping how the human condition fits into the ontological -- teleological? -- understanding of the existence of existence itself.

So, therefore, we must have free will! The horror of living in a world where our brains really do compel us in the waking world to think, feel, say and do that which we are never able not to...just as it does in the dreamworld.

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 1:29 amThat's not what I'm saying.

Okay, phrase it and use it in the most technically correct manner. How would determinists who are also "serious philosophers" construe Mary and Jane? How you do? Or, rather, how I construe you doing so: basically arguing "determinism...free will? What's the difference"

To Jane? Still being around for one thing.

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 1:29 amWhy don't you look it up on the internet or in a book.

There's no point in me doing it because I can't seem to write anything that you are able to understand.

Try a better writer.

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 1:29 amA recurring theme ... whatever you say and do is somehow untouchable.

How arrogant and egotistical can you get?

[quoteCome on, you're the one here talking about determinism, free will, and compatibilism as though only how you understand them is the correct way...

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 1:29 amLots of people understand it in reasonable ways that vary from mine.

They don't babble, make things up and write/talk without any knowledge of the subject.

To witless:

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 1:29 amWho is witless?

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 1:29 amStop misinterpreting determinism, compatibilism and free-will and I won't come in to correct you.

The problem is that left alone, you spread misinformation.

That's bad.

Then the part that particularly intrigues me: the part where you can't, won't, don't explain how your own commitment to free will and objective morality ultimately comes back to God and/or religion.

Sure, when you can fall back on them your conclusions are then in sync with the Divine itself!

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 1:29 amThe topic isn't God or religion.

There's a Christianity thread for that.

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 5:54 pm You'll do better at grasping how their intertwined if you took the time to understand their definitions individually.

For example the definition of compatibilism. Have you grasped yet that it doesn't involve making exceptions for determinism in bifurcated brains?

henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 4:49 pm

iambiguous wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2023 7:36 pm

read a few books by Oliver Sacks in order to note just how far medical afflictions can yank "I" into all manner of fantastical directions.

Or consider this opinion piece from the New York Times:

Your Brain, Your Disease, Your Self

By Nina Strohminger and Shaun Nichols

WHEN does the deterioration of your brain rob you of your identity, and when does it not?

Alzheimer’s, the neurodegenerative disease that erodes old memories and the ability to form new ones, has a reputation as a ruthless plunderer of selfhood. People with the disease may no longer seem like themselves.

Neurodegenerative diseases that target the motor system, like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, can lead to equally devastating consequences: difficulty moving, walking, speaking and eventually, swallowing and breathing. Yet they do not seem to threaten the fabric of selfhood in quite the same way.

Memory, it seems, is central to identity. And indeed, many philosophers and psychologists have supposed as much. This idea is intuitive enough, for what captures our personal trajectory through life better than the vault of our recollections?

But maybe this conventional wisdom is wrong. After all, the array of cognitive faculties affected by neurodegenerative diseases is vast: language, emotion, visual processing, personality, intelligence, moral behavior. Perhaps some of these play a role in securing a person’s identity.

The challenge in trying in determine what parts of the mind contribute to personal identity is that each neurodegenerative disease can affect many cognitive systems, with the exact constellation of symptoms manifesting differently from one patient to the next. For instance, some Alzheimer’s patients experience only memory loss, whereas others also experience personality change or impaired visual recognition.

The only way to tease apart which changes render someone unrecognizable is to compare all such symptoms, across multiple diseases. And that’s just what we did, in a study published this month in Psychological Science.

What we found runs counter to what many people might expect, and certainly what most psychologists would have guessed: The single most powerful predictor of identity change was not disruption to memory — but rather disruption to the moral faculty.

We surveyed 248 family members of people who had one of three types of neurodegenerative disease: Alzheimer’s, A.L.S. or frontotemporal dementia.

Frontotemporal dementia is the second most common form of dementia after Alzheimer’s. It obliterates executive function in the brain, impairing self-control and scrambling the moral compass. People with the disease are prone to antisocial outbursts, apathy, pathological lying, stealing and sexual infidelity.

In one part of the survey, we asked the family members questions designed to evaluate identity persistence. For instance, did they feel like they still knew who the patient was? Did the patient ever seem like a stranger?

We found that people with frontotemporal dementia exhibited the highest degree of identity change, and that people with A.L.S. exhibited the least. People with Alzheimer’s were somewhere between these two extremes.

While this result was suggestive, it still didn’t tell us which specific symptoms were causing the patients to no longer seem like themselves. For this, we would need to collect a detailed history of the scope and extent of the symptoms that each patient had experienced.

So in another part of the survey, we asked about basic cognitive faculties, like executing voluntary movements and object recognition; about the patient’s memory for words and facts and autobiographical details; about emotional changes like agitation and depression; about nonmoral personality change, like extroversion, sense of humor, creativity and intelligence; and about moral character and moral behavior changes, such as empathy, honesty and compassion.

We found that disruptions to the moral faculty created a powerful sense that the patient’s identity had been compromised. Virtually no other mental impairment led people to stop seeming like themselves. This included amnesia, personality change, loss of intelligence, emotional disturbances and the ability to perform basic daily tasks.

For those with Alzheimer’s, neither degree nor type of memory impairment impacted perceived identity. All that mattered was whether their moral capacities remained intact.

Though more in alignment with your point they do note that...

As monstrous as neurodegenerative disease is, its powers of identity theft have been greatly exaggerated. Remarkably, a person can undergo significant cognitive change and still come across as fundamentally the same person.

What makes us recognizable to others resides almost entirely within a relatively narrow band of cognitive functioning. It is only when our grip on the moral universe loosens that our identity slips away with it.

Again, it can vary considerably from person to person. But the fact is that any number of afflicted individuals can lose that grip on their "moral compass".

I merely interject here and suggest that our moral compass itself is not derived from IC's Christian God or from your Deist God or from the APA; that instead it is rooted existentially [historically, culturally, experientially] in dasein.

Then the classic case of Charles Whitman: https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... in-damage/

It's just that in regard to the free will debate, the brains of hardcore determinists compel them to insist that everything that everyone of us [diseased or not] think, feel, say and do is but an inherent manifestation of the laws of matter.

In other words, of the only possible reality.

Yes, henry quirk, you too are but one more of nature's meat minds.

That's an odd recommendation considering I don't dispute folks respond or react to physical or mental afflictions.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2023 1:15 amMebbe becuz mind is not a product of brain?

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2023 1:15 amWhich was, is, my initial response to your question: How are our "desires and motivations" able to "escape" a brain that is wholly in sync with the laws of matter?

I do not argue that brain (or body) does not affect mind. I only argue mind is not the product of brain.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2023 1:15 amAnyway, I've read Sacks. For an alternate view I suggest you read The Mystery of the Mind : A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain by Wilder Penfield.

[Compatibilists] believe what they do only because they were never able not to believe it. So, compatibilists reconcile an inevitable, wholly determined abortion with moral responsibility but only because every single component of their brain, in sync with the laws of matter, compels them to? Is that what they are concluding? Not that moral responsibility actually is reconcilable with determinism, but that the compatibilists thinking that it is is?

It simply makes no sense to me "here and now" that if Mary was unable not to abort her unborn baby, that she can still be held morally responsible for doing so. Unless, when someone does hold her morally responsible, they do so, in turn, only because they were never able not to...in a world where all of our brains are entirely in sync with the laws of matter. And thus everything that we think and feel and say and do is but an inherent, necessary manifestation of the only possible reality.

Then "the gap" and "Rummy's Rule" in regard to grasping how the human condition fits into the ontological -- teleological? -- understanding of the existence of existence itself.

Though more in alignment with your point they do note that...

henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 4:49 pmThat's interesting but not germane to my point: mind is not the product of brain.

A person's moral compass or facility can be inhibited or lost (as in lost sight of) for all kinds of reasons. Most commonly: the existential crisis prompted by a life-changing event. You yourself have spoken of your own fracturing event. Did you become another person, or dd you simply become a person who lost his way?

iambiguous wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 6:55 pm

henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 4:49 pm

iambiguous wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2023 7:36 pm

read a few books by Oliver Sacks in order to note just how far medical afflictions can yank "I" into all manner of fantastical directions.

Or consider this opinion piece from the New York Times:

Your Brain, Your Disease, Your Self

By Nina Strohminger and Shaun Nichols

WHEN does the deterioration of your brain rob you of your identity, and when does it not?

Alzheimer’s, the neurodegenerative disease that erodes old memories and the ability to form new ones, has a reputation as a ruthless plunderer of selfhood. People with the disease may no longer seem like themselves.

Neurodegenerative diseases that target the motor system, like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, can lead to equally devastating consequences: difficulty moving, walking, speaking and eventually, swallowing and breathing. Yet they do not seem to threaten the fabric of selfhood in quite the same way.

Memory, it seems, is central to identity. And indeed, many philosophers and psychologists have supposed as much. This idea is intuitive enough, for what captures our personal trajectory through life better than the vault of our recollections?

But maybe this conventional wisdom is wrong. After all, the array of cognitive faculties affected by neurodegenerative diseases is vast: language, emotion, visual processing, personality, intelligence, moral behavior. Perhaps some of these play a role in securing a person’s identity.

The challenge in trying in determine what parts of the mind contribute to personal identity is that each neurodegenerative disease can affect many cognitive systems, with the exact constellation of symptoms manifesting differently from one patient to the next. For instance, some Alzheimer’s patients experience only memory loss, whereas others also experience personality change or impaired visual recognition.

The only way to tease apart which changes render someone unrecognizable is to compare all such symptoms, across multiple diseases. And that’s just what we did, in a study published this month in Psychological Science.

What we found runs counter to what many people might expect, and certainly what most psychologists would have guessed: The single most powerful predictor of identity change was not disruption to memory — but rather disruption to the moral faculty.

We surveyed 248 family members of people who had one of three types of neurodegenerative disease: Alzheimer’s, A.L.S. or frontotemporal dementia.

Frontotemporal dementia is the second most common form of dementia after Alzheimer’s. It obliterates executive function in the brain, impairing self-control and scrambling the moral compass. People with the disease are prone to antisocial outbursts, apathy, pathological lying, stealing and sexual infidelity.

In one part of the survey, we asked the family members questions designed to evaluate identity persistence. For instance, did they feel like they still knew who the patient was? Did the patient ever seem like a stranger?

We found that people with frontotemporal dementia exhibited the highest degree of identity change, and that people with A.L.S. exhibited the least. People with Alzheimer’s were somewhere between these two extremes.

While this result was suggestive, it still didn’t tell us which specific symptoms were causing the patients to no longer seem like themselves. For this, we would need to collect a detailed history of the scope and extent of the symptoms that each patient had experienced.

So in another part of the survey, we asked about basic cognitive faculties, like executing voluntary movements and object recognition; about the patient’s memory for words and facts and autobiographical details; about emotional changes like agitation and depression; about nonmoral personality change, like extroversion, sense of humor, creativity and intelligence; and about moral character and moral behavior changes, such as empathy, honesty and compassion.

We found that disruptions to the moral faculty created a powerful sense that the patient’s identity had been compromised. Virtually no other mental impairment led people to stop seeming like themselves. This included amnesia, personality change, loss of intelligence, emotional disturbances and the ability to perform basic daily tasks.

For those with Alzheimer’s, neither degree nor type of memory impairment impacted perceived identity. All that mattered was whether their moral capacities remained intact.

Though more in alignment with your point they do note that...

As monstrous as neurodegenerative disease is, its powers of identity theft have been greatly exaggerated. Remarkably, a person can undergo significant cognitive change and still come across as fundamentally the same person.

What makes us recognizable to others resides almost entirely within a relatively narrow band of cognitive functioning. It is only when our grip on the moral universe loosens that our identity slips away with it.

Again, it can vary considerably from person to person. But the fact is that any number of afflicted individuals can lose that grip on their "moral compass".

I merely interject here and suggest that our moral compass itself is not derived from IC's Christian God or from your Deist God or from the APA; that instead it is rooted existentially [historically, culturally, experientially] in dasein.

Then the classic case of Charles Whitman: https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... in-damage/

It's just that in regard to the free will debate, the brains of hardcore determinists compel them to insist that everything that everyone of us [diseased or not] think, feel, say and do is but an inherent manifestation of the laws of matter.

In other words, of the only possible reality.

Yes, henry quirk, you too are but one more of nature's meat minds.

That's an odd recommendation considering I don't dispute folks respond or react to physical or mental afflictions.

Come on, henry, you yammer on and on regarding your God given logical assessment of morality and life and liberty and property. And yet as noted in both assessments above, given a particular affliction, you may well find yourself behaving in ways that spin your own moral compass and political prejudices around and around and around.

Look what happened to Leonard Shelby in Memento. He gets afflicted and winds up convincing himself he is morally justified in committing murder. Only his mind is so reconfigured by his affliction, he ends up killing the wrong guy! The guy that was actually trying to help him!! He should have shot himself?

The whole point of the film is about self-deception. It's about how tricky differentiating lies and the truth can be. Even without a brain disease: https://collider.com/memento-movie-expl ... %20insulin.

Instead, what hardcore objectivists like you do is to swallow hook, line and sinker the belief that God created you with the capacity to divide the world up between "us" [the heroes] and "them" [the villains]. Those who grasp the objective truth about life, liberty and property and the "the fools" who don't.

The only difference with you being that, from the perspective of fiercely fanatic objectivists like Satyr, you are weak...you still need a God, the God to fall back on. Just as you need a God, the God to pin down the objective truth about free will. It must exist because God Himself installed it in you.

Sans God, however, and all you really have are your definitions and deductions in order to define and to deduce free will into existence in your own rendition of an intellectual contraption cloud.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2023 1:15 amMebbe becuz mind is not a product of brain?

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2023 1:15 amWhich was, is, my initial response to your question: How are our "desires and motivations" able to "escape" a brain that is wholly in sync with the laws of matter?

I do not argue that brain (or body) does not affect mind. I only argue mind is not the product of brain.

Of course not. Ultimately, human brains are the product of the Deist God. If there is a distinction between mind and brain that's His doing. He just split the scene once bringing it all about. Or however you connect the dots here "in your head".

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2023 1:15 amAnyway, I've read Sacks. For an alternate view I suggest you read The Mystery of the Mind : A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain by Wilder Penfield.

Okay, tell me how you imagine him reacting to this...

[Compatibilists] believe what they do only because they were never able not to believe it. So, compatibilists reconcile an inevitable, wholly determined abortion with moral responsibility but only because every single component of their brain, in sync with the laws of matter, compels them to? Is that what they are concluding? Not that moral responsibility actually is reconcilable with determinism, but that the compatibilists thinking that it is is?

It simply makes no sense to me "here and now" that if Mary was unable not to abort her unborn baby, that she can still be held morally responsible for doing so. Unless, when someone does hold her morally responsible, they do so, in turn, only because they were never able not to...in a world where all of our brains are entirely in sync with the laws of matter. And thus everything that we think and feel and say and do is but an inherent, necessary manifestation of the only possible reality.

Then "the gap" and "Rummy's Rule" in regard to grasping how the human condition fits into the ontological -- teleological? -- understanding of the existence of existence itself.

If it impresses me, I promise to read it.

Though more in alignment with your point they do note that...

henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 4:49 pmThat's interesting but not germane to my point: mind is not the product of brain.

A person's moral compass or facility can be inhibited or lost (as in lost sight of) for all kinds of reasons. Most commonly: the existential crisis prompted by a life-changing event. You yourself have spoken of your own fracturing event. Did you become another person, or dd you simply become a person who lost his way?

Well, let's just say that our "bottom lines" here are clearly different.

Yes, I am the same person [physically] from the cradle to the grave. But what is crucial in our interactions with others is not that so much as the behaviors that we choose with and around others. It's those behaviors that produce actual consequences. And if Charles Whitman would never have gone up into that tower and killed 14 people before the brain tumor, but did afterwards, what will matter most to the victims and their loved ones...the fact that physically he was the same person?

No, what makes his case so intriguing revolves precisely around the question of whether morally, he should be held responsible for that. Some argued that the brain tumor precipitated that change in behavior and since the tumor was beyond his control he was not morally responsible.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 7:29 pm iam,

So we're not gonna talk about mind as being, or not being, a product of brain, yeah?

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Fri Aug 11, 2023 1:57 pm Yes, entertainment truly is just quoting the posts that were made.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 7:29 pm iam,

So we're not gonna talk about mind as being, or not being, a product of brain, yeah?

iambiguous wrote: ↑Fri Aug 11, 2023 1:30 pm*rhetoric & off-topic diversion*

henry quirk wrote: ↑Fri Aug 11, 2023 2:11 pm

henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 7:29 pm iam,

So we're not gonna talk about mind as being, or not being, a product of brain, yeah?

iambiguous wrote: ↑Fri Aug 11, 2023 1:30 pm*rhetoric & off-topic diversion*

That's a no then.