Philosophy Now Forum

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 3:40 pm

Atla wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 3:39 pm

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 3:38 pm

Well obviously that's what some hard determinists disagree with

Yeah and they're wrong, so what?

Well so you said serious determinists wouldn't do that. Serious determinists can be wrong about things. So some serious determinists would do that.

?

Atla wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 3:42 pm

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 3:40 pm

Atla wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 3:39 pm
Yeah and they're wrong, so what?

Well so you said serious determinists wouldn't do that. Serious determinists can be wrong about things. So some serious determinists would do that.

?

??

Atla wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 3:28 pm It's not just awkward, it's backwards imo. Why would a truly "hardcore" determinist, someone who takes determinism very seriously and always sees it in everything, subscribe to all this childish metaphysical hogwash of "hard" determinism?

Hardcore determinists wouldn't subscribe to this. Why? Apparently because it's wrong.

Do you think hardcore determinists can't be wrong about something?

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 3:58 pm

Atla wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 3:28 pm It's not just awkward, it's backwards imo. Why would a truly "hardcore" determinist, someone who takes determinism very seriously and always sees it in everything, subscribe to all this childish metaphysical hogwash of "hard" determinism?

Hardcore determinists wouldn't subscribe to this. Why? Apparently because it's wrong.

Do you think hardcore determinists can't be wrong about something?

I don't understand what you're saying. Sure people like iambig talk about things like hard determinism on a philosophy forum, but hard determinism is about as rational as the belief in the tooth fairy. It's just some BS for laughs. Obviously.

Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 3:39 pm

Martin Peter Clarke wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 11:36 am

Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 11:05 am

I had to look up Chat for him.


But voluntarism does not refute absolute Free Will. Absolute Free Will can veto what the subject prefers to do.

My beholder's share of his peerless work is that it never arises, it cannot be pointed to.

It cannot be pointed to because there is no event or entity that is a material correlate of it . In other words, it does not exist , except as a religious mystery.

I think we agree?! McGovern can do no wrong, but I don't see any of his characters demonstrating free will in the slightest. They're carried in the surface of their lives by raging oceans. Currents, tides, storms, doldrums. Like all of us. None of them, not even the jury, do or say anything unexpected. It's all extremely powerful, moving, helpless. But not a single point of view, character, 'choice', way of being, is surprising. As superb as any Greek tragedy. One benighted creature seemed to be completely trapped in luxuriating in predatory depravity. I've seen that. Been in the face of it in a secure mental health unit. As a visitor. All we can be is understanding, kind. And never foolish. Never let such out without chemical castration and 24/7 monitoring. Tagging. Which . does . not . work. It can't. Not with a third. McGovern had no answers, no excuses, no stories, no explanations, which is excellent. There can still be forgiveness, repentance, love.

Atla wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 4:14 pm

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 3:58 pm

Atla wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 3:28 pm It's not just awkward, it's backwards imo. Why would a truly "hardcore" determinist, someone who takes determinism very seriously and always sees it in everything, subscribe to all this childish metaphysical hogwash of "hard" determinism?

Hardcore determinists wouldn't subscribe to this. Why? Apparently because it's wrong.

Do you think hardcore determinists can't be wrong about something?

I don't understand what you're saying. Sure people like iambig talk about things like hard determinism on a philosophy forum, but hard determinism is about as rational as the belief in the tooth fairy. It's just some BS for laughs. Obviously.

I think it's a mistake to assume that just because you think an idea is silly, nobody actually believes it. People believe all sorts of things.

I can comfortably assure you, there are hard determinists who aren't saying it for a laugh.

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 4:55 pm

Atla wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 4:14 pm

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 3:58 pm

Hardcore determinists wouldn't subscribe to this. Why? Apparently because it's wrong.

Do you think hardcore determinists can't be wrong about something?

I don't understand what you're saying. Sure people like iambig talk about things like hard determinism on a philosophy forum, but hard determinism is about as rational as the belief in the tooth fairy. It's just some BS for laughs. Obviously.

I think it's a mistake to assume that just because you think an idea is silly, nobody actually believes it. People believe all sorts of things.

I can comfortably assure you, there are hard determinists who aren't saying it for a laugh.

And where do you imagine did I claim otherwise?

Atla wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 5:05 pm

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 4:55 pm

Atla wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 4:14 pm
I don't understand what you're saying. Sure people like iambig talk about things like hard determinism on a philosophy forum, but hard determinism is about as rational as the belief in the tooth fairy. It's just some BS for laughs. Obviously.

I think it's a mistake to assume that just because you think an idea is silly, nobody actually believes it. People believe all sorts of things.

I can comfortably assure you, there are hard determinists who aren't saying it for a laugh.

And where do you imagine did I claim otherwise?

It's just some bs for laughs. Right there

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 5:15 pm

Atla wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 5:05 pm

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 4:55 pm

I think it's a mistake to assume that just because you think an idea is silly, nobody actually believes it. People believe all sorts of things.

I can comfortably assure you, there are hard determinists who aren't saying it for a laugh.

And where do you imagine did I claim otherwise?

It's just some bs for laughs. Right there

= Just some BS to anyone with an IQ above room temperature.

Atla wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 5:19 pm

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 5:15 pm

Atla wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 5:05 pm
And where do you imagine did I claim otherwise?

It's just some bs for laughs. Right there

= Just some BS to anyone with an IQ above room temperature.

Ah okay I thought you were continuing with your other chain of thought where you were insisting hardcore determinists would never believe that because it's wrong, and hardcore determinists are never wrong.

I'll leave you and iambig to it.

I think the important point is that Iambiguous claims hard(core) determinists say this and that but he never quotes any determinists actually saying these things.

And there are no determinists here arguing or defending the positions that Iambiguous attributes to them.

It's all ... " I think I heard some guy say he believes A. Yeah, I have no evidence that he said it and he's not here."

Most multiverse/extradimension theories are deterministic, and are the opposite of an only possible reality. Determinism, soft or hard, has overall nothing to do with an only possible reality. That only comes in from the first person perspective. He had 50 years to learn this, and yet he keeps bringing up science.

Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t
By Dennis Overbye at the New York Times

...physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place.

And here we are, thousands and thousands of years later, discussing and debating it still.

What does that alone tell us regarding how profoundly enigmatic the human brain remains here? Matter like no other matter to say the least.

“Is it an illusion? That’s the question,” said Michael Silberstein, a science philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. Another question, he added, is whether talking about this in public will fan the culture wars.

Some insist that is precisely what it is, an illusion. Others however are adamant: it is anything but an illusion. But what they all share in common is the fact that none of them [to the best of my knowledge] have been able to intertwine philosophical speculation and the scientific method in order to arrive at anything in the way of a...consensus?

As for fanning culture wars, sure, some might include determinism here. But if that's the case, I missed it. Culture wars revolve far, far more around moral and political issues. After all, it's not like in regard to Jeffery Epstein, you hear people noting the possibility that it was all wholly determined by the laws of matter.

Or the part where some argue that, yes, Epstein did all those terrible things. And even though he was never able not to, he is still morally responsible.

“If people freak at evolution, etc.,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?”

Next up: the truly unsophisticated meat machines.

But either way, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other for some in a world where everything interacts only as it ever could have interacted.

Another "incredible shrinking exchange"! 

Atla wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 3:09 pm

iambiguous wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 5:21 am Here's what I got running it by AI:

"A hard determinist believes that all events, including human actions, are causally predetermined and that free will is an illusion. They hold that every event is necessitated by prior events, and thus, no one could have acted otherwise than they did. This position is considered an extreme form of determinism because it asserts that free will is incompatible with determinism". 

No, you didn't run it by an AI. That's HARD determinism, not HARDCORE determinism. Fucking hell. You've been at this determinism shit for decades and still can't even get something like this right.

Fucking hell?! Just because I used the word hardcore instead of hard?!! 

In other words, as I understand this [rightly or admittedly wrongly], everything that we think, feel, intuit, say and do is inherently/necessarily a manifestation of the only possible reality.

So, sure, if you need to scrap the "core" part that may well be only because you were never able not to.

Atla wrote: ↑Mon Jul 28, 2025 3:09 pmThere was no mention of an "only possible reality" what the fuck. And that's NOT what the difference between hard vs soft determinism is about. I won't even read the rest of your comment I can't deal with this level of retardedness right now.

How about this...

Google "what's the difference between hard and soft determinism?".

You get this:

https://www.google.com/search?q=what%27 ... e&ie=UTF-8

Lots and lots of different arguments coming to lots and lots of conflicting assessments and conclusions. Not unlike discussions and debates pertaining to all the other Big Questions. Or in regard to morality or politics or religion. 

I'm the first to acknowledge [as I did above] that I may well be wrong about my own assessment and conclusion. "Here and now" in other words. 

On the other hand, I'm not here calling others retarded just because they don't think like I do.