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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29309 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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To add some levity, https://youtube.com/watch?v=OCCYvPlsp7o

Amusing I'm sure, but do you have a more substantive answer?

You can believe what you want! But if we can't at least agree on a framework of reality, or if reality is actually reality, then none of it matters anyway.

It is air I'm breathing now, and we know exactly what it is.

I'm also a huge typical minder, I simply can't fathom smart capable people truly believing in some religion/afterlife or another. I don't think they really actually do. Barring true jihadists their actions certainly never show it. Don't listen to what people say, watch what they do. People don't act like eternal life is just around the corner in death, that is for damn sure for 99.9% of the population.

You can believe what you want!

One can indeed. As Bertrand Russell puts it:

I am persuaded that there is absolutely no limit to the absurdities that can [...] be generally believed. Give me an adequate army, with power to provide it with more pay and better food than falls to the lot of the average man, and I will undertake, within thirty years, to make the majority of the population believe that two and two are three, that water freezes when it gets hot and boils when it gets cold, or any other nonsense that might seem to serve the interest of the State. Of course, even when these beliefs had been generated, people would not put the kettle in the ice-box when they wanted it to boil. That cold makes water boil would be a Sunday truth, sacred and mystical, to be professed in awed tones, but not to be acted on in daily life. What would happen would be that any verbal denial of the mystic doctrine would be made illegal, and obstinate heretics would be "frozen" at the stake. No person who did not enthusiastically accept the official doctrine would be allowed to teach or to have any position of power. Only the very highest officials, in their cups, would whisper to each other what rubbish it all is; then they would laugh and drink again. This is hardly a caricature of what happens under some modern governments.

Your belief in Determinism is observably a "Sunday Truth, sacred and mystical, to be professed in awed tones, but not to be acted on in daily life." It makes no testable predictions, and it directs no useful actions. It has no connections of any kind to the real world. Maybe it will not be so in the future, but appeals to the future are not part of empiricism.

More frustratingly, my entire point in this discussion has not been to prove why you should believe in free will or stop believing in Determinism.

The whole point is that evidence doesn't stop being evidence when it goes against a theory you don't like. Under the Empirical framework we have both been claiming at every step of this discussion, evidence must be explained rather than handwaved. You cannot explain the evidence of free will under a materialistic framework, and Determinism is very explicitly a handwave. And this means, inescapably, no matter how much you would rather not admit it, that the apparent existence of free will is evidence against materialism. Further, evidence doesn't force conclusions, in exactly the way it's not forcing this conclusion on you!

You don't have to accept that evidence as conclusive, but I'm not really interested in a discussion based on Empiricism with someone who insists on ignoring the rules of empiricism when it suits them.

There is no apparent existence of free will. That is what I am saying. All evidence is explicitly to the contrary if you have even a passing understanding of physics at an observable scale. Action, reaction, all that 8th grade jazz. It means everything is determined. I ask again, do you not accept cause and effect?

Nothing handwavy about it. It is reality.

There is no apparent existence of free will. That is what I am saying. All evidence is explicitly to the contrary if you have even a passing understanding of physics at an observable scale.

Then use your understanding of physics at an observable scale to demonstrate that the human mind is deterministic and not possessing free will. All it would take would be a practical demonstration of either mind reading or mind control. I'm pretty comfortable claiming that neither you nor anyone else can do that, but I stand ready to be proven wrong.

Absent such a demonstration, physics at an observable scale doesn't answer the question. I observe gravity and thermal conductivity in exactly the same way I observe free will. My confidence in my understanding of gravity and thermal conductivity is reinforced by experience, exactly the way it is for free will.

I ask again, do you not accept cause and effect?

I don't accept a claim of cause and effect when the relationship of cause and effect can't actually be demonstrated. I certainly don't accept it in cases where the demonstration has been repeatedly attempted and has repeatedly failed.

The point of the universal fire quote above is that you can't appeal to the tightly-laced reality of nature if you can't actually point to the laces. If you want to claim that a cause leads to an effect, you have to actually demonstrate the linkage. You don't get to just say "well it has to be this, what else could it be?"

All effects have causes. Can we agree on that framework?

Happily.

Then there is no free will. It requires an effect without a cause.

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