compatibilism

[henry quirk]

iam,

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

*rhetoric & off-topic diversion*

That's a no then.

No, you misunderstand, when he makes big quote posts of the ME: HIM: format, you're supposed to assume that the audience is laughing at you and feel ashamed.

Classic stooge tactics.

Only thing I'm ashamed about: I keep engagin' him, expectin' a different result. My unbridled optimism will be the death of me.

[iambiguous]

That's a no then.

No, you misunderstand, when he makes big quote posts of the ME: HIM: format, you're supposed to assume that the audience is laughing at you and feel ashamed.

Classic stooge tactics.

Only thing I'm ashamed about: I keep engagin' him, expectin' a different result. My unbridled optimism will be the death of me.

Right, henry, keep telling yourself that. But there they are...the points I make above that you simply wiggle, wiggle, wiggle out of responding to.

The ME/HIM scaffolding is merely to point out the enormous substantive gap between us.

And, no, I am not supposing that others should be laughing at you...only that I am.

Look, once I go into "entertainment mode" with the most hapless of objectivists among us, it's "chuckle, chuckle" all the way down. From my own rooted existentially in dasein frame of mind, our exchange here is just another rendition of my exchange with IC on the Christianity thread. The substantive gap between my reaction to those YouTube videos and his reaction to my reaction. Could it possibly be wider?

Yeah, I do think both you and he ought to be embarrassed by what you post in our "exchanges".

Unless, of course, I'm wrong.

[Flannel Jesus]

The ME/HIM scaffolding is merely to point out the enormous substantive gap between us.

How interesting, because that's exactly what it does. Perhaps not in the direction you intended though.

[iambiguous]

The ME/HIM scaffolding is merely to point out the enormous substantive gap between us.

How interesting, because that's exactly what it does. Perhaps not in the direction you intended though.

Darn! We're stuck here too!!

[Flannel Jesus]

Well, like usual, you can unstick it whenever you feel like it

[iambiguous]

Well, like usual, you can unstick it whenever you feel like it

Sorry, but it's now "chuckle, chuckle" mode with you too.


Nature just doing its thing let's call it.

[Flannel Jesus]

But of course it would be irrational to expect you to want to unstick it. You always throw the first punch, and you seem to never tire of punching.

Do you know there's ways to talk to people without punching at all?

[henry quirk]

Do you know there's ways to talk to people without punching at all?

He's not interested in talking.

The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven. CS Lewis

[iambiguous]

Do you know there's ways to talk to people without punching at all?

He's not interested in talking.

The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven. CS Lewis

Oh, I'm interested in talking henry.

For example:

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.

Mebbe becuz mind is not a product of brain?

Which 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".

Anyway, 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 imaging him reating 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...

That'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.

On the other hand, here's your idea of talking back:

iam,

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

[henry quirk]

Oh, I'm interested in talking henry.

Only about certain things, from a certain perspective, when it gives you a shot to make it all about you.

Let's consider my most recent entry to this thread...

YOU WROTE:

How are our "desires and motivations" able to "escape" a brain that is wholly in sync with the laws of matter?

Mebbe becuz mind is not a product of brain? A conclusion one might draw if one were familiar with the wholly on-the-ground-not-up-in-the-clouds results of split brain surgeries, hemispherectomies, and hands on, in the brain itself, surgical epilepsy treatments and research.

If mind is just brain product one might ask: how is it that severing the corpus callosum or removing half a brain, while physically debilitating, never affects identity or self or mind or I-ness? If mind is just brain product, how is the product is never touched by radical changes to, or subtractions from, the supposed source? If mind is just just brain product, how it is only physical seizures occur? If mind is just brain product why does no one have creativity seizures or mathematics seizures or desire seizures?

Further, if mind is just brain product, one would be justified in asking how does my brain generate "desires and motivations"? Where in my brain does my obstinacy live? What brain parts are involved? Where are my memories stored? How exactly does my brain make me?

-----

Incidentally, as I say, compatibilism, as a reconciliation between libertarian free will and necessitarianism is hooey. There is no reconciliation, only a redefining of free will to make it fit within the deterministic scheme. Compatibilism is the philo-equivalent of *Helena boxed.

*there's a for the one who gets the reference...no cheating!

Note: there's what I wanted to talk about -- the evidence for mind not being brain product, and a short repeat of my position on compatibilism. There's two points of entry to conversation. You took neither.

Here's you...

How are our "desires and motivations" able to "escape" a brain that is wholly in sync with the laws of matter?

Mebbe becuz mind is not a product of brain? A conclusion one might draw if one were familiar with the wholly on-the-ground-not-up-in-the-clouds results of split brain surgeries, hemispherectomies, and hands on, in the brain itself, surgical epilepsy treatments and research.

If mind is just brain product one might ask: how is it that severing the corpus callosum or removing half a brain, while physically debilitating, never affects identity or self or mind or I-ness? If mind is just brain product, how is the product is never touched by radical changes to, or subtractions from, the supposed source? If mind is just just brain product, how it is only physical seizures occur? If mind is just brain product why does no one have creativity seizures or mathematics seizures or desire seizures?

Further, if mind is just brain product, one would be justified in asking how does my brain generate "desires and motivations"? Where in my brain does my obstinacy live? What brain parts are involved? Where are my memories stored? How exactly does my brain make me?

-----

Incidentally, as I say, compatibilism, as a reconciliation between libertarian free will and necessitarianism is hooey. There is no reconciliation, only a redefining of free will to make it fit within the deterministic scheme. Compatibilism is the philo-equivalent of *Helena boxed.

*there's a for the one who gets the reference...no cheating!

Again, with henry it's not so much what he posts, but the manner in which he invariably communicates a flagrantly arrogant "this is the way it is and if you don't agree with me, you're flat out wrong!" inflection. Same with his take on life and liberty and property. There's his own God given assessment of them and all the idiots who disagree.

Only here it is in regard to the human brain itself!!!

As for the entangled nature of mind, there are any number of afflictions -- from tumors to brain diseases -- that can have a profound impact on the manner in which the self is grasped by any particular individual. And then pertaining to the behaviors he or she chooses.

And, again, that's assuming that we have free will at all.

But, of course, henry has his own sneering and insufferably pompous "my way or the highway" bumptiousness about him here too.

Go ahead, ask him.





On the other hand, unless he watches those 17 YouTube videos IC swears by and accepts Jesus Christ as his personal savior, his very own mind will burn in Hell for all of eternity.

Right, IC?

You talk alright, just not to me, not about anything I posted.

So, I try again...

As for the entangled nature of mind, there are any number of afflictions -- from tumors to brain diseases -- that can have a profound impact on the manner in which the self is grasped by any particular individual. And then pertaining to the behaviors he or she chooses.

One who pays attention to what's actually going on in the wholly on-the-ground-not-up-in-the-clouds research knows tumors to brain diseases often have devastating physical effects but none at all on the coherence and continuity of the I behind the eyes.

Stella's dementia is confusing and frustrating for her becuz she, the person, the mind, the I, is trapped in it. Stella hasn't become a different person, only a trapped one who acts accordingly.

Joe's brain tumor affects his sight, his mobility, his continence. He's angry about it. He's trapped, not changed.

Lucinda's Tourettes embarrasses her. The tics, the vocalizations, trap her, not turn her into a different person.

The topper is Phineas P. Gage. A large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe. Supposedly the injury effected his personality and behavior over the remaining 12 years of his life. Gage is often held up as an evidence mind is brain product.

How else can you explain his personality change, Henry?

I reckon having a disfiguring, debilitating injury would sour me too. I wouldn't be a different person, just an awfully disgruntled one.

You...

Again, with henry it's not so much what he posts, but the manner in which he invariably communicates a flagrantly arrogant "this is the way it is and if you don't agree with me, you're flat out wrong!" inflection. Same with his take on life and liberty and property. There's his own God given assessment of them and all the idiots who disagree.

Only here it is in regard to the human brain itself!!!

As for the entangled nature of mind, there are any number of afflictions -- from tumors to brain diseases -- that can have a profound impact on the manner in which the self is grasped by any particular individual. And then pertaining to the behaviors he or she chooses.

And, again, that's assuming that we have free will at all.

But, of course, henry has his own sneering and insufferably pompous "my way or the highway" bumptiousness about him here too.

Go ahead, ask him.
.

One who pays attention to what's actually going on in the wholly on-the-ground-not-up-in-the-clouds research knows tumors to brain diseases often have devastating physical effects but none at all on the coherence and continuity of the I behind the eyes.

Stella's dementia is confusing and frustrating for her becuz she, the person, the mind, the I, is trapped in it. Stella hasn't become a different person, only a trapped one who acts accordingly.

Joe's brain tumor affects his sight, his mobility, his continence. He's angry about it. He's trapped, not changed.

Lucinda's Tourettes embarrasses her. The tics, the vocalizations, trap her, not turn her into a different person.

The topper is Phineas P. Gage. A large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe. Supposedly the injury effected his personality and behavior over the remaining 12 years of his life. Gage is often held up as an evidence mind is brain product.

How else can you explain his personality change, Henry?

I reckon having a disfiguring, debilitating injury would sour me too. I wouldn't be a different person, just an awfully disgruntled one.

Again, 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.

More talk, but not on my subject (mind bein' sumthin other than brain product) or your own (compatibilism).

Me...

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.

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

I returned to this thread with...

Mebbe becuz mind is not a product of brain?

Which 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.

Anyway, 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.

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

That'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?

You...

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.

Mebbe becuz mind is not a product of brain?

Which 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".

Anyway, 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 imaging him reating 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...

That'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.

Again, lots of talkin' but nuthin' about any of the points I raised. So, I gave up...

iam,

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

Your response: predictable, like a broken watch...

Chuckle, chuckle it is then...

ME:

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.

Mebbe becuz mind is not a product of brain?

Which 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".

Anyway, 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...

That'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.

HIM:

iam,

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

Now, that is entertainment!!!

You had two avenues of legit entry to conversation. You took neither. I raised points germane to one of those avenues. You ignored them.

If my topic held no interest for you: you coulda said so and spared the forum the above sad & pointless exchange. Instead: you grand-standed

We coulda talked -- again -- on your topic, compatibilism, but -- no -- we didn't. Instead: you self-aggrandized.

I may be entertaining to you, but you're just a big time waster to me.

'nuff said.

[iambiguous]

Reconciling Determinism and Free Will: A Compatibilist Perspective
Innocent Ociti

Incompatibilists argue that if our actions are predetermined, then we cannot be said to act freely, as we have no control over them. They argue that free will requires that our actions be undetermined so that we can choose to act in one way or another. This view has been defended by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill.

Then the part where it is pointed out that the arguments the incompatibilists themselves make are no less but another inherent manifestation of the only possible reality. That's what I come back to in regard to those here I call the "free will determinists". They defend determinism. But their inflection conveys [to me] this sense that if you don't agree with them then you are wrong. As though you should change your mind and think like they do...even though how all of us think is entirely determined by brains entirely in sync with the laws of matter.

Then this equally incomprehensible [to me] contention...

Compatibilists, on the other hand, argue that free will and causal determinism can coexist. They argue that even if our actions are determined by prior causes, we can still act freely and take responsibility for our actions. They argue that free will is not the ability to act in a way that is completely independent of prior causes, but rather the ability to act on our desires and motivations. This view has been defended by philosophers such as David Hume and Daniel Dennett.

As though when it comes to our desires and motivations, well, suddenly our material brain wholly in sync with the laws of nature in regard to "external" variables in our lives "somehow" switches over to autonomy in regard to these "internal" variables.

What we want and what we want to want are dealt with differently by our brains.

And, sure, God or No God, that might well be the case. But, from my own compelled or not compelled frame of mind, what some here do is merely to make that distinction philosophically. It is argued into existence by brains some determinists insist only argue what they could never have not argued.

[iambiguous]

You had two avenues of legit entry to conversation. You took neither. I raised points germane to one of those avenues. You ignored them.

If my topic held no interest for you: you coulda said so and spared the forum the above sad & pointless exchange. Instead: you grand-standed

We coulda talked -- again -- on your topic, compatibilism, but -- no -- we didn't. Instead: you self-aggrandized.

I may be entertaining to you, but you're just a big time waster to me.

'nuff said.

Absolutely shameless!

If nature says so itself.

[attofishpi]

But, from my own compelled or not compelled frame of mind, what some here do is merely to make that distinction philosophically. It is argued into existence by brains some determinists insist only argue what they could never have not argued.

..and what a pathetic fucking universe that would be.

[iambiguous]

But, from my own compelled or not compelled frame of mind, what some here do is merely to make that distinction philosophically. It is argued into existence by brains some determinists insist only argue what they could never have not argued.

..and what a pathetic fucking universe that would be.

Click.

Okay, I flat-out admit this can only be my own rooted existentially in dasein personal opinion, but it is truly demoralizing to come to a forum derived from Philosophy Now magazine and encounter posters of this ilk. What on Earth are they doing here when they would fit in so much more seamlessly here -- https://ilovephilosophy.com/index.php -- instead?

[attofishpi]

But, from my own compelled or not compelled frame of mind, what some here do is merely to make that distinction philosophically. It is argued into existence by brains some determinists insist only argue what they could never have not argued.

..and what a pathetic fucking universe that would be.

Click.

Okay, I flat-out admit this can only be my own rooted existentially in dasein personal opinion, but it is truly demoralizing to come to a forum derived from Philosophy Now magazine and encounter posters of this ilk.

What's your actual counter to my point - that the universe is NOT pathetic that all arguments that ever take place for so long as entropy allows are somehow automatic, determined, that they are the only arguments that could ever exist.
I remain with my statement, that such a universe is pathetic and certainly only an atheist could be of such an opinion. (and didn't remark that u had this opinion, I merely pointed out that such a universe is pathetic\absurd).