FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
But the materialist narrative isn't at all dishonest...
...This is best demonstrated in words other than my own. From a link in the Cryonics discussion:
All of these ideas challenged the traditional view of Vitalism, and were steps towards “reducing” man, and indeed all living things, to the status of mechanisms: clockworks that could be rationally explained, understood and eventually manipulated at will. These novel ideas had the power, at least in theory, to confer on men the knowledge and ability formerly reserved only for god. If life was a natural phenomenon governed by the same physical laws that enabled the construction of timepieces, factories, bridges and manufacturing machines, what was to stop man from creating life itself and, in essence, usurping the role of god?
At one point, maybe in the late 1700s, it might be argued that the above was not a lie but only an untested theory. But then we tested it, at considerable length, and very thoroughly falsified it. Neither living things in general, nor man very much in particular, attain the status of "mechanisms: clockworks that can be rationally explained, understood and eventually manipulated at will", much less "usurping the role of God".
When such theories are falsified, and their proponents decline to update but rather ignore the evidence or begin stacking epicycles, that is dishonesty, or at least a level of foolishness indistinguishable from it. We all laugh at the Flat Earthers and the Sovereign Citizens who have rendered themselves impervious to evidence. But "I think, therefore I am": there is no evidence more immediate and more readily available than the existence of the Willful Self, which prominent Materialists consistently agree cannot exist as it evidently does.
You claim:
I think it's not too relevant to the point that we have a lot of evidence there's not a heaven with jesus and angels and the happy souls of all the do-gooders that we didn't have a thousand years ago.
...But in fact the evidence you describe does not exist. We have significantly more and better evidence for a historical Jesus now than we did a thousand years ago, contrary to the predictions of the majority of a previous generation of materialists. We have exactly the same amount of evidence that he was the Son of God, that God exists, that people have souls that we did a thousand years ago. Depending on how one counts it, we have slightly more evidence that the souls of do-gooders are happy than we did a thousand years ago, at least from a strictly materialist frame, given that "religion is a plague to be cured" has largely given way to "we need to figure out how to generate the benefits of religion without the drawbacks". The old-school materialists didn't recognize any benefits to religion. The new-school materialists don't admit to how much of their edifice is built on falsified claims.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
I have a hard time thinking of a worse one.
Communism. Like, it's not even close.
The history of "nobility" is largely one of forcefully looting as much wealth as possible from what are effectively slaves, held in place with military force.
For most of that history, wealth as we understand the term effectively didn't exist, because there wasn't a workable way to create it. Most people were subsistence farmers, and the military force was necessary to prevent the next guy over from rolling through and looting all the portable goods. Anything better than that required a level of structure and coordination that no one involved could maintain.
Of course not, they passed laws prohibiting peasants from leaving so that they could not get those higher wages.
You understand that food has to be made, a process that takes a lot of work with a lag-time of several months to a year? If everyone abandons the fields to go chase better wages in the cities, where does the next harvest come from? What happens to the people in those newly crowded cities?
Don't you see how that seems rather like saying "If you don't like the practice of double mastectomies, don't practice it with your kids"? Obviously double mastectomies are vastly more destructive than circumcision, but I don't see any principled difference.
The fact that it's vastly less destructive is a principled difference.
Literally anything can be labeled "abusive" or "harmful" if one engages in sufficiently enthusiastic linguistic masturbation. If one is to retain one's sanity, it is necessary to understand that the application of a label does not automatically shift reality. Yes, I understand that circumcision impacts the mechanics of sexual pleasure. The thing is, they do not seem to impact it all that strongly, given that orgasms still fuckin' rock even with one, and sexual pleasure is not remotely the sum of human existence. The simple fact is that I and a lot of other men have had one, and it does not appear to us to be that big a deal. This is in fact born out by the survey you linked: those with their foreskin intact very much want to keep it. Those who've lost it mostly don't care.
I implore you to let your psychological guard down for a moment and sincerely examine whether your attitude towards circumcision is simply a result of having been circumcised (which I'm assuming with 95 percent confidence that you have been) and the distress you'd experience if you were no longer able to avoid truly reckoning with what was inflicted on you.
This is quite absurd. What, exactly, was "inflicted" on me? I take it for granted that uncut men experience more intense sexual pleasure, but having experienced a goodly amount of sexual pleasure in my life, I do not find myself mourning the lack of additional intensity. What I have is good enough to be frankly dangerous; Having more would be nice, but why should its absence be some terrible crushing tragedy? Do you approach all pleasures this way, mourning that your car isn't a lambo and your house isn't a mansion, and that you didn't buy bitcoin for .001 cents a coin when you should have? How would it benefit me to obsessively mourn the things I theoretically might have had, rather than enjoying the good I do have in a spirit of contentment?
Why is it not good enough for me to freely decide that I won't continue the practice with my own children? Why is more than that needed?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
It's strange to be hated by the far-left for being rightist, and hated by the far-right for being leftist.
It's less strange if you consider that far-left and far-right are not polar opposites, but instead something approximating Stalinists and Trotskyites: members of a coherent ideological tribe, sharing basic values in common, driven to mutual hatred by surface details.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
The later appears to me to be a mainstream position, not "the absolute vilest possible relevant thing you could say."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
I used to be one of those "quality contributor charity cases". People make choices, and sometimes they choose to change.
Is this essentially correct, or am I missing a key distinction here?
You nailed it. And specifically this part here:
This fundamentally changes things because it means you cannot neglect my will; I am in control of how things pass into/out of my mind, and until you can go around my normal IO channels you need my buy in unlike with ships and planes who don't get a say in things. As a result, the normal paradigm of engineering ain't gonna work.
...And further, that this view is supported by an overwhelming amount of evidence from every facet of human behavior, and every claim to the contrary is either unfalsifiable or has been falsified, yet people continue to insist otherwise, in a way identical to Sagan's invisible dragon. This isn't because they're stupid, it's because Sagan's invisible dragon is describing something irreducible about how humans reason. Reasoning is not simply doing math on accumulated evidence. The evidence is weighed and assessed in reference to axioms, and those axioms are chosen. You can choose to uncritically accept one provided to you by others, or you can choose to look at an arbitrary amount of arbitrarily-selected evidence until you arbitrarily decide that no more evidence is needed and a conclusion can be drawn, or you can take certain positions as self-evident and then prioritize the evidence that is compatible with them.
That last option is how people end up believing in Determinism, despite zero direct evidence in favor of determinism and a lot of evidence against it: they've adopted Materialism as an axiom, and Materialism requires Determinism. Any evidence against determinism is likewise evidence against Materialism, but because Materialism is an axiom, evidence against it is simply deprioritized and discarded. This is not objectionable in any way, and it is the only method of reason available to us. The problem comes from people ignoring the actual operation, and substituting it for some fantasy about reason as deterministic fact-math, as though their choices were not choices, but predetermined outcomes, and anyone who doesn't choose the same axioms is simply not reasoning properly.
There's a lot of gray area out there, and some of it quite dark.
I'd be interested on the grey you see. Torture regimes observably fail. Totalitarianism observably fails. Power slips through the fingers, despite all efforts to the contrary. People have been trying to reduce humanity to an engineering discipline for three hundred years running, and they've failed every time. Again, that's not conclusive proof that they'll continue to fail indefinitely, but looking at the historical record, and accounting for my understanding of technology that actually exists, I like my odds.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
I disagree, for reasons explained in the rest of the comment.
Christianity demands a balance between loving the sinner and hating the sin. Non-Christians seem determined to insist that we only do one or the other, as their short-term-preferences dictate, but we will continue to do both regardless.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
The fact remains that a rich, well-fed society is capable of raising more and better-equipped fighters than one clinging to the edge of survival.
...How does this model account for the Scythians, Huns, Mongols, etc? The general pattern of relatively advanced, settled, built-up civilizations getting wrecked by successive waves of plains nomads? My understanding is that in the east at least, the nomads themselves settled down to rule what they conquered, and were wrecked in turn by the next tribe to come along.
Again with this shit. Because humanity hasn't solved all its problems and answered all questions, it has actually stagnated for centuries. Millennia!
Humanity has not solved any of its actual problems. Not a single one. We still get sick, we still die, we still covet and lust and hate exactly the way we did at the dawn of history. People predicted otherwise, and were proven wrong. The specific ways their claims have been falsified provides solid evidence that this will not change in the foreseeable future.
"Stagnation" implies a lack of necessary growth, but "growth" in this sense is pretty clearly not possible.
Natural selection is very much evidence against god that didn't exist a 1000 years ago.
It's evidence against a specific theory of God. It is not evidence against a God in the general case, or even against most specific cases. It does nothing at all to address a Simulationist theory, for example. Further, Materialism can't do better even by its own terms: everything we've learned about the mechanisms of the universe say that the universe shouldn't exist the way it evidently does, which is why we have people positing unfalsifiables like infinite universes.
Every aspect of the mind that gets explained and controlled by physics and chemistry is evidence against the existence of a soul.
Which aspects of the mind have been explained and controlled by physics and chemistry, in the sense you mean here? Do you recognize that previous generations of Materialists have claimed far, far more control than they actually had?
As people learn to measure and control your every impulse and emotion by manipulating your brain, you'll continue to shift the goalposts as long as they haven't solved the hard problem.
They've been trying to do that for three hundred years, and to date no shifting of the goal-posts has been necessary. I see no evidence that greater control over individuals or the public is available now than was in the 1600s or 1400s or under Alexander the Great. Deterministic control over individuals or groups does not seem possible at all, even in principle, and the feasibility of such control is one of the basic predictions of the Materialistic thesis.
This is by no means an obscure question. Disney can't get people to watch their movies. If brain-manipulation through measurement and control of brain impulses worked, they are one of the groups I'd expect to be really good at using it. They aren't, which is fairly good evidence that it doesn't.
Which religion doesn't either of course.
My religion, at least, doesn't require me to reject the readily-observable reality of free will, which is the base of my argument here. You can directly observe yourself making choices moment-to-moment. Materialism says that can't actually be what's really happening, and makes specific predictions as to why and how to prove it. Those predictions have been falsified every time they've been tested. Materialism ignores the falsifications and simply pretends such control exists, as you yourself demonstrate above.
One the most beautiful aspects of materialism is that "I don't know" is an acceptable answer where religion pretends to knowledge it doesn't have or goes for "it is unknowable", a statement with an impossible burden of proof that has been shown wrong on innumerable topics time over time.
I'm given to understand that reason demonstrates that a number of things are unknowable in principle. Materialism absolutely pretends to knowledge it does not possess, and has a long, very public history of doing so.
I grew up in a church with the understanding that Evolution was probably real. I can't be doing a "God of the Gaps", because I was born on this side of the purported gap. You seem to want to hold me to the predictions of previous generations of Christians, who made their arguments before I was born, and honestly, I don't think this is an unreasonable position to take. What is unreasonable is for you to object to being likewise held accountable for the arguments made by previous generations of Materialists, and it seems to me that my side has shifted the goalposts a whole lot less than yours.
and mormonism and scientology among others are new evidence against Jesus being the son of god.
No, they aren't. The existence of innumerable false religions was already priced-in; the invention of additional novel false religions provides no significant additional evidence, because such novel false religions are (or should be) expected. On the other hand, Materialists have been both predicting and actively working to bring about the end of Christianity for hundreds of years now, and yet Christianity persists despite Materialist predictions to the contrary. To the extent that those predictions have been falsified, it seems that this persistence should be at least weak evidence. And indeed, as I noted above, Materialist attitudes toward Christianity have shifted considerably over my lifetime. The hardcore attitude that Christianity is pure net-negative has weakened considerably, due, I think, to the evidence piling up against such assertions.
Materialism is an ideology like all previous ideologies, not a breakthrough or a new paradigm. All that is required to observe it deforming over time is a moderately-good memory.
Bro, you can't invent your own definition of the enlightenment, then say that everybody else's definition is wrong because it doesn't fit your own.
I'm not saying that your definition of the Enlightenment is wrong because it contradicts mine. I'm asking you what your definition is based on, how it is derived. I'm pointing to a pair of purported Enlightenment revolutions, and observing that the features people generally ascribe to the Enlightenment don't actually cluster the way the standard narrative claims. One revolution is much more secularized and rationalist than the other, two values usually taken to be core elements of the Enlightenment.
If your definition holds that individual liberties are a core, definitional element of the Enlightenment, my argument isn't that you're wrong, it's that you should then conclude that the French Revolution isn't a central example of the Enlightenment, and neither are the succeeding generations who took the French Revolution as a positive example of how to make a better world. The problem then becomes that absolutely everyone else appears to be certain that the French Revolution is a central example of the Enlightenment, and we can both notice we are confused together.
You say that your assessment comes from reading the words of theorists and revolutionaries, by which I have to assume you mean literally the French revolutionaries themselves. This is a good way to learn about the French Revolution, but not about the ocean spanning movement of the Enlightenment, on which exists a massive corpus of work by theorists arguing for the importance of individual rights.
My claim is that different types of evidence should carry different weight, and the order roughly goes: writings of theorists < theory as understood by revolutionaries < actions taken by revolutionaries/political actors < action as interpreted by the next generation of theorists/revolutionaries/political actors. Ideologies have a core, an identifiable set of central beliefs that define them. I'm arguing that the best way to identify that core is to look at which ideas make it into practice and then get propagated down through the generations and into subsequent revolutions and government reforms, versus those that do not. How could it be otherwise?
I do not think I am engaging in circular thinking. If the French Revolution is a central example of an Enlightenment project, than the values it trampled can't be definitional elements of the Enlightenment. If the values it trampled are definitional to the Enlightenment, then the French Revolution can't be a central example of an Enlightenment project. ...Otherwise, it seems to me that the definition of the Enlightenment is simply incoherent.
If you want to argue that the enlightenment brought tyranny, centralization, and religious persecution, you need to grapple with the fact that all those things were happening before the enlightenment and that the broad European history of the enlightenment is less absolutism and greater religious tolerance.
The French Revolution brought some of the worst tyranny, centralization of unaccountable power and religious persecution Europe had ever seen, and led to a military dictatorship that plunged Europe into one of the worst sequences of warfare it had suffered to date. Direct ideological descendants, Marx in particular, did significantly worse. They were worse than the status quo, and not by a small margin. I get that the American/British-style eventually spread and a lot of the European nations eventually settled down into peace and normalcy, and now they DO care a lot about individual liberties and other Enlightenment principles, and don't guillotine each other randomly. What I'm trying to do is to track the specifics of how that actually happened, compared to the recieved story of how it happened.
You and Mandalay seem to be arguing that the French Revolution's murderous nature was par for the course. It was not. France wasn't a slaughterhouse under the ancien regime. America pulled off a revolution with absolutely minimal bloodletting. People have argued that tyranny and massacres were the norm for French politics, but the whole point of a revolution is that you stop doing things the way they've been done, and start doing them exactly the way you think they should be done. And again, there'd be no point in arguing about it if everyone recognized that the FR was a monstrous mistake. They don't! It's been lauded as a victory for freedom and social progress for two hundred years!
You can't just pick one country you don't like, ignore all the others, and act like their own history started in 1789.
I'm picking the first two (three, counting Britain) countries in the chain, and trying to make sense of the divide between them. The next step is to follow the branches of that split forward through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. I'm not sure what to do with the argument that I can't act like the history starts in 1789, because 1789 is when this set of people secure absolute power and begin to use it. We can look at what came before them, or what opposed them, but neither seems to me to be of much help to the central problem; they won, they got to reshape their political world as they saw fit, and what they produced is what we have to judge them by. What am I missing?
Beyond this, your insistence that the success of the incredibly enlightenment oriented, rationalist-ruled, post revolutionary nations of Britain and America add proof that the enlightenment is bad is just baffling.
Britian and America diverged very sharply from France. If they're the central examples of the Enlightenment, fine, the French Revolution and its descendent ideologies are non-central, and then we need to ask why no one else seems to understand this. If France is the central example, then the extreme political divergence means America and Britian are the non-central examples, and their excellent results can't be attributed to Enlightenment ideology. If all three are central examples, then we need to admit that "The Enlightenment" can mean pretty much anything, and is thus an incoherent term.
Further, the French did what they did for specific reasons, and those reasons clearly derive from elements of Enlightenment philosophy, specifically the axiomatic confidence in human reason. I believe it is easy to demonstrate how those ideas contributed directly to the disastrous consequences in France, and how they continued to propagate through the subsequent generations of thinkers and actors.
The past 200 years are far away the most prosperous in all of human history. It is insufficient to say "science existed before"...
Science existed before the Enlightenment. The Scientific and Industrial revolutions are absolutely, obviously the reason for the graph you posted. The question is whether the Enlightenment is responsible for those revolutions, a question we can't answer without nailing down an understanding of what the ideology itself actually is and is not. I note that both revolutions were heavily driven by Britain and America, so the split mentioned above seems like it's pretty relevant.
The point isn't that science is fake, it's that the Enlightenment wasn't ever science, and especially not when it explicitly claimed to be. The educational revolution underpinning the birth of Science started with Gutenburg and Protestantism. The Enlightenment took shape because science already existed and was demonstrating its value. The Enlightenment itself was not a scientific movement, but a philosophical and political one. It frequently deployed fake science for political ends, using social hacks to bypass skepticism and verification because the lie was "too good to check"; Marxism and Freudianism being two of the more consequential examples, but the social sciences generally are rife with examples. Its ideological nature frequently undermined actual science, occasionally to disastrous effect.
Science and Industry, meanwhile, were obviously useful and experienced little to no ideological opposition from any quarter. No one who mattered was arguing that science sucked and should be stopped. What people were arguing against, and occasionally fighting, were Enlightenment social innovations. A fundamental part of the Ideology's strategy has always been to frame opposition to its schemes as opposition to Science. That's part of what makes it so pernicious.
Or at least, that's the reality as I understand it. If you think the Enlightenment was actually critical to the Scientific and Industrial revolutions, though, it'd be good to lay out exactly why, what, and when it did the things to get the ball rolling. I'm skeptical, but open to being proven wrong.
You appear to be asserting that if I steal my neighbor's chainsaw, that's bad, but if I then give it to you, that's perfectly fine.
I don't think that's what you mean to say, but it is what you're actually saying. I think you should consider stepping away from the keyboard, taking a couple deep breaths, and thinking a bit about how this thread is going, because at the moment you don't appear to be doing a good job of either understanding or conveying meaning with the words you use. I genuinely do not mean this to be insulting, and invite you to show this thread to someone you trust for a disinterested outside perspective. I do not wish you ill, but I do find this thread bewildering; I recognize your name from the old place, and do not remember you acting in this manner in the past. If you like, I'll step out here and leave you to it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I am not arguing that it is disastrous. Clearly millions of men live fine lives despite being circumcised. However, it does seem monstrous to me, a totally unnecessary and creepy violation of infants' bodies.
I had it done to me, would rather it had not been done, and nonetheless do not consider it creepy or a violation of my body. What explains the difference in reactions, do you suppose?
I am not a progressive.
Good. Stop talking like one, and stop thinking like one. Stop pretending that your idiosyncratic values are universal truths that need to be enforced by the power of the State, because you were able to draw a facile comparison between one thing and another thing and so apply a negative-affect label. Leave other people the fuck alone, and let them leave you alone, and pursue happiness as best you see fit in your own life.
We would not. Current social norms are that for a parent to cut part of his or her infant's ear off would be a very bad thing to do, something worth serious legal penalties.
If one parent did it, sure. If a whole bunch of parents started doing it, and "studies show...", they'd do as they pleased and everyone would smile and nod. The part you're missing here is that there is a fundamental difference between individual quirks and social norms. Circumcision is a social norm. Some weird bullshit someone makes up tomorrow is not a social norm. These two things get treated differently, because they are different. Social infrastructure is not in fact arbitrary, and pretending it is will only make you look foolish.
How would banning circumcision cause vast amounts of harm?
By removing one of the few remaining principles of tolerance we haven't yet managed to demolish, and establishing common knowledge that absolute political dominance is the only way to secure the future of one's tribe. Enforcing a circumcision ban on the Jewish community means telling them they don't get to be Jews anymore. If the government can pull that off, no one is safe. If no one is safe, the system you rely on for clean water and electricity will no longer function.
Every time I have this conversation, I find that my opposite seems to believe that Laws are magic, and that if they can just get their wishes codified, everyone else is forced to do things their way. The popularity of this view is both depressing and maddening. People obey the law because the alternatives are worse. If you make laws in a sufficiently unreasonable fashion, the alternatives no longer are worse, and people will avail themselves of them.
Americans do not share a common set of values. The only way we can survive sharing a country is by leaving each other the fuck alone, and even this requires a great deal of geographic segregation to be practical. The more the government's power is extended, the less the leaving each other alone works, and the more inevitable serious conflict becomes. It is already quite inevitable enough. There is no need to weld the accelerator to the firewall.
I feel the same way, but none of that is any justification for letting parents cut parts of their kids' dicks off for absolutely no good reason.
Religious belief is a good reason. Personal preference is a good reason. The harm is negligible, your personal disgust is not an argument to the contrary, and the second-order benefits are literally incalculable. You may not like circumcision, but you really, really, really will not like a no-holds-barred fight over the mechanisms of state power.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I think this is almost entirely a result of circumcision having been around for a long time and people being familiar with it.
Well, sure. It being around for a long time shows that it's not a novel practice with unknown consequences, and people being familiar with it means that it's pretty tough to convince people that it's somehow disastrous or monstrous when roughly half of them have a lifetime of experience to the contrary.
More generally, it seems obvious to me that this entire argument is yet another round of the usual Progressive word games. Circumcision is not an obscure practice, the outcomes are not in doubt, and those outcomes do not justify the histrionics activists inevitably deploy. Circumcised men get on just fine. If some think the practice harmed them, they are free to act differently with their own children, but there is no crisis here, and attempting to force the outcome you prefer will cause vast amounts of harm for very, very little benefit.
Most people who are fine with circumcision would not be fine with the idea of allowing parents to decide to cut off parts of their children's ears or fingertips or any other body part the non-consensual removal of which in infancy has not been traditionally practiced in the West.
Our current experiment with prepubescent transition rather indicates otherwise; we've just in the last few years started letting parents put their children through incredibly invasive surgeries on the very slimmest of justifications, of a sort that would have been absolutely beyond the pale as recently as a decade ago. In any case, it seems to me that circumcision is considerably less harmful than losing a fingertip, and I think if people decided they needed to do weird ear stuff with their kids, we'd probably let them.
I think that this would still be much better than parents having the right to get their kids circumcised in infancy. With the secret encouragement, at least there is some form of consent from the person who is actually going to be affected.
I disagree. Kids don't have a good understanding of the consequences either way; parents do, because in most cases they've lived with the consequences all their lives. More generally, I do not see why we should consider children free agents capable of making serious life decisions. Baring the small fraction committing severe abuse and neglect, there is not going to be anyone more committed to a child's welfare nor more invested in good outcomes for them than their parents. I absolutely do not trust teachers or other agents of the state to make better decisions for children than parents on net, and deeply resent their attempts to usurp parental powers while conspicuously neglecting the attendant responsibilities.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Revolution against people who insist that their way is "natural" "necessary" and "god ordered" even when it leads to endless death and suffering is necessary and natural part of history.
Is it? Can you point to some examples where such revolution actually succeeded according to its own priors? Are we about to get another of those cartoonish, unsourced anecdotes about how everyone prior to the Enlightenment thought medicine was witchcraft and burned doctors at the stake?
Why even attempt to form a correct view understanding of reality, when re-writing the past is so much easier?
What will you do to stop me? What will you threaten me with that is worse than death?
Shouldn't death be sufficient, since that's exactly what hypothetical-you is desperately trying to avoid?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
This sounds like a good idea. Let's apply it to the rest of society first, and then apply it here last. Reasonable?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr 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
1yr ago
Well put. The people downvoting you are poor sports, and probably cheat at cards.
Determinism is more theorem than theory, an exercise in hard logic rather than empirical data gathering.
Materialists generally claim that their viewpoint is simply the default, that there's zero evidence for anything non-Materialistic, and so they simply follow where the evidence leads.
Determinism is adopted because non-deterministic free will would pretty clearly break Materialism.
The problem is that there is precisely zero actual evidence for determinism itself, and there is an absolutely staggering amount of evidence for non-deterministic free will.
Every human has an entire lifetime's experience of making choices freely. No one has ever demonstrated actual deterministic control over the human will, in any way, to any degree, ever, despite repeated claims that such control was trivial and extremely-well-resourced and -motivated efforts to implement or demonstrate such control.
Despite this, Materialists routinely reject all evidence of free will on the basis of a determinism-of-the-gaps, having retreated from "we can directly, repeatably and arbitrarily engineer human will to our preferences" to "whatever you do was what you were always going to do, even if we can't predict it or control it or test this claim in any way". Determinism has been tested, and has failed all tests. After decades of steady retreat, the current version makes no testable predictions at all, but is precisely a statement of blind faith.
Observable free will is significant evidence that Materialism is wrong. But no human belief arises deterministically, and every human belief is chosen through an act of the will. Materialists choose to adopt Materialism as an axiom; evidence of free will conflicts with that axiom, and so it is discarded, not because it is disproven, but because weighting and filtering evidence is the purpose of axioms. Materialists know that free will can't exist, because if it existed it would disprove Materialism, and their adherence to Materialism is pre-evidential.
...And all the above is not an error to be corrected on the part of the Materialists, but rather a demonstration of how human reason actually operates. All beliefs are chosen. No one has ever or will ever be "forced" to adopt a belief, by evidence or by coercion or by any other mechanism. Some beliefs require more maintenance and effort than others, and some beliefs pay off more than others, but it all comes down to choice.
I mean, what does the null hypothesis for determinism even look like?
That we do not have access to a complete understanding of reality, and that the unknown unknowns are significant and must be accounted for.
Empiricism, the entire scientific method, is based on the truth of causality.
Empiricism and the entire scientific method are not universal solvents. They have limits, and those limits should be understood and respected, not papered over, ignored or lied about. The later solutions have caused great harm and misery, and that harm and misery has never been adequately answered for.
If causality is false we have to throw pretty much everything out and just accept that we're all living in Plato's cave.
Why? Within its limits, science and causality work quite well. Engineering is delightful. But my appreciation of air conditioning and microcircuitry and repeating firearms does not obligate me to ignore significant evidence that free will exists. I am comfortable saying that inert matter seems to run on strict causality, while the human mind does not appear to do so. This costs me nothing, requires me to paper over nothing, offered significant predictive value back when Determinism was still making falsifiable predictions, and seems to me to offer decent predictive value on the currently-untestable predictions that Determinism still allows itself.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
If you are a committed Christian (or theist in general, I guess) your reality requires lots of maintenance.
What sort of reality maintenance do you have in mind, here?
Religion is the practice of having faith in things you can't deduce through empiricism, atheism is a rejection of faith, and anti-theism considers faith the be a type of negative utility delusion.
Do you believe in free will?
I can, empirically, observe and interact with my will on a minute-to-minute basis. I can gather it, direct it, strengthen or weaken it. My interactions with it are nearly as inescapable as my interactions with gravity.
It is routine for me to observe Atheists arguing that Free Will does not exist. They admit that this belief makes no testable predictions, that one should act in every way as though it existed, and yet assume that it does not. They explain that this is because, under Materialist assumptions, it can't exist. They do this despite a considerable history of their forebears making confident predictions for something like two centuries that the will's nonexistence could be demonstrated and used for basic engineering of people, only to have all those claims falsified; the current position is the "determinism of the gaps" that they have retreated to.
It seems logical that they wouldn't pick a fight on such poor terms if they had a choice. If Materialism demands that free will not exist, then evidence of free will is evidence that Materialism is wrong. We each have a lot of evidence that free will exists.
The above, to me, looks like a pretty good example of "reality maintenance". What do you have in mind?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Christians have not gotten rid of the Old Testament God, and Christianity built the stability, peace and plenty that made a grift like the Enlightenment possible.
nope, posted in the wrong place.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
Well, how many Christians' concern with worldly life crosses the line (and by a lot). It seems the case of overwhelming majority of them.
Perhaps, or perhaps not. Certainly caring more about earthly affairs is an error I'm prone to, which I must constantly try to resist, and a lot of people calling themselves Christians don't seem to be on the right side of the line. On the other hand, I'm not confident that either of us can rigorously identify where the line between "making a good-faith effort" and "only pretending to try" is, and I'm certainly not confident that most non-Christians even understand what Christians are aiming for.
We've experienced it, and do not consider it worthy of the term "mutilation". No perceptible loss of function has been observed; while I'm sure there is a quantifiable difference, that difference appears to be entirely swamped by other factors.
It is, in fact, possible for a person to fixate on something minor and blow it up out of all proportion. One of the best ways to tell whether this is happening is to look at whether their experience generalizes. The experience of circumcision-objectors observably does not generalize very well. You can tell people that they've been mutilated, but many of us do not in fact perceive ourselves to be mutilated. You can claim that sexual pleasure would be greater; okay, so instead of it being the most intense physical pleasure we ever experience, it is instead the most intense physical pleasure we ever experience. Like, you get that sex is primarily a trigger, right? Do you think if you shave a few millimeters off a gun's trigger, it makes the gun less powerful?
More options
Context Copy link