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 Now online (1)dariusgriffin ...and 149 guests Last 5 registered Oplandisks nothingstar N_loop yipe foxtrotromeo Browse members... |
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I appreciate that fo sho, I just wish philosophy would be more concise and not waffle on for ages and ages. But like I said I am a noob with proper hardcore philosophy. |
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Insofar as I sympathize with "traditional" philosophy, I'd say: Yes, philosophical texts can be vague and long-winded. But that's not because they're meaningless, it's often for the opposite reason. It's, when it comes to the better philosophers, merely an effect of doing justice to the difficult and abstract subject matter. If you want to be precise you just have to write very long-winded texts, develop a 'boring' technical vocabulary etc etc -- otherwise too many misunderstandings are possible. And even after that there are still many vague aspects. [On the other hand, there ARE philosophers who write long-winded stuff and don't seem to give a shit - such as Sartre in Being and Nothingness.] Insofar as I'm frustrated by 'traditional' philosophy, however, I'd say: But why is it so difficult to be precise in traditional philosophy?It's because there are no clear criteria for success in philosophy! The whole project of traditional philosophy is based on the idea of finding out truths. But it's unclear how you could tell whether you have just discovered a truth or not. Given this lack of clarity at the foundation of traditional philosophy it's not surprising that there's no consensus in philosophy. And this lack of clarity suggests there's something wrong with it. But one also can not just abandon philosophy. People who claim to successfully overcome philosophy, such as recently Stephen Hawkings, usually just go on to philosophize in a very sloppy manner while denying that they philosophize. So: Philosophical problems deserve serious treatment since questions such as - what constitutes the good life? are there absolute truths or are truths cultural construction? what's the relationship between the divine and morality? - can not be avoided in a human life. However, traditional philosophy can not give well-grounded answers. Therefore, it seems, one needs a serious alternative to traditional philosophy. The most promising option I see is a Wittgensteinian type of philosop |
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I've had the flu and haven't had the energy to read those Wittgenstein passages, but I think I get the idea. So how does this apply to free will? What linguistic confustion needs to be dissolved here? My own analysis would be: what function does the word "free" serve here? Why not just say will? (I could ramble on but want to hear what you say) |
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Camus covered so much in the 'Mythe de Sisyphe'. Suicide, my thinking friends. Suicide. |
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where did "Julian" get his pin-wheel? |
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A bit long, but so what ... A popular way to express the idea that we have no free will is to say "I can do what I will, but I can not will what I will". Willing appears as somethings which just happens to one. One is passively subjected to one's will, so to speak. But having free will would presuppose that one can control one's will. One can identify at least three confusions related to this philosophical statement. (1) The confused idea that willing is an action. (2) The confused idea that willing is a non-causal bringing-about of further actions. (3) The confused idea that 'the will' is a sort of mental object which is analogous to physical objects such as cogs in a clock-work. I'll only give a rough draft of how confusion number 1 could be dissolved. The grammar of the verb "to will" is superficially similar to verbs expressing actions such as "to go for a walk" or "to kill". This similarity misleadingly suggests that willing too is an action. But if you think of willing as an action, it then becomes a philosophical puzzle that you can't will what you will. In the grip of that confusion one wants to say both (A) that willing is an action, that willing is something WE DO and (B) that our willing just comes when it comes. That's obviously self-contradictory. But why is that a confusion and not a real philosophical discovery which shows that a free will is impossible? You can see the confusion if you remind yourself of what you usually mean by doing something. In what cases can we meaningfully speak of doing something rather than letting something happen? For instance in that case: I DO something if I voluntarily raise my arm. I can control whether or not I raise my arm. This is in contrast to a case in which I wait for something to happen: My heart beats very fast and I can't control my pulse. I have to wait for my pulse to slow down. |
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So willing is not an action; however, it's a feature of actions that they are willed actions. In other words: There are voluntary actions but willing itself is not an action. Therefore it doesn't make sense to treat willing as if it could itself be a voluntary or involuntary action. The philosophical problem arose because one was illegitimately projecting features of actions on willing. So the dissolution of the problem, if it works, would work something like this. If you view willing as an action, it seems to make sense to ask whether willing is a free action or an unfree action. What's more: Since one "cannot will willing" it seems to be an unfree action. But if we remind ourselves that willing is NOT an action, one can see that willing is not an unfree action and the problem dissolves. [Or to be more precise: This aspect of the problem gets dissolved and this specific root-cause gets destroyed. All in all there are of course various related confusions and problems.] But now one might ask: What's the point of that dissolution? It might show that willing is not an unfree action because willing is not an action. But it implies that willing is also not a free action. So how could that line of argument help defend the concept of free will? - Because of the following. We have a pre-philosophical understanding of free will. The concept plays a role in our life. It is connected to our practices of holding people responsible. If we can show that the philosophical arguments - based on which the "natural" understanding of free will is rejected as illusory and (moral) responsibility is rejected as illusory - are inherently flawed, then that is a valuable achievement, even if a complete and positive account of free will is still lacking. |
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And ONE MORE THING. … I'll repeat an argument I mentioned before, but it ended up being brushed aside. One very fundamental problem with the position on free will you defend - "there is no free will" - is that in the end nobody actually believes it. If not even the people who put forward the argument believe it, there's serious trouble with the argument. (1) What one believes necessarily shows in one's actions. [Example: When I believe that touching a dog will kill me It will necessarily show in my behavior - I will in normal circumstances avoid touching a dog at all costs (unless I'm suicidal and want to die).] (2) Strawson claims to believe that free will is an illusion (3) Strawson leads his life as if free will were true and admits that he does so in that interview you linked to (Conclusion) Strawson's claim that he believes in an unfree will is false. He is mistaken about his own beliefs. He doesn't REALLY believe that free will is an illusion. One can basically generalize from Strawson to every other philosopher who defended the claim that the will isn't free. I'm happy to say more about my argument above and defend it if it seems erroneous or strange. But for now I'll leave it in that short form. I think unless you have a good answer to that argument talk about an unfree will is rather empty. It's similar to proclaiming "I am the present of the United States" but then leading your life as if you were a regular citizen. The way you lead your life shows that you don't really believe that you're the president. And similarly the lifestyle of philosophers who deny the existence of free will shows that they do believe in free will. |
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"A popular way to express the idea that we have no free will is to say "I can do what I will, but I can not will what I will". Willing appears as somethings which just happens to one. One is passively subjected to one's will, so to speak. But having free will would presuppose that one can control one's will." bollocks to that. will can will itself to change, that's the magic. on a momentary level, it's will. but if you treat it as a recursive thing -- the will changes itself which changes how it changes itself etc -- and draw out the limit as that goes to infinity, it then becomes free will, instead of just will. anyways, feel free to continue to ignore me and spout loads of bullshit written on amphetamines. |
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Would also recommend you cease memorizing Stawson's 5th Edition For Tiresome Cunts and pick up a calculus textbook instead; you might learn something |
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Why do you act like a child and insult me while complaining about being ignored? BE A MAN! |
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i wasn't complaining about being ignored. i simply have no patience for overbuilt academic bullshit; tenured deadwood sitting around trying to out-reference each other all day. for anything in life, you can make it as complicated as you want, but not everything warrants complexity. you've said some of the same things i've been saying, you just take sixteen times the amount of words to say it. who are you talking to, anyways? i'd wager you're just writing this for yourself. i do it too, so i know it when i see it. in fact, i'm doing it now.... in any case, you live in a bubble of esoterica that will never have any sort of impact in the world.... unless you learn the value of brevity, how to communicate with normal humans, etc. |
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prick |
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just reflecting the love the community has shown me |
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prick |
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"i'd wager you're just writing this for yourself. i do it too, so i know it when i see it." Be careful with these types of projections. They are very often wrong. |
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very often=always |
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alright then, what do you intend to accomplish with this deluge of citations? i'm willing to see things from a different angle. |
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Well, my first posts in this thread weren't very serious. But then fleetmouse was making some good points to which I was replying more seriously. Since we disagree, however, it seemed necessary to explain the position I'm coming from. I was explaining it because I'm interested in how others respond to it, where weaknesses are seen etc. And I'm genuinely interested in how fleetmouse will respond to the "challenge" I gave him. ….. At the same time I won't be offended if everybody thinks I'm writing boring bullshit and leaves it alone … so it's a WIN/WIN situation! |
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fair enough then. apropos my "complaint," all i really meant was, "you can't be writing like this on XLT and not be getting something out of it." i just figured, you know, standard procedure -- this guy is trying to be academic on the internets, obvious thing to do is craft a reply telling him he's a no-good buttpoop. |
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my determinism is soft like polar fleece. i solve the hard problem of consciousness with multiple universes. if not that, i solve it with time. time is definitely some frothy blob -- like in that , except free will causes the string to melt re-solidify into slightly different arrangements of string, similar to the light bulb in a lava lamp. |
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welt, it seems like your answer is something like - let's not think about the problem of free will because we know how the term is used in our daily lives. I'm sorry but saying it's not an action seems like a dodge. How about we call it a process? As to whether or not Strawson or anyone else behaves as though they have free will - as I said in my examples above, you can speak of the sun rising without being a geocentrist. And you can be a nominalist about color and still say that a banana is yellow. To add a third example, I see all the objects around me as solid even though I accept the physics that says that atoms are mostly empty space. Our mental life is full of those kinds of tensions, and retreating to naive realism just because of an apparent conflict between custom and deeper analysis seems to me like a bigger problem than the problem of free will you want to avoid thinking about. I want to go back to your example of not cheating on your girlfriend and be a bit more analytical about it. You consider that an example of free will because it's logically possible that you could have done otherwise. And for the will to have been free, that means that it wasn't entirely determined by prior factors such as the way your girlfriend is, the way the potential mistress is, the disposition of your self at the time (including any soul you care to postulate), and so on. No, in order for it to be free, you must imagine that you might have done otherwise given the exact same set of dispositions and circumstances, down to the tiniest detail. In which case I must ask you - how does your decision not to cheat mean more than a coin toss or a dice roll? |
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The problem is that 'speaking of the sun rising' or 'speaking of physical objects as solid' is not analogous to applying the concept of free will. When I say "Ah, the sun is rising now" all I mean by that is that I now stand in a specific relationship to the sun -- one in which my surroundings are 'enlightened' and I can see the sun in specific position ins my visual field. When I say "Ah, the sun is rising now" I don't literally believe that the sun is rising. So there's 0% contradiction between that statement and our knowledge about the solar system. It's the same when I speak of objects as solid. My saying "Ah, that piece of wood is solid" means that it won't easily break and fall to pieces etc. There's nothing in that statement which has any implications for the description of wood on an atomic level. So there's 0% tension between that statement and a scientific description of wood. If, however, I say "Fritzl raped his daughter out of his own free will" I mean that all other things being equal it would have been possible that this action might not have occured. But if I deny free will that contradicts my statement about Fritzl. So NOW we HAVE a contradiction. In the other cases there's really no contradiction at all. So if you really believe that there's no free will - and aren't a complete nihilist who in the end just doesn't care about truth and reality - you will necessarily have to stop applying the concept of free will in daily life. I don't want to avoid thinking about free will. I just take the law of non-contradiction seriously. |
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to summarize, welt's answer be thus: "it depends on what your definition of 'is' is." |
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There's no contradiction in pointing out that the facts of the matter differ from our customs and colloquial expressions. And I don't see that disbelief in free will entails nihilism. I'm not talking about disbelief in will. I believe that I make decisions - I just don't believe that I make uncaused, disconnected, meaningless decisions in a vacuum. Now on the other hand, your Fritz who commits an uncaused rape of his daughter - whose actions aren't determined by his own disposition, whose actions might have been different given the exact same set of prior factors, whose action is therefore no more comprehensible than a coin toss - there's your nihilism, your meaninglessness, your absurdity. |
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My point was that these "colloquial expression" DO NOT contradict what natural science describes as matters of fact. Do you honestly belief that when somebody says "Ouch! That stone is solid!" the speaker mysteriously implies theses about the being of the stone on an atomic level? That expression might very well SUGGEST certain ideas about the being of the stone on an atomic level. But it doesn't imply them. There's a very clear difference between 'implying' and 'suggesting'. Belief in a free will might not necessarily entail nihilism; but it entails nihilism when you have the nerve to use the concept of free will in daily life when you belief that there's no free will in reality. It shows that you don't care about the truth and don't want to do justice to the truth. If somebody denies free will and lives according to his beliefs I will not complain about it. But if you take comfort in a cheap reality/appearance-distinction that's just laziness and ignorance of the most basic logical law (that of non-contradiction). I admit that I don't have a clear account of free will (at least not at the moment, "haha"); but what is more rational? Accepting unclarity (as I do) or going against the law of non-contradiction and living your daily life as if reality doesn't matter? |
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Whoops. Of course I meant to write "LACK of belief in a free will might not necessarily entail nihilism; ..." |
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I'll use my free will now to bring my awake body into subjection and sleep, I hope .. |
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F O R M E A N I N G , C O N T E X T I S E V E R Y T H I N G |
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ANYWAY … to SUM UP. +1. You have one strong point - you solve the problem that we have no clear understanding of what free will is by outright denying that it exists. Unfortunately this strong point goes along with various weak or perhaps even absurd points. -1a. You either render philosophy almost meaningless by placing the results of philosophy in a safe theoretical sphere that doesn't interfere with our lives -1b. Or - if you not only want to talk the talk, but walk the walk - you destroy our form of life to the extent that it depends on the belief in free will. [The fact that almost everybody takes flight to position 1a proves that this is a serious problem.] - 2. You destroy moral responsibility. - 3. You seem to dogmatically presuppose that everything of which we have no clear understanding must be non-existent. But it might very well be so that something exists even though we only have a vague understanding of it. I don't see any rational law that says "Accept only that as existing of which we have a clear understanding, even if everything else speaks for its existence". So that would be a dogmatic claim. Ironically it is dogmatism that is irrational. |
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I really don't get what your problem with Welt is. Fleetmouse basically starts a philosophical discussion, Welt has (apparently) written a PhD thesis connected to or about this subject. Is he supposed to write single sentence replies because otherwise you'll feel butt hurt out of some sad anti-intellectual sense of inferiority? |
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Ironic LOL @ epicmegatwat complaining someone's boring. |
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no matter how dull you are, there's always someone more boring. i'm afraid my level of dullness is no match for the XLT dupe swarm. kudos. qrter -- i don't get why you think i have a problem with welt. sure, i'm having a blast being super-puerile, but i AM still reading all his posts. thread bump because i came across the article i linked, and i realized: this is perfect for that philosophy thread from a few weeks ago. it makes the point far better than i did. instead, i just get replies from who dullards who don't get it, accusing me of being a dullard who doesn't get it |
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