02:13
@shp999 "Because foo gloks" Why is there a foo? Doesn't this beg the question? You're supposed to answer why there's anything, and you're using something to answer it.
It's pretty bad when I can argue against how sensible the question is using nothing but metasyntactic variables
"The question is defined very exactly" <- then it should be trivial to give me some description of at least the form that an answer can take.
@shp999 Let's completely drop the criteria that it has to be true. Give me any made up logically consistent answer.
13 hours later…
@shp999 There may be a NN involved, which would support my theory that healthy people are born 'good', only later becoming corrupted by our environment (the 'world'); hence requiring years of self-analysis and close attention to reality in order to overcome early traumas and damaging conditioning by 'society' (i.e. others in our environments). However, prison is just another form of conditioning. Conditioning may trigger the exercise of free will in some people, but it is no substitute for it,
You undermine your ability to even argue if you throw logic out the window. Talk about throwing away the baby with the bathwater
...to say "choices not determined by previous events" is evidence to me that you're conflating some definition of free will with choice
"Sure, you can avoid also this question about free will by saying "I hold no opinion on what "free will" means", even though it is defined so simply as "choices not determined by previous events."." <- That's not how language works.
You can define free will any way you like. I can define it as a ham sandwich. Ham sandwiches certainly exist, therefore defined this way free will exists.
By putting this in "passive" form without a subject ala "is defined so simply as 'choices not determined by previous events'", you hide the fact that you're ignoring the subject. I mention that to emphasize that you have no subject here to "define"....
16:33
Conflate mean something. You're saying I'm "conflating logic" with "a certain type of people".... those two concepts don't even go together
I've advanced the argument that the question of why something exists rather than nothing is meaningless.
You advance the counter that it does mean something, but that its meaning breaks out of what is logical
I explained in my argument why I think it is meaningless... particularly, it's not really asking something... that it just on the surface seems to ask something. This is evidenced by the fact that there cannot even be in principle an answer to it.
But your defense of this is that even if there cannot be an answer to the question, it somehow has meaning anyway, breaking out of logic
A particular setup X that will evolve to Y1 with probability P1 and Y2 with probability P2 is not illogical
Well yeah, and that's the problem... logic isn't causality... your confusion between the two though isn't a burden I should have to bear... that's your confusion
Imagine you make a flip book... you can draw whatever you want on each page, but the idea is that when you're done, we'll look at the images one by one while flipping it
We can make cute animations on the page... animating, say, a cartoon man walking to the store, or a ball bouncing
With the "ball bouncing" flip book, we can animate the ball in a realistic fashion... according to, let's just make it simple, Newtonian gravity, as it would bounce with standard friction, and the like
But I can also do other things. I can just put the number "1" on a few pages, then "2", then "3", and so on... once I get to "9", I put "10", and so on and so on
I can also draw anything else I want... genies summoning up unicorns, suddenly changing to bananas, and so on and so on
Like my flip book, a corresponding universe could hypothetically follow any rules at all, or no rules. It could be that every time I have a ball, the next frame looks like this. It could be that sometimes when I have a ball, the next frame does Y1, and other times it does Y2.
There are things I cannot "animate" in this fashion... I can't have a frame that shows a triangle with seven sides
But even if I don't follow "causality-like" rules, with the flip book like universe, I could still make predictable patterns
And even if I follow "causality like" rules, my flip book won't actually represent causal chains... it would simply be mimicing them. (Compare these flipbooks to animated feature films... even if elmer fudd always falls when walking off a cliff, that doesn't mean there's a causal chain there)
In, let's say, the causality animations... the apparent causes you see really have what's called a "confounder"... it's not elmer fudd walking off a cliff that causes you to see him fall, it's me animating things to a particular aesthetic that causes both of these
In a similar fashion, eating ice cream doesn't cause people to drown, though they may correlate (because eating ice cream and swimming are both summer activities)
Regarding "choice", I was searching for a video of Sam Harris describing choice (which he believes in; Sam Harris of course doesn't believe in free will)... I found one, but he takes about 15 to 20 minutes to explain it, and you're already confused
Regarding what "free will" means, I take the linguist approach. This is a term floating around in natural language... if "free will" in general can be said to have a meaning, it's to be found in a commonality between the speakers of that language
Definitions for a term from a linguist approach are simply documentations of how native speakers of a language use a term... they're short sentences meant to describe the thing the speakers mean by the word. They don't establish what the words actually are, because that's not how language works.
Among these speakers, regarding the term "free will" per se, even people who give me definitions for the term seem to bolt on other meanings to it outside of their given definition. Furthermore, there are at least two very broad descriptions of free will, but there's some commonality here as well
@shp999 You've given a great number of topics to me. This is one of them:
Sure, you can avoid also this question about free will by saying "I hold no opinion on what "free will" means", even though it is defined so simply as "choices not determined by previous events.".
Sure, you can avoid also this question about free will by saying "I hold no opinion on what "free will" means", even though it is defined so simply as "choices not determined by previous events.".
We can certainly do that... but if this is what you want to do, you should hold off on slinging out 40 topics at once
"Breathing life into" is an English idiom; actually I have a feeling its origins are biblical (the creation story)
In the flipbook universe, all I need for something to be "random-like" is for you to not be able to predict how particular states evolve
@shp999 Unfortunately these two topics are merging... you're looking at how dictionaries document usage... in this case, different dictionaries :)
In this case, what I'm saying is that you're introducing something new to the concept of randomness that's not required
"If you would like to implement it, you would have to come up with a way to implement also randomness." ...not really
"randomness" within the simulated universe rules is all about what a hypothetical entity within it can predict given the current state
3 hours later…
20:55
@shp999 Thank you for your opinion, but until you give me some actual content I have no reason to take your opinion seriously
You can accuse me of word games, but I'm giving you exact criteria for a question to have meaning... not just equivocating or anything. So as far as I care, you're just using "word games" as a dysphemism
We're the users of language; we're the ones who carry the torch of meaning. But meaning has to be about something... there must be an extension, or the meaning's illusory
21:40
@shp999 There seems to be another disconnect in meaning here though. You're confusing "not based on (pure) logic" with "illogical"
There are many lines of thought besides simply carrying a logical argument; I don't have any qualms with that at all
But just because something seems to have meaning doesn't mean it does... meaning is a very specific thing. "Seeming to" is a feeling. There's nothing special about something "seeming to" have meaning insofar as its ability to be illusory as opposed to, say, vision, where something can "seem to" move or "seem to" be red and that be illusory
"Feeling of agency" is a subjective feeling by the way, so not sure why it's a different bullet point
"existence of anything" isn't an idea in and of itself; "first cause" is the name of an idea that presupposes a particular sort of model of the universe
The question "Why is there anything at all?", or, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" has been raised or commented on by philosophers including Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Martin Heidegger − who called it the fundamental question of metaphysics − and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
== Overview ==
The question is general, rather than concerning the existence of anything specific such as the universe/s, the Big Bang, mathematical laws, physical laws, time, consciousness or God. It can be seen as an open metaphysical question.
== Criticism of the question's adequacy ==
Some argue that the question may...
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Transcript for
Oct12
Oct '1813
Oct14
Free Will, Omnipotence, Determinism
Discussing issues of causal and theological determinism
