Paul Brunton, quotes by The Maverick Philosopher.
Peterdjones
Karma: −1,560
Huh? “Soul” and “Free will” are almost entirely different ideas.
The counterargument to “arguments are not soldiers” is “a point should have a point”.
It’s not an example that lends much credence to the idea that all problems can be solved that way, even apart from the generalisation-from-one-example issue.
Hi.
You can respond to the argument.(it might even do you good). or you can refuse to consider criticism. It’s your choice. From which I will draw my own conclusions.
if a person claims to have a “belief” about something unempirical, they’re wrong.
Why si that relevant? The question is how to explain belief:-
“To me it seem the problem here is simply trying to treat natural language sentences as real things when they are only an approximate abstraction, that breaks down in these kinds of edge cases.
There are no discrete “belief’s” with “justifications”, there are only a probability distribution over the configuration space of all possible histories of sensory input. And that’s just another layer of abstraction really, but it’s enough for now.”
Wrong beliefs exist
A theory that explains why people sometimes say “two plus two equals five” is a theory of psychology
exactly.
similarly, a theory that explains why people sometimes say things like “there is an invisible dragon in my garage” is a theory of psychology and not a theory of epistemology.
Epistemology can’t ignore falsehood.
What is that relevant to?
I dare say high-level trolls cause all sorts of damage, but what’s the relevance?
Well, no-one is encouraging suicide here, so there are no trolls here.
And who is doing that?
People can believe in unempirical things. That’s a fact—an empirical one, if you like. The standard theory that treats beliefs as linguistic, sentence-like things can handle such beliefs.. The question is whether the Possible Experience theory can.
how does a belief in invisible pixies relate to possible experience?
I consider libertarian free will not only false, I consider it self-contradictory. In short not only it doesn’t exist, I don’t see how it could possibly exist (for coherent definitions of determinism and free will) in even a hypothetical universe.
Where;s the argument that the indeterministic model [of libertarian free will] is incoherent?
Too much metaphor. What is this damage?
Thats a description of the deterministic model. Where;s the argument that the indterministic model is incoherent?
Insults are highly subjective too.
Okay, look. When you say “where’s the choice?” I can only understand your question as saying “where’s the decision process?” The answer is that the decision process happens physically in your brain.
That’s not what I mean. I mean that any deterministic process can be divided into stages,such that stage 1 “contriols” stage 2 and so on. But because it is deterministic every probabiity is 1. But choice is choice between options. Where are the other options, the things you could have done but didn’t?
Isn’t “crimes” just a wee bit overheated?
Which leaves the question in an uncomfortable position whereby it is calling dualism a form of determinism. Indeed, any solution which posits a non-reductionist answer to the question of free will is being called determinism by your definition.
A dualist would regard their immaterial mind as internal. I was givin a non-dualist asnwer to the question “what is outside” because I thought there weren’t any dualists round here. Are you a dualist? Am I being vague because I correctly anticipated your background assumptions?
Worse still, your formulation is completely senseless in the reductionist form you’ve left it; you deny non-reductionist answers, but you implicitly deny all reductionist answers as well, because they’ve -already- answered your question: No choice happens whatsoever that is “fully determined” by things outside your central nervous system, that denies the very -concept- of reductionism.
Events happen that are fully determined by outside events, for instance if someoen pushes you out of a window. We wouldn’t call them free choices, but so what? All that means is that I have correctly identified what free choice is about: my definition picks out the set of free choices.
Your question maintains meaning only as rhetoric.
I have no idea what you mean by that.
To say Eliezer hasn’t answered it in that context is to complain that he didn’t preface his arguments with a statement that the brain is the organ which is making these choices.
He hasn’t answered the question of FW because he hasn’t said anything at all about whether. or not brains can make choices that are not entirely determined by outside events.
Socialists do believe in fun. So long as it is organised by Billy Bragg.