FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
That and the existence of the universe are two fairly important natural phenomena which remain unexplainable, and which the potential role or attribution to God Science has failed to minimize. In fact, Science resorts to unfalsifiable stories for the one, and resorts to solipsism for the other. This doesn't prove Christianity or Heaven true, but the standard materialist narrative on this topic is fundamentally dishonest.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
It's not pedantry. Beliefs are a central example of an action. They are a thing you actively do. People are not computers, and human cognition is not deterministic. If they were, if beliefs were not subject to the will, arguments between humans would work very, very differently than they do.
I understand that this runs counter to what a great many people have often said, but you can literally observe the effect at both small and large scales, all around you every day. It is not subtle. We weigh evidence, and that weighing is fundamentally subjective, and the biases, priors and axioms of that subjectivity are derived from discrete acts of will, either from ourselves or from those around us. We choose what to question, how to question, whether an answer satisfies us, where to look for more information, when to move on, what to listen to. Any question of substance leads to a web of further questions, infinite in branchings, and we choose a finite set of those questions to explore before drawing conclusions. People observably draw different conclusions based on similar evidence every day, even when examining the same evidence in good faith! You can follow the branchings to any conclusion you wish, if you want to. When you stop at any particular conclusion, you stop because you want to, not because the evidence forced you to. How could it be otherwise, when there are always more questions available?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
They are actually unequipped to properly analyze these works because their own religion is so deeply rooted in the mythos itself.
...Provided you are correct, and "properly analyzing these works" means agreeing with you. Alternatively, they have their own analysis, and while you can dismiss it at your pleasure, we are equally free to dismiss you at ours. There is little point in discussion where agreement with your bespoke interpretations is set as a precondition for engagement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
what you've provided is an assertion. table stakes is some examples of lighter sentencing, though actual statistics would be better. My sky is blue with scattered white clouds; in point of fact, I think I probably agree with you that first-nations criminals get lighter sentences. but arguments need to be backed up with evidence, not mere assertions.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
Okay, so what's the actual effect on sentencing?
One of those four was part of the Communist empire, and another allied with them to initiate wars of aggression.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I don’t think that’s charitable. ‘Soft determinism’ is merely an acknowledgement that ‘free will’ and freedom/liberty in general the way they’re colloquially used don’t mean some kind of conscious override of the weight of deterministic history...
What evidence directly supports the concept of "deterministic history"? What testable predictions does the concept of "deterministic history" allow one to make?
It seems obvious to me that "deterministic history" is not a falsifiable, testable concept, but rather an axiom. People believe in determinism and deterministic history because doing otherwise would be incompatible with their axioms. Determinism has been used to make testable predictions for many decades, and all those predictions have been falsified. All the evidence we have available to us directly contradicts determinism, none of the evidence we have directly supports it. Each of us has a lifetime's immediate, personal experience of Will, of making free choices moment to moment, of making decisions and struggling to choose one thing versus another. All of this evidence is simply handwaved by Determinism, not based on contrary evidence, of which there is none, but because if it is not handwaved Materialism is invalidated.
And all this is fair enough; axiomatic reasoning is the only reasoning we have available to us. The problem comes when people act as though their axioms are obviously evidence-based, when they are not.
When did it have a notably negative impact on society, though?
...I've just finished one big debate on censorship, and I'm not really up for jumping into another one. I know the consensus is supposed to be that censorship is very bad, m'kay. I observe that large amount of censorship, through a variety of methods and with a variety of targets, appears to have been the norm throughout our nation's entire history, excepting perhaps two decades bookending the turn of the last century which were unusually permissive, and which were immediately followed by an acute decline in social conditions.
I know how this all is supposed to work. I am skeptical that it actually works that way. I note that a lot of the standard narrative about censorship conveniently ignores most of the censorship actually happening in the past or present, and gets pretty hand-wavey about nailing down cause and effect.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Okay so that's saying that some of the founders did find slavery abhorrent.
Just not abhorrent enough to do anything about.
They all appear to have united behind their cause primarily because they found political tyranny abhorrent.
They found the political tyranny of modest taxation and less-than-perfectly-favorable administrative status more abhorrent than unaccountable ownership of millions of human beings.
The fact that disliking slavery was a minority viewpoint which they chose to compromise on in order to achieve their primary objective of classical liberalism shows that that was indeed their primary objective.
What is the difference between your phrasing above, and "they founded the country on White Supremacy"? Figuring out a workable accommodation with White Supremacy was probably the largest and most significant issue involved in uniting the States.
The British showed little objection to slavery and the slave trade at the time (they wouldn't start to seriously oppose it until decades later), but at least some of the founders did oppose it, so they were at least slightly less "racist" and "white supremacist" than was the norm at the time.
That is not my understanding of the history. The British had their abolitionists as well at the time of the founding, so "some of the founders opposed it" gives no advantage; some of the British did too. Further, the founders who opposed it abandoned all substantive opposition to get independence done, and in so doing enshrined and armored the institution of slavery well beyond what it would have been while remaining part of the British empire. It may be presumed that if independence had not happened, slavery would have ended in Britain on roughly the same timetable, and the colonies would not have been exempted. Slavery would have ended something like two generations earlier, with no Civil War, no Jim Crow and so on.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
In a hypothetical world where this happens, they go hungry and head back to where they were born to work the land.
By the time serious hunger arrives, it seems to me that it's too late to do that. By contrast, it is not hard to imagine the authorities getting reports of people abandoning their farms to flood the cities, doing the simple math, and trying to prevent what seems like an obvious crisis in the making. Serious famine is very, very bad. Or maybe I'm wrong and they totally did it just to be dicks. I stand by to be educated.
We needn't pretend that medieval aristocrats were enlightened despots when we can very much see they were no such thing.
Neither do we need to claim that the miseries of existence are imposed by human design, or that a human action being unpleasant proves that there was a better option available, and that the people involved should have known about it. If you want to claim that the laws were pointless and evil, make the argument, don't just assume it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
It'd determine almost everything were we beings who did not need mineral resources or foodstuffs to exert their will.
Why doesn't it determine the acquisition of material resources and foodstuffs?
I honestly don't think I'm being uncharitable or an ass to ask this. The term is "biodeterminism", but now we're talking about resources and food, presumably tied to arable land. That ain't genes any more, is it? We can soften the theory to say that superior genes give a considerable advantage that tells in the long-term, but then there's the problem that the only long term we can test this against is the past, which we already know the results of, and we're not actually going to be around to see a similar stretch of the "long-term" future, are we?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
Scoundrels should have justice coming to them, for the bad things they actually do, no more, no less. Doing more than that, because they're bad people who deserve being treated badly, is not justice, and it's not what the justice system is supposed do to, and it can get out of control quickly. That's not autoimmune disorder, that's leukemia.
You appear to be approaching the question from a context of laws and other highly legible systems of formal rules. If I'm understanding you correctly, the idea would be that there's a clear separation between the legal rules and the justice system, and the various sorts of informal social consequences for lesser transgressions, with the idea being that the latter are perhaps less important and can more or less be ignored. If someone's not breaking the law, they should be left alone to do as they please, and we should in fact maintain a broad commons of unpoliced social space where people, generally, mind their own business and live and let live.
The problem, as I see it, is that people can do harmful and selfish things that make life a lot worse for everyone around them, and it's not possible to actually codify law against all those things. There's always going to be leaks, cracks, failures of encoding or enforcement. Also, there's a lot of social interactions that the law is simply too slow and regimented to meaningfully police. I observe that social consequences, even very serious social consequences that ruin or even end lives, have more or less always been part of our social structure. My guess is they always will be.
Society needs cohesion to function. broad commons of unpoliced social space where people, generally, mind their own business and live and let live was tried. It collapsed very quickly, and it is not obvious that it can or should be rebuilt. Live-and-let-live failed because it allowed a variety of social harms to spread unchecked, until people found the situation intollerable and began throwing their weight behind various forms of crackdown. And this is the pattern: your laws and social systems have to actually keep things running smoothly, or people will simply tear them out and replace them wholesale.
Once you cut down the law to get at scoundrels who "hide behind it" by abiding it, it doesn't protect honest people anymore either.
It is not obvious to me that this is actually true. I know that libertarians and Enlightenment idealists of the first water think it's true, and even desperately want it to be true, but many of the arguments they present seem to me to cash out in various forms of just-world fallacy. Censoring people doesn't seem to lead to you getting censored in any sort of causal fashion. Riding roughshod over the law to secure necessary results doesn't actually force woeful outcomes. Sticking it to the outgroup doesn't by any means result in someone else getting to stick it to you, thus restoring the balance. The Soviets broke every rule, and simply won, killed everyone who got in their way, ruled half the world for the better part of a century, and then more or less quietly died off. There was not and will not be any triumphant counter-revolution that does to them or their posterity what they did to others. Lincoln cut down a variety of laws, because the situation seemed to demand it... and his side won, and imposed their will on the losers, and there was no consequence of any significance that resulted.
It's very comforting to imagine that those who exercise power receive strict karma for the way they use it... but this does not appear to be the case. If you use power benevolently but ineffectually, others can take power away from you, and how they use it has nothing to do with how you used it.
What protects honest people is a cohesive society of other honest people who share their values and their understanding of who is and is not a scoundrel, and are willing and able to punish defectors appropriately. Lacking that, all the laws in the world will not save them.
Another issue is that scoundrel can mean bad people, but it also can mean icky people. Lolicons are the latter.
The distinction does not seem sustainable at our present social scale.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
If the rule you followed led you to here, of what use was the rule?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
My understanding is that "Science" telling them so was a big part of it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
The pretense is in ignoring compatibilism.
I am neither ignoring nor even rejecting compatibilism. Compatibilism is an axiom, not an empirical claim. I object to compatibilism only when people claim to have demonstrated it empirically, because I am pretty sure they have not in fact done that.
My objection to Determinism is not "I don't feel like I'm a machine". My objection is strictly empirical: you cannot in fact manipulate me like a machine, and that sort of manipulation is the central characteristic of machines.
I am communicating with you right now, and from my perspective no part of this communication is based on assuming non-determinism.
Just so. You are assuming materialism/non-determinism. You are treating materialism/non-determinism as an axiom. I do not object to you doing so, because this is exactly what axioms are for. Nor do I claim that I can prove your axioms wrong, because that is not how axioms work. At best, I might be able to present evidence that does not fit nicely into your axioms, giving you the choice of discarding the evidence or the axiom, but even this is difficult to accomplish and boils down to an apparently-free choice on your part.
Other people do use materialism/non-determinism as an axiom, and then claim that it is not an axiom but an empirical fact. I have been arguing at some length and for some time that axioms and material facts are different things, and that confusing them leads to further confusion and often to outright disaster.
And same as the last time we had this conversation, I genuinely do not care what other people did under the label of capital m Materialism before I was born.
...Got a link to the previous version for context? In any case, to the extent that this is true, then you and I have no dispute. But I am interested in what other people did and are still doing under the label of Capital M Materialism, because I think their arguments are wrong, and I can demonstrate that those arguments have been enormously influential and have shaped our world for the worse on a vast scale.
I am not claiming you are part of a Movement, and am pretty sure I never have. I am claiming there is a very clear Movement, and a lot of people, including a lot of very prominent people, are part of it, and that one of the basic characteristics of this movement is conflating axiomatic arguments with empirical arguments, the better to pass their prejudices and fantasies off as scientific fact. I am not claiming that Materialism as an axiom can be disproved. I am claiming that Materialism as an empirical fact has at least two glaring holes, and that people who claim materialism is an empirical fact have a long history of lying.
If you tell me that you reason from the assumption that all phenomena are part of a chain of unbroken cause and effect emerging solely from the physical laws founding reality, that is fair enough. If you tell me that we can say, as an empirical matter, that we can observe the cases of all effects, well, no, we cannot in fact do that. If you tell me that things we cannot observe or interact in any way nonetheless exist and are "Materialistic", well, no, that is not what that word means.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
The two obvious rejoinders would be that Country Clubs very obviously select for evident success in their membership, while Christianity does not, and that if nice country clubs could deliver the effect, then how to explain the longstanding pattern of rationalists attempting to bootstrap their own religion when they could and had country club analogues already. Also, I do not believe you can demonstrate specifics about how my "epistemics" are inferior to yours in any objective sense. I believe in observable reality the same as you. I likewise act on hypotheses about unobservable reality the same as you.
More generally, "Epistemics" and "Thinking things are true" do not work the way you are assuming they do. No belief is forced by evidence. All beliefs are chosen. All reasoning is motivated reasoning.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Then what are prayers for?
They are for building a relationship with God. The relationship is built on gratitude and trust; gratitude for the many good things he provides for us, and trust that he will care for and preserve us, to a limited but significant extent in this life, and to the maximal extent in the next.
Is my accusation of “God as Therapist” more or less accurate here?
Only to the extent that Therapy is, in its essence, a relationship, but perhaps that's close enough from your perspective.
Yes, but I think that one of the “axioms” on which you’re operating — the one people call “faith” — is that none of the potential arguments which could potentially prove fatal to your continued adherence to Christianity can possibly be true. Such arguments are necessarily false, because your religion is necessarily true. Therefore everything else is an argument backwards from that — a series of post-hoc epicycles designed to lessen the impact of various arguments which seem to reveal contradictions within the doctrines and claims of your religion.
That's one way to frame it, sure. It's also an isolated demand for rigor.
It is routinely argued here that humans are deterministic machines. All forms of this argument that resulted in falsifiable predictions resulted in those predictions being consistently falsified over more than a century of dedicated testing across the globe, and the current popular form of the argument is very clearly unfalsifiable. Likewise for bedrock Materialist claims about the Material being all that exists: by their own standards, it is very clear that things definitely exist that we cannot observe or interact with even in principle; to the extent that we can in principle observe the chain of cause and effect, we arrive at an effect with no observable cause. And yet even those materialists who recognize this fact are not disturbed by it, because their Materialism is axiomatic, the origin of their reasoning rather than its destination. And that is perfectly appropriate, because this is the only way anyone can reason in any way at all.
Axioms that make bad predictions are selected against. Axioms that fit as much of the available evidence as possible are selected for. It should not be surprising that a set of axioms that have lasted thousands of years fit the available evidence pretty well, and both Christianity and Atheism have existed for thousands of years.
Our disagreement, it seems to me, is not over the facts, but over their interpretation, and specifically over the moral significance of pain and death. You seem to argue as though death were avoidable, but it evidently is not, and everyone does in fact die. You seem to argue as though suffering is much more real and more significant than I understand it to be. I observe that death and pain do not necessitate some uniform amount of suffering, that suffering expands and contracts by orders of magnitude based on a variety of factors, the state of one's own mind being predominant among them.
From a previous discussion:
If God's design hinges on some outcome, you have no idea what that outcome is or why it is necessary, and certainly no reason to believe that it coincides neatly with your worldly preferences for ease or glory or the defeat of your enemies. Maybe it serves his purpose for you and all you know and love to die in pain and horror and darkness. It was so for the Japanese Christians, and for many others, and he has promised to wipe the tears from every eye.
...And indeed, a cursory examination of Christianity or the Bible will reveal the belief that some suffering, pain and death, even extreme forms of these, are a positive good, admirable, desirable even, with no shortage of examples of Christians acting on this belief and other Christians admiring them for it.
We observe the same pain and death, and draw different conclusions, because our axioms are different, and because axioms drive interpretation of evidence much more than evidence drives adoption of axioms. Reason is fundamentally an act of the Will; neither of us is being "forced" by evidence anywhere we do not want to go. But it is not clear to me why I should consider your axioms better than mine; your moral anguish over evident pain and death does not actually serve to reduce the pain and death more than my moral accommodation of it, and arguably has resulted in worse pain and death in the long-term as attempts at Utopia collapse into harsh reality. My accommodation of pain and death prevents neither buckling seat-belts nor attempting cancer cures; I am all for preventing pain and death, and even paying significant costs to do so. It's not even obvious to me that our metric for what costs are unacceptably high is too terribly different.
What's your assessment of voluntary human extinction? That's one way to solve pain for good, right?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
That is not an accurate assessment of the content of the post in question. It may be a accurate assessment of the poster's intention, but they did not actually demand that anyone shut up, they did not (directly) call anyone a Nazi. They drew a comparison between positive descriptions of Apartheid South Africa and positive descriptions of Hitler elsewhere, and they offered a link to make it clear what they were talking about. It's not a particularly good post, but it is a fair one.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
question from the peanut gallery: what is "system stuff"? I run across mentions of it frequently, but it's always in a context where everyone apparently already knows what it is, and I've never found the headwaters, as it were.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
And the system doesn't distinguish between types of warnings like "bad formatting" vs "being a shithead on purpose"
It does do that. We have notes on the warnings that can be general or specific, and can mention extenuating or aggravating factors.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
So do I. My desires are outputs of a function incorporating my history and a bit of randomness. Nothing mystical about it.
Assuming "function" here means some sort of mechanistic/deterministic process, what direct evidence do you base this claim on?
"Free will" isn't required to model humans as organisms with intrinsic drives and memory that respond to incentives.
"Free will" is the data provided by observation. We evidently have it in all senses and in all ways that we can empirically test. That doesn't preclude it being an illusion generated by some hidden process, but if so, all that can be said is that we have no direct evidence of that process.
Sure, but there's a pretty strong case for post-big-bang materialism.
With the exception of free will, sure. But now we're at two really important things that Materialists predicted their approach would explain, and those explanations failed without apparent recourse. "Materialism answers all our questions, except the questions we ignore because Materialism can't explain them" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
To put it another way, we have two very important phenomena that cannot be explained by empirical materialism. If empirical materialism itself is forced to resort to non-empirical explanations or to "material" that cannot be observed even in principle, then it has no grounds to object when other philosophies do likewise, does it?
This question vexes me, but seems independent of consciousness and experience and so on, which we can explain using physical laws given the singular prior that something indeed exists.
We can't explain either consciousness or experience, though. Like, at all. We can tell a story where they're the outcome of vague, undefined processes, and we can insist that these processes must be materialistic even though we can't rigorously define them or explain how they work, but that is not in fact an "explanation".
Demonstrate either mind reading or mind control, and I'll concede that you have explained consciousness and experience. This doesn't seem like an unreasonable request, since many prominent scientists have previously claimed that they could totally do either or both, and no small number of materialists still insist it should be possible, occasionally claiming it's arrival as soon as the next decade.
Can you elaborate on these falsifications? To be clear, I'm not talking about naive functionalism. Human actions are not merely the result of immediate inputs. We have state. We have an internal history. We can introspect.
Sure, but all these things were equally obvious to epiphenomenalists, Marx among them, who concluded that thought was essentially meaningless and the brain was a simple machine to be engineered to our preferences. Likewise Watson and Skinner and the behavioralists, who claimed that they knew how to arbitrarily shape minds as they saw fit. And certainly, in retrospect, it's obvious that all these claims were very stupid, and that the people making them were being absurdly overconfident. But it evidently was not obvious to either those making the claims or to their contemporaries, and that fact should give us pause.
I'm merely asserting that parsimony suggests we treat this reflection as a computational process grounded in the material world.
It doesn't seem to me that parsimony can be validly applied in a case where you know that significant data is missing.
Treating the mind as a computational process grounded in the material world will be reasonable when doing so allows us to either make testable predictions or engage in engineering. Right now, it does neither. "Treating the mind as a computational process" enables only speculation and philosophical discussion, and it seems likely to me that this will not change in the near future.
Scoundrels should be oppressed. The fact that honest people can be falsely portrayed as scoundrels, and the necessary mechanisms of justice turned unjustly against them, does not change this reality. Auto-immune disorders can't be resolved by simply switching off the immune system.
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