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My wife has no beliefs I consider repulsive. My children, speaking strictly, don't really have beliefs at all, beyond perhaps "I like this food" and "these people make me happy". My parents have no beliefs I consider repulsive. My siblings have some beliefs I think are wrong, but people being wrong is part of the human condition, and certainly not worth repulsion over. one person I know is teaching their child that sometimes lying is okay, and that's probably the closest I'm aware of to a "repulsive" belief. Certainly it's not worth killing over. There are ideas that I think are worth fighting, dying and killing over, so I know such ideas exist. I just don't know anyone who holds them.
Your statements continue to be absurd.
This clarifies the conversation significantly. Would I be correct in guessing that you do not believe in free will, and think that human behavior is, by necessary implication from the obvious truth of materialism, fundamentally deterministic?
I mean, I don't think there's any reason to believe that our thinking is deterministic, given that we can each observe ourselves exercising free will every moment of every day. To the extent that the most basic and obvious observation of all completely contradicts Materialism, so much the worse for Materialism.
In any case, if you think our brains are deterministic, than your argument above makes no sense at all. Love can't possibly be an unprincipled exception, because it doesn't exist; the desire you claim we all share to kill others, and the obvious lack of such a desire that I observe toward my family and friends would both necessarily be equally bound by the chain of cause and effect. Your entire argument here defeats itself.
More generally, this conversation has been the philosophical equivalent of seeing a car driving on the freeway at three AM, drifting erratically between lanes. Your statements have no coherence, only vehemence. My guess is that you are some form of troll, but in any case, you should put a bit more effort in.
I find claims of humans being anything but deterministic (above the level of quantum mechanics) frankly confusing myself, and I do hope you don't think I'm a troll.
Nowhere in the human body do we find anything that acts contrary to the laws of physics. Our inability to perfectly model it and thus predict future decisions is a failure of our measurement tools and computational resources, from a qualitative standpoint we're no different from a sorting algorithm where you can mechanistically predict with near perfect confidence that it'll pick the larger of two numbers.
And mere randomness, be it fundamental or because of errors in measurement doesn't give rise to free will, certainly not in the sense people use the term. A billiards table doesn't have free will just because we can't predict more than half a dozen bounces before chaos overwhelms us.
This proves far less than you'd like. Do you notice the blind spot in your vision or the input of your visual neurons appearing in staccato bursts interrupted by saccades which the rest of your visual cortex post-processes into a seamless, smooth video? So much the worse for neurology and optics, when it contradicts our fundamental lived experience.
Where exactly, from the jiggling of sub-atomic particles, which are well described by the Standard Model of physics, to the biological superstructures we're more familiar with exist, made of the same, does "free will" arise?
For the record, the troll part wasn't about the claim of determinism, which seems to me to be the consensus view among participants here, for the reasons you describe.
This is my understanding as well. But it seems to me that this argument ought to cut both ways: if Materialism necessitates determinism, then determinism's implausibility should translate to Materialism. And it seems to me that Determinism is exceedingly implausible, to a degree that people do not accept from arguments they do not dearly wish to adopt.
If Determinism were merely unfalsifiable, that would be bad enough. But in fact, many previous versions of Determinism were in fact falsified, at least in terms of the long-term claims of their most prominent proponents, and the present position of complete unfalsifiability is the Determinism-of-the-gaps that remains when all other possible arguments have collapsed. The claim of Determinism didn't start modest; it has ended up modest because it has a great deal to be modest about.
To the extent that these phenomena are verifiable and falsifiable, I do not see a reason why they should be relevant to the point at hand. A better question would be why you believe the room around you exists; after all, might not your senses be deceived? In the same way we both experience the room around us and so are highly confident of its existence, we both experience choice and free will. We each have, numerous times this very day, asked ourselves some variant of the question "should I...?" One cannot rely on Cogito Ergo Sum on the one hand, and conclude that one's lifelong experience of actively exercising one's Will is simply an illusion on the other.
We've discussed the idea that beliefs are chosen before, if I recall correctly. This is an example of how beliefs are, in fact, chosen. If evidence forced conclusions, then our collective observations of choice and Will would count against Materialism. But in fact, Materialism is adopted axiomatically, and then Determinism becomes "obvious" despite it possessing negative predictive value and being directly contradicted by all available evidence. With the right axiom, any amount of evidence can be pushed aside, even reversed. And this is in fact how all humans think; all it takes is introspection and a little honesty, and you can observe the process yourself.
Skinner's failure to describe everything in terms of operant conditioning by no means reaches the level of "falsifying" determinism. At most, it shows a particular, highly crude approach to prediction fails.
What it doesn't tackle is-
A) Humans are made of particles with nearly perfectly defined properties we can simulate with arbitrary accuracy. B) At no point, going up the chain, do we encounter a reason to posit phenomenon that can't be explained in terms of interactions of more fundamental elements, even if the emergent behavior isn't computationally tractable.
Those two are nigh impeachable, and in combination are sufficient to banish free will.
Of course a complex macroscopic object like a human is enormously difficult to simulate from the ground up, but that's no different from a beach ball or a protozoa. I fail to see how this is a rebuttal worthy of consigning the project to the gaps of our understanding.
The fact that such intuitively obvious notions can be verified and falsified is evidence that something like the "sensation of free will" can be too. I think there's sufficient evidence to make that claim with confidence, what I find perplexing is that it doesn't convince you.
You're talking to someone who assigns a non-negligible probability to everything around me being a simulation. However, since I have no tools to robustly explore that notion, and since, without gross incompetence on the part of the entities doing the simulating, it makes no practical difference, I find it moot.
My senses can be deceived. I've seen plenty of insane people who chose to trust their senses over other conflicting streams of information, to their detriment, and should that discordance ever build up sufficiently, I will certainly consider that I might be going mad. That's not the case today.
Negative prediction value? How on Earth?
That's as prima facie ridiculous to me as claiming that Quantum Mechanics has negative prediction value because I can't apply it to myself, or because I'm not tunneling through walls as I speak.
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