fmaa
9d ago
Ok, I don't believe we have metaphysical free will. That in no invalidates any choices I have made so far or any choices I'll make in the future, because their importance to me has never been based in metaphysical free will, see also the litany of Gendlin. That an algorithm is deterministic doesn't make the work it does any less real or avoidable.
If you want to call this belief something else, go ahead, but then also replace all instances of "free will" in FCfromSSC's posts with that same word, because we're both talking about the same internal feeling of making choices.
fmaa
10d ago
Which includes this quote from you:
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.
Which flatly denies the existence of compatibilism. Neither materialism nor determinism say you aren't really making choices. Determinism does make the currently untestable claim that, given the exact same starting state and exact same inputs, the choice-making algorithms in your mind would produce the exact same outputs. Materialism claims that this choice-making is fully contained in physical processes in the brain, which is currently imperfectly testable, but has some good evidence for it.
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.
No, I assume materialism and determinism for my model of the world (Yeah, quantum uncertainty means the universe can't be perfectly predicted. There is currently no reason whatsoever to believe this has any effect on the brain or cognition.) But crucially my ability to converse does not in any way rely on these assumptions, let alone their opposite, which is your original claim that I objected to.
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.
The first quote sounds a lot more like "I don't feel like I'm a machine" to me. Otherwise, this comes back to your absolutist stance where the weather isn't materialistic because we can't fully control it and lobotomies aren't physically controlling your personality because they only produce a specific, not arbitrary, change to it.
fmaa
10d ago
The pretense is in ignoring compatibilism. The sole evidence against materialism isn't the experience of free will, which feels the same under materialism (and determinism, for that matter), it is the conscious experience and the hard problem. Which is why all the evidence that conscious experience is materially based is so interesting.
We can work mind-to-mind to communicate, teach or persuade. We cannot work mind-to-mind to read or control.
I am communicating with you right now, and from my perspective no part of this communication is based on assuming non-determinism.
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. Like, you keep going on about this, both with me and other materialists in this thread (Perhaps because your conception of your own Christianity is so deeply based on you feeling like you're continuing millennia of tradition?), but this is not a motte-and-bailey on my part. I'm not trying to be part of a Movement here.
fmaa
10d ago
This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed.
I genuinely can't tell what you mean by this, though I'm assuming it's part of your usual pretense that compatibilism doesn't exist and materialists deny the experience of free will. But how can a method of action possibly operate off an untestable assumption?
We have no proof that Determinism is true; we also have no proof that it is false. People are free to choose their beliefs accordingly. My disagreement is exclusively with those who insist that their system is empirically supported, when in fact the opposite is true.
While determinism is currently unfalsifiable, we do fact have a significant amount of empirical evidence that the mind in materially embodied in the brain. But we've been over that before and, no, whatever new evidence has appeared since then will not meet your absurd standards (iirc, literally no connection between biochemical processes in the brain and observed or self-reported mindstates counts as evidence until people have fantasy story mind-control).
fmaa
17d ago
I largely agree with you, but I don't think the last part is true. As with the weirdos wanting to be hunter-gatherers (or worse, raiders), you really can't be those things as they were in the past, because all the good land has been taken by people doing something vastly more productive with it.
And an off-the-grid cabin in the woods isn't really being a medieval peasant. You need a lord for that. But, ironically, for the authentic frontier homesteader experience you really need some nearby raiders to potentially pillage your homestead, otherwise you're benefiting far too much from the peace and prosperity of the modern state surrounding you.
See the first part of https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/21/current-affairs-some-puzzles-for-libertarians-treated-as-writing-prompts-for-short-stories/
I don't even necessarily disagree that this might be a good use of government, but this is essentially not an argument for democracy, but an argument for imperialism. Backwards communities need better morals enforced on them by guys with guns from more enlightened ones.
More options
Context Copy link