Philosophy Now Forum

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 8:38 pm Aw, RC...the poor guy can't help himself.

He's the unthinking pawn of prior insentient causal forces. He has to be irrational...he has no choice.

I detect a bulge in your cheek.

RCSaunders wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 9:01 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 8:38 pm Aw, RC...the poor guy can't help himself.

He's the unthinking pawn of prior insentient causal forces. He has to be irrational...he has no choice.

I detect a bulge in your cheek.

There might be. But which cheek?

RCSaunders wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 8:17 pm

Sculptor wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 6:37 pm

RCSaunders wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 4:04 am
You do realize, since you are not a volitional being able and required to consciously choose what you think and do, that the sentence, "Free will is an invention of religion; wholly political, and has no metaphysical basis," means nothing at all; because, whatever you do (or write) is determined by something other than your choice, like a dead tree falling in the woods, it's just a meaningless physical event. Right?

[Of course if you answer it won't mean anything either since it will just be something that physics caused you to do.]

Every thing I say has meaning precisely because I am determined to say it.
Where I to have used "free will" my words would be meaningless and capricious.
As it is, what I say is result of a long chain of learning that caused my opinions to grow and be assessed by my brain.

Well I have no idea if what you are saying has any meaning or not, since some long irrational (i.e. unjudged and unchosen) long chain of causes, caused you to say it. I see no difference between your view: "Every thing I say has meaning precisely because I am determined to say it," and the religious who say, "Every thing I say has meaning because God determined my saying it." It's a kind of secularized superstition.

Then maybe you should try to think a bit more clearly?
It's not rocket science. What I say is based on learning and experience. If I were "free" - what ever that's supposed to mean, what I say could just as well be shit pulled out of the air.

Of course it does let you off the hook for being responsible for what you do, since you don't choose to do it.

Being determined does not mean I do not make choices. It just means those choices are related to something a bit more "concrete" than airy fairy bullshit.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 8:37 pm

Sculptor wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 6:35 pm ad verecundiam fallacy

Fallacy fallacy again.

Read:

"The ad verecundiam fallacy concerns appeals to authority or expertise. Fundamentally, the fallacy involves accepting as evidence for a proposition the pronouncement of someone who is taken to be an authority but is not really an authority." -- Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy

You couldn't even get one message without messing it up. Charming.

You can claim fallacy fallacy as much as you like. But you have committed the fallacy whether you want to own it or not.

You are relying on expert witnesses, that you do not understand, nor do you realise that their views have long been superseded by science.

Immanuel Can wrote:

Meanwhile, reason is a morally neutral calculating method, like maths.

You would say that! But as a matter of fact you are wrong.

It has been shown beyond all reasonable doubt that moral ability is indispensable for reasoning.
Jesus, the OT prophets, Socrates, Buddha, and Confucius all reasoned skillfully and with empathy. Sympathy is a necessary biological basis for learning.

Well known bad men are and were deficient in reason probably because they were deficient in ordinary human sympathy.

Henry, you are correct according to what seems to be your idea of what free will is. You are devoted to common sense.

Metaphysics is not understood by common sense alone and requires you sometimes to think counter -intuitively and imaginatively.

Sculptor wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2020 9:49 am You are relying on expert witnesses, that you do not understand, nor do you realise that their views have long been superseded by science.

You are so funny sometimes.

You've got an idea that "expert witness" does not include "scientist"? And you think "science" is the same as "philosophy," and has now "superseded" it? Welcome to the philosophy forum. You'll find scientists here, and you'll also find that science and the philosophy of science are not coextensive.

But carry on...how has "science" superseded "the views of the "experts" at Stanford? Give me one such case.

Belinda wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2020 11:39 am Immanuel Can wrote:

Meanwhile, reason is a morally neutral calculating method, like maths.

You would say that! But as a matter of fact you are wrong.

It has been shown beyond all reasonable doubt that moral ability is indispensable for reasoning.

Feel free to explain how it was "showed". I don't think you'll find that's true, but if you've got an explanation, I'd be interested.

Jesus, the OT prophets, Socrates, Buddha, and Confucius all reasoned skillfully and with empathy. Sympathy is a necessary biological basis for learning.

Empathy and sympathy may not even be the same thing, if you look at the literature on that. I recommend you check out Paul Bloom's "Against Empathy."

But philosophers like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Rand all vehemently opposed the idea that empathy was a good idea or a moral quality, and gave rational reasons for that. Now, I don't happen to agree with their assumptions, but you certainly can't call them "irrational," because they gave good logic and reasoning, and would have been right, IF their fundamental premises or assumptions had been correct. And their assumptions are shared by many.

But those a priori beliefs (like Nietzsche's "God is dead") cannot be tested; so we cannot call them irrational for taking them. We can only say that their assumptions may have been incorrect...but their subsequent rationality, after their assumptions, may well have been flawless.

Sculptor wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2020 9:46 am If I were "free" - what ever that's supposed to mean, what I say could just as well be shit pulled out of the air.

Go back to every post I have ever made about volition and you will see I never use the phrase, "free will," or ever describe it as, "free." Volition only means everything a human being does, as a human being, must be consciously chosen. Of course choice is limited to what one is intellectually and physically able to do. One cannot choose to do what they have no knowledge of. One cannot speak a language they have never learned, solve a calculus problem if they have never learned algebra or analytic geometry, or perform any act they have never learned how to do (like typing or playing the piano). Of course one's learning and experience limits the scope of one's choices, but they do not determine one's choices. Within the scope of one's knowledge and ability, whatever an individual does, they must consciously choose to do it.

That's my view. It does not have to be yours and I'm not trying to convince you. I just wanted to make sure you understood what I mean and why the word, "free," does not pertain to my position.

The issue for me is not whether or not one, "can," consciously choose what they think and do, but the fact they, "must," choose whatever they think and do. Don't call it choice, if you object to that word, just call it a conscious decision, like the one you made when you decided to respond to my comment.

RCSaunders wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2020 3:34 pm

Sculptor wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2020 9:46 am If I were "free" - what ever that's supposed to mean, what I say could just as well be shit pulled out of the air.

Go back to every post I have ever made about volition and you will see I never use the phrase, "free will," or ever describe it as, "free." Volition only means everything a human being does, as a human being, must be consciously chosen.

Ah, I'm afraid you'll have to get used to this trick, RC. The opponents of free will (or volition, if you prefer) do this all the time.

They perform the reductio ad absurdum on your view, by claiming that any belief in will must imply that there are no contributing factors, constraints, circumstances or difficulties involved whenever a human being makes a free choice. They do this by insisting the word "free" has to imply much more than any believer in free will ever thinks is true about free will, thus reducing the position to something unthinkable. They think that his will lead to their 'winning' their point cheaply.

They're being silly, and they know it. They're just hoping you don't know it too.

That's exactly what it means. If the entirety of you is determined by prior events, then you can choose nuthin'.

Choosing is a matter of weighing this against that, of surveying options, gauging those options against what you know, what you suspect (imagine), and what you guess (intuit). It's an act of organic deliberation (de-liberation) involving ought and should and can, and all of this occurs within the context of the irreducible I, within the context of person.

Choosing is you, a person, sussing out or creating reasons to do sumthin'.

If you're determined, then you are hard-wired, the selections you make are purely a mechanical affair. You input data and the selection most closely approximating correct comes up. I is not required cuz you're just a slot machine.

A determined person isn't a person at all but a just a very complex piece of automation.

Belinda wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2020 11:44 am Henry, you are correct according to what seems to be your idea of what free will is. You are devoted to common sense.

Metaphysics is not understood by common sense alone and requires you sometimes to think counter -intuitively and imaginatively.

In context: to think counter-intuitively, imaginatively means to deny my own experience of myself (as a cause) in the world, and to accept that I am only biological machinery, goin' through the motions.

I can't do this, won't do this. Denying that I'm a free will is akin to claimin' fire freezes, that is: it's a goddamned lie.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2020 5:18 pm In context: to think counter-intuitively, imaginatively means to deny my own experience of myself (as a cause) in the world, and to accept that I am only biological machinery, goin' through the motions.

This is exactly right.

So...imagine you're at a lecture on Determinism, delivered by some august Determinist. As he concludes his lecture, what does the guy do?

He says, "...and that's why free will is an illusion. Thank you."

"Thank you"? But why?

According to Determinism, you had no choice but to be there. What's he thanking you for? You were fated to do it by prior forces, all set in motion at some point prior to the Big Bang...his lecture just said so. But now, he turns around and says, "Thank you"?

"Thank you" means he knows you had a choice about where you would be and what you would be doing. You had a choice about whether to sit quietly and listen to him, or throw tomatoes. And it means that he knows you did him favour.

In other words, he cannot keep consistent with his own Determinist lecture for ten seconds...not even so long as it takes him to get off the platform. His final words show him to be completely self-unaware, completely faulty in his own critical judgment of the case, and completely hypocritical in his practices in daily life. And they show that everything he said in his lecture was nonsense.

He just doesn't see it.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2020 5:34 pm

henry quirk wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2020 5:18 pm In context: to think counter-intuitively, imaginatively means to deny my own experience of myself (as a cause) in the world, and to accept that I am only biological machinery, goin' through the motions.

This is exactly right.

So...imagine you're at a lecture on Determinism, delivered by some august Determinist. As he concludes his lecture, what does the guy do?

He says, "...and that's why free will is an illusion. Thank you."

"Thank you"? But why?

According to Determinism, you had no choice but to be there. What's he thanking you for? You were fated to do it by prior forces, all set in motion at some point prior to the Big Bang...his lecture just said so. But now, he turns around and says, "Thank you"?

"Thank you" means he knows you had a choice about where you would be and what you would be doing. You had a choice about whether to sit quietly and listen to him, or throw tomatoes. And it means that he knows you did him favour.

In other words, he cannot keep consistent with his own Determinist lecture for ten seconds...not even so long as it takes him to get off the platform. His final words show him to be completely self-unaware, completely faulty in his own critical judgment of the case, and completely hypocritical in his practices in daily life. And they show that everything he said in his lecture was nonsense.

He just doesn't see it.

Outside of my experience of myself, one of the biggest jabs against determinism is I-ness, self-awareness, person-ness. Of what use is self to a bio-robot? Why would such a superfluous, non-parsimonious entity exist? Of what use is mind?

The determinist sez these things are shadows & echoes, illusions to be, if not ignored completely, kept in a proper perspective (we all should be a little ashamed at feeling self-directing, self-efficacious, and we shouldn't talk about it too much).

But that ain't an answer (and as you say, choosing to deny self, mind, free will, is, of course, an exercise of self, mind, free will).

Declaring I a fiction simply stresses the question of why I? even more.

Henry Quirk wrote:

-----"only biological machinery, goin' through the motions."

Biological systems, bodies, are not despicable. Our bodies, our biological systems, are made by God according to deists. Reason, according to deists, is also made by God. Our common sense reason puts causes and effects together so we can have some idea of what will happen as a result of our doing this or that.