Philosophy Now Forum

Martin Peter Clarke wrote: ↑Sat May 17, 2025 5:33 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat May 17, 2025 5:28 pm

Martin Peter Clarke wrote: ↑Sat May 17, 2025 5:23 pm
You're doing it again. Meaningless gainsaying with no reasoning at all.

Is it just easier to post one line than to respond substantively? I think I've given you some good responses, and I've invested the time to do so. I'm sorry you wish it to seem that I haven't. I was genuinely interested in your angle on "love," for example, and was wondering what you could be meaning by it.

However, conversation's a privilege, not a right: and both communicators have to be into it, so if you're not, then thank you for your time.

You're not engaging in the slightest...

That's quite implausible. Not only have I shared my story with you, as you shared your story with me, but we also have gone back and forth, pretty much point-for-point. I simply don't believe you, and I don't think the evidence shows that. I don't think anybody else would believe it either.

I do see, however, that we are disagreeing about our worldviews. And I do see that every time I put a serious challenge to your skeptical comments, you back off. Why, I can't say. And I can glean from the brevity of your last two posts that you are, for some reason, keen to declare unilateral victory and depart the field before something comes under threat.

And I shall not prevent you. I still thank you for your time.

Sorry mate, you can message or email me, but I can't see your public posts. No point.

You prefer to speak privately? Okay.

Can't hear you mate. And nobody else is listening.

Martin Peter Clarke wrote: ↑Sat May 17, 2025 7:56 pm Can't hear you mate. And nobody else is listening.

Apparently you can. You just have no answers, it seems.

But, off you go, I guess.

You're talking to yourself mate.

Martin Peter Clarke wrote: ↑Sat May 17, 2025 8:18 pm You're talking to yourself mate.

Maybe not. You keep replying.

I'll only ever hear you if anybody else replies to you. Any non-Foe that is. I have made many Foes.

Not only have I shared my story with you, as you shared your story with me, but we also have gone back and forth, pretty much point-for-point. I simply don't believe you, and I don't think the evidence shows that. I don't think anybody else would believe it either.

Then this part: click.

Unless, of course, of my own free will, I am wrong. On the other hand, I no longer have the capacity to simply accept that the Christian God anchored everything that I think, feel, intuit, say and do to an immaterial soul.

Now, I'm not saying this isn't necessarily the case, just that a leap of faith and Scripture are no longer enough to convince me.


And, if there really, really is one, God knows I want to be convinced.


Instead, those like IC come along and insist that beyond leaps, and wagers and chapter and verse, and such is actual historical and scientific proof that a God, the God is in fact the Christian God.

And even though I'm not from Missouri, "show me", I say. Hell, I can't even get WLC the RF folks to do that though.

And speaking of Missouri, God came calling there yesterday: https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=b ... =599&dpr=1

Still, it was a slap on the wrist compared to...Joplin?

On the other hand, there were reports of a potential tornado right here in Baltimore yesterday. Just north of Dundalk. Way too close for comfort.

A sign from God, perhaps? And since there's no way on Earth I can entirely rule that out, I really, really do want to be shown.

Hi iambiguous. Have we met? As it were. In my dotage I can't recall. Clever moniker.

Who doesn't believe who? You don't believe IC? Rhetorical question if you like.

If I may, 1+1=5 and all that, I don't believe any apologist. Apart from honest, apologetic ones. That excludes the likes of savant Lennox, WLC and even Platinga, the McGraths et al. Those who... lie that there is philosophical justification for belief beyond knowledge. And then lie that there is therefore knowledge. All forgivably. Our believing mechanism is remarkably pragmatic. Just look at our politics. At all rhetoric. We are a rhetorical species. Lying, to ourselves, for the truth is normal. Where logos is the weakest leg of Aristotle's 3-legged stool of pathos, ethos and logos in kairos. Evolution thinks it's worth the price and has been right so far. Fallacy is hard wired in to us as Hume intuitively knew; reason rightly being the slave of the passions. We liberals have utterly failed to realise this. I despair at humanist whinging about the vast majority's helplessness to think out of the bag. Even amongst us, passion warps reason, but with less survival value. I struggle to have Carl Rogers' good will. My id snarls. We utterly fail to embrace evil. Trump. In our lack of Rogerian good will. Which I run out of rapidly here with IC and the worse like. Hypocrite me. So I have to cut them off, as I don't have the capacity to deal with them as Seneca would. With lofty, Olympian, stoical good will. Hmmmm.

Deconstruction should never be apologized for in itself. Your lack of capacity above, is no lack. It is gain. In the west, historically, atheism and physicalism, materialism followed, deconstructed theism. In logic, they come first and stay there. One should stop at materialism. The perfect dialectical thesis to which no immaterialist antithesis is material. One should kick the tyres, sure. One should incorporate science, i.e. measurement, with its terminally statistical fuzziness. But reason supervenes that.

We can reasonably, 'reasonedly' say that immaterialism is meaningless. Meaninglessly un-so, non-so. As opposed to materialism which is meaninglessly so; so, meaninglessly. That the vast majority, including me, find folk meaning in superstition, religion; and always will, I did for 50 years.

I don't want an immaterial soul; there isn't an undetectable 'soul' field that the thalamus is tuned to. Neither, of course, is there 'quantum consciousness' or any such woo. I want to be convinced that Love is the ground of being. No chance. If it were, it would be obvious. I used to justify God every which way, even my evolved best case God. Until I realised in one gutting moment of loss, of irretrievable, irremediable relationship breakdown, in the blink of an old CRT powering off, in stellar gravitational collapse to the Pauli exclusion point, that it is an incoherent, unjustified, untrue belief. The ground of being does not Love me. Because it's entirely natural.

So yes, I'm not an atheist either, just like young Dickie. Well not actually, as he's not for purely scientific reasons. I'm not for reasoned reasons. To argue a gap in reason for God on the basis of the statistical uncertainty of non-absolute, indeterminate, relatively simultaneous, fuzzy measurement, is a category error par excellence. Twisting the cart before the horse in the desperation of 'faith'. Which is no faith. Faith I admire.

Only Love could show us, iambiguous. In divine, unnatural, anachronistically culturally impossible, emotional intelligence in the text. It doesn't. There is nothing unnatural about the text. To which I have complete good will to all concerned, and therefore to the genius robed provincial Jewish carpenter. Despite the unlikelihood that the original was as brilliant as the priestly class, especially the late C1st, early C2nd school of John, made him out to be. And there is nothing in nature. No fossil artefact. No still small voice in the Maryland tornado.

What you're advocating isn't determinism, it's a weird hybrid where you want your cake and to eat it too. I'm telling you what it is straight up and gave examples proving it. Will does not exist under determinism, definitionally. There is no choice under determinism therefore no will. Will is part of the "folk psychology" it tries to dismiss.

Then the part where some advocates of determinism as they define it define it in the only possible reality. In other words, given the hardest of hard determinist assessments, we define things only as we are ever able to define them. That we define them incorrectly is just another inherent component of this only possible reality. Nothing that we think, feel, intuit, say or do is ever really correct or incorrect as, say, the Libertarians and Objectivists understand them.

Then those here who, from my own rooted existentially in dasein philosophical prejudice, have their cake and eat if too in becoming what I call the "free will determinists". They embrace determinism but the manner in which they do always seems to result in nature giving them the last word. The final denouement. They may be determined to post what they do here [like everyone else] but they are still always going to be nature's favorite.

As there is no such thing as absolute - material (the only kind there is) - reality, due to quantum indeterminism and the relativity of simultaneity at opposite ends, and randomness, chaos and un-computable emergent complexity at multiple levels in between, determinism apart from all that predicated on how existence has to be by the laws of physics, is meaningless in consciousness, apart from the fact that I would say that wouldn't I?

Damnationists need Cartesian free will for their God to condemn everyone for their immoral responsibility. A very dark folk religion indeed.

Death gives absolute meaning to life. Live in the moment.

Being blessed with ADHD, those disconnected facts are a seamless whole for me. They would be wouldn't they?

Martin Peter Clarke wrote: ↑Mon May 19, 2025 9:38 am
Death gives absolute meaning to life. Live in the moment.

On the other hand, any number of "meaning objectivists" among us here will insist that, in either a God or a No God universe, true meaning revolves entirely around their own [and only their own] One True Path.

This thread, however, pertains not to what people think about meaning, morality and metaphysics, but regarding whether what they think about them they do so with at least some measure of free will.

My contention is that given this...

All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was "somehow" able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter "somehow" became living matter "somehow" became conscious matter "somehow" became self-conscious matter.

Then those here who actually believe that what they believe about all of this reflects, what, the ontological truth about the human condition itself?

Then those who are compelled in turn to insist on a teleological component as well. Usually in the form of one or another God.

Meanwhile, philosophers and scientists and theologians have been grappling with this profound mystery now for thousands of years.

...what we mostly exchange here are theoretical/philosophical assessments embedded in "worlds of words".

The bottom line [mine "here and now"] is that we just don't know what the ultimate relationships are between brains and minds and the world around them.

iambiguous wrote: ↑Thu May 22, 2025 10:50 pm

Martin Peter Clarke wrote: ↑Mon May 19, 2025 9:38 am
Death gives absolute meaning to life. Live in the moment.

On the other hand, any number of "meaning objectivists" among us here will insist that, in either a God or a No God universe, true meaning revolves entirely around their own [and only their own] One True Path.

This thread, however, pertains not to what people think about meaning, morality and metaphysics, but regarding whether what they think about them they do so with at least some measure of free will.

My contention is that given this...

All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was "somehow" able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter "somehow" became living matter "somehow" became conscious matter "somehow" became self-conscious matter.

Then those here who actually believe that what they believe about all of this reflects, what, the ontological truth about the human condition itself?

Then those who are compelled in turn to insist on a teleological component as well. Usually in the form of one or another God.

Meanwhile, philosophers and scientists and theologians have been grappling with this profound mystery now for thousands of years.

...what we mostly exchange here are theoretical/philosophical assessments embedded in "worlds of words".

The bottom line [mine "here and now"] is that we just don't know what the ultimate relationships are between brains and minds and the world around them.

Apart from their all being matter. Can you point to free will? I'm not aware of it in myself. At all. If Love were the ground of being, They wouldn't have it of course. Whatever it is.

Pereboom's Four Case Argument against Compatibilism at Philosophical Disquisitions

So which type of causal sequences do the trick? A variety of accounts have been proposed over the years. Here are four of the more popular ones:

Character-based account: A decision can be said to be “free” if it is caused by, and not out of character for, a particular agent. This is the view traditionally associated with the likes of David Hume. It is probably too simplistic to be useful. Other compatibilist accounts offer more specific conditions.

On the other hand, aren't all of our assessments here regarding compatibilism "too simplistic to be useful" given The Gap and Rummy's Rule? Sure, the subject is so fascinating and so relevant to human interactions that those of our ilk will always be grappling to understand it. But not many have come to suspect [as I have] that we'll go to the grave without ever approaching a definitive answer from the scientific community.

But then back to the part where the human condition is such that all one needs to do is to believe what one does. That's what makes it true, the mere belief itself.

Second-order desire account: A decision can be said to be free if it is caused by a first-order desire (e.g. I want some chocolate) that is reflexively endorsed by a second-order desire (e.g. I want to want some chocolate). This is the account associated with Harry Frankfurt (and others).

Then the account associated with those like Schopenhauer. The assumption that while most are convinced that, at any given time, they themselves choose to want chocolate, to desire it, what if what they want to want and desire is no less autonomic?