Philosophy Now Forum

Obvious Leo wrote:Alpha. There are two entirely different kinds of determinism and these are technically known as linear and non-linear determinism. In the common parlance linear determinism is also known as pre-determinism and non-linear determinism is more commonly known as chaotic determinism, which is synonymous with self-determinism. These are simple basic definitions which are universally used in both science and philosophy and they are completely orthodox and mainstream principles which any science or philosophy undergraduate would be expected to understand. You quite obviously don't understand these principles so you need to go away and learn them. I suggested this to you ages ago but you clearly ignored my advice and now all you're doing is making a fool of yourself.

Well, yes. In a purely mathematical world where you can specify initial conditions exactly, chaotic systems are fully deterministic. It's not like a quantum system with wavefunction collapse, whose evolution can never be specified exactly by the initial conditions.

But in practice, we can never specify (or know) the initial conditions exactly. So there will always be some uncertainty in the initial conditions, and it makes sense to characterize the behavior of a system in terms of its response to this uncertainty. Basically, a chaotic system is one in which any uncertainty in the state at time t=0 leads to exponentially larger uncertainties in the state as time goes on, and a non-chaotic system is one in which any initial uncertainty in the state decays away or at least stays steady with time.

In the former (chaotic) case, given that we can't know the initial conditions to infinite precision, there will always be some time after which predictions of the behavior of the system become essentially meaningless - the uncertainty becomes so large that it fills up most of the state space. This is effectively similar to the behavior of a truly non-deterministic (e.g. quantum) system, in that our ability to make predictions about it is limited, so some people call chaotic systems non-deterministic.

Obvious Leo wrote:You're merely confirming what I've been saying all along. It's true that some people conflate chaotic determinism with randomness but your citation points out that this is just a sloppy use of language. Chaotic systems do not behave randomly but they do behave unpredictably.

Obvious Leo wrote:If you had a wife like mine you'd find this proposition very easy to accept.

Obvious Leo wrote:And stop using the word "free" as a referent to the will. It has no meaning in such a context and only serves to muddy the waters.

Obvious Leo wrote:Since you seem to be in homework mode look up the Maturana/Varela model for embodied cognition, sometimes known as the "Santiago" school. It gives a pretty good layman's overview of how non-linear determinism is applied to cognitive neuroscience.

alpha wrote:

Obvious Leo wrote:And stop using the word "free" as a referent to the will. It has no meaning in such a context and only serves to muddy the waters.

of course it has no meaning in your context; nothing does. your refusal to use my words, coupled with your reluctance to provide alternative terms, doesn't really help you. it appears that any word i use "muddies the waters".

Obvious Leo wrote:And stop using the word "free" as a referent to the will. It has no meaning in such a context and only serves to muddy the waters.

alpha wrote:of course it has no meaning in your context; nothing does. your refusal to use my words, coupled with your reluctance to provide alternative terms, doesn't really help you. it appears that any word i use "muddies the waters".

Obvious Leo wrote:I refuse to use your words because they are not pertinent to what it is that you're trying to discuss. You can't use the word "free" as a descriptor for the will unless you first specify "free of what".

Obvious Leo wrote:I am not free to fly to Mars simply by flapping my arms and pointing myself in the general direction. However I am free to decide what I'll have for lunch within a rather narrow range of options.

alpha wrote:i thought i already explained this, repeatedly. free of cause.

alpha wrote:

Hobbes' Choice wrote:I think he's just not reading properly; either that or he's just fucking stupid.
Maybe "...by its initial genetic make-up..." slipped his attention.

allow me to demonstrate the reasoning of you two monkeys; you say:
1. a person gets his autonomy from his parents (his initial genetic make-up).
2. even though this person gets his so called autonomy from his initial genetic make-up, this initial genetic make-up doesn't determine this person's subsequent actions, thoughts, feelings, etc..

i strongly recommend that you two sue whomever sold you your so called brains. you don't even need a lawyer; all you have to do is open your mouth in court and the judge would immediately rule in your favor.

alpha wrote:i thought i already explained this, repeatedly. free of cause.

Obvious Leo wrote:I don't think that any of us here, yourself included, is suggesting that a causeless event is anything but a metaphysical absurdity, so the question is whether the notion of executive function should be regarded as a causal agent in neural network processing.

Obvious Leo wrote:You keep going back to initial causes as if such a construct actually has a meaning. How far back would you like to go? Even if you go all the way back to the big bang and say that it was determined 13.8 billion years ago that Hobbes would come into existence and then become an archaeologist then you still have the problem of proving that the universe was the beginning of the universe, in which case you then have the problem of explaining what caused it to begin. Haven't you ever heard of the first law of thermodynamics? A first cause is a metaphysical non-sequitur because an uncaused cause is no different from an uncaused effect.

Hobbes' Choice wrote:Try to stop and think.
Can you imagine that there might be other causal agents in the world other than genes?

alpha wrote:

Hobbes' Choice wrote:Try to stop and think.
Can you imagine that there might be other causal agents in the world other than genes?

when have i ever suggested otherwise? the point is, whatever the causal agent, that causal agent itself is also caused and determined, hence nothing in the universe can have any actual freedom.

Hobbes' Choice wrote:Don't make me look back, but you rejected my posts that supported something other than genetic determinism.
So either get a life, or bugger off.

Hobbes' Choice wrote:F'fuck sake! This is a complete no brainer.
Genetically the human species is indistinguishable from how we were as hunter gatherers.
Depending on where you live in the world our entire subsistence model has changed completely between 12,000 - 100 years. You can take a baby from a modern day hunter/gatherer society and make him a CEO of a corporate conglomerate.
Culture is not genetically determined.

alpha wrote:who the fuck said anything about "culture" being "genetically" determined? people should really stop putting words in others' mouths. my point is that every tiny subatomic particle in existence is deterministic. likewise, every huge and complex system is equally deterministic. genetic determinism affects genetic areas, and cultural determinism affects cultural areas, and so on.