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There are 5 interconnected reasons that public shootings like the recent one at LAX are about to rise like a meteor doesn’t. 1. We have violently increasing numbers of uneducated people in our country 2. The upper classes blissfully ignore the fact that human life is being brought into this world every day, by couples who are by most measures children, that has very little chance of happiness 3. This growing underclass has increasingly few possibilities for education or jobs 4. Society is being structured to reject, rather than nurture this group 5. It’s really easy to get a gun in the United States We’re essentially approaching outbreak-level numbers of people who are set up for mental illness from the moment they emerge into the light. Put more plainly, we as a society are manufacturing suicidal people. |
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While not all uses of the term "mental illness" are invalid, I hate how it's so often used in the mainstream media to completely deflect institutional and cultural responsibility and instead entirely shift the focus onto the individual. It's nauseatingly ironic that it's just that neo-liberal delusion — where all individuals, regardless of class, are seen as completely independent, completely free agents — that contributes to these kinds of atrocities occurring. |
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I don't think mental illness is a bad description for the condition of people who are stressed and depressed far beyond their capacity to cope, even if the causes that put them there are institutional and structural. But yes, it is often used to redirect attention from structural causes onto the individual. Meissler has some good posts on , which became a hot topic after addressed it. Few things in western civilization are as pernicious as the myth of ultimate responsibility. |
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The very fact that there are laws in economics, sociology, psychology that can be used to predict human behaviour and human responses to various situations kinda pisses all over the idea that we are particularly well-endowed with free will IMO. Half the time we are not even making rational independent decisions. And even if it is free will, the fact that it can be so predictable kinda makes the whole concept a bit pointless. |
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Typical! |
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That's not much of a defense... "I can't help but do crime because of my bad brain." Better keep you locked up where you can't hurt anyone, until your fancy brain science shows otherwise. The thing is, though, free will falls apart under philosophical inquiry. It doesn't even require empirical methods like neuroscience. |
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Yeah, I agree. Eat endless amounts of bad food = illness. Absorb endless amounts of oppressive bullshit = mental illness. ^ That's obvious a ridiculous over-simplification, but y'all get ma point, hopefully : P Oh yeah, AFTER ALL THE MIND IS ALSO PART OF THE BODY. FALSE DICHOTOMY OF MIND-BODY YO! |
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Free will has been a hot topic since 400 CE when Augustine wrote his Confessions. From the age of 14 to around 23 I was certain that free will doesn't exist. Because if you do something you do it for a reason and obviously, so I thought, from that it follows that your actions are determined by the reasons that strike you as the best reasons. So: given reasons determine your will and your will determines your actions; no freedom at all! The very idea of a free will then doesn't even make sense, because the will is something which is determined by reasons. Now, however, I tend to believe that the idea of an unfree will is incoherent. I think people, such as the blogger, who say that in everyday-life they accept the "illusion" of a free will; but in intellectual reflexion when they see the world as it really is, they accept that there's no such thing, are kidding themselves big time. It is logically very incoherent to split the one world we inhabit artificially into two words - the illusory world of everyday-experience and the true world as revealed by natural science and philosophical analysis. Free will is an almost complete mystery, but the problems run much deeper than guys such as that blogger make out. |
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Also, good Meissler thing yo |
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Ha ha! "Objection, your honor, calls for dualism!" |
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Either your actions / choices have causes, or they're random. Either way, or a mix of the two, you don't have libertarian free will. That's the Sam Harris argument in a nutshell. This is very good, from a slightly different perspective. (BTW welt, always a pleasure to see you) |
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"It is logically very incoherent to split the one world we inhabit artificially into two words - the illusory world of everyday-experience and the true world as revealed by natural science" Bit of a side-issue but in a way, that split does exist - it is impossible to get the 100% "true" picture from observation of the world - Uncertainty Principle etc. |
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Now, however, I tend to believe that the idea of an unfree will is incoherent. I think people, such as the blogger, who say that in everyday-life they accept the "illusion" of a free will; but in intellectual reflexion when they see the world as it really is, they accept that there's no such thing, are kidding themselves big time. It is logically very incoherent to split the one world we inhabit artificially into two words - the illusory world of everyday-experience and the true world as revealed by natural science and philosophical analysis. Free will is an almost complete mystery, but the problems run much deeper than guys such as that blogger make out. Coming back to this - it seems to me that you're using terms like logic and incoherent very loosely. It also seems to me that the bulk of the Western philosophical canon is devoted to exploring the distinction between appearance and actuality. If the notion of free will collapses under close inspection, well, so much the worse for free will, and no amount of handwaving about its depth and mystery will make it any more respectable than astrology. |
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free willy would disagree. he knows what freedom tastes like |
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Did you know that killer whales are actually fish, not whales. Not many people know this. People say, that fact is very unknown. |
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fuck off no way. it's probably not common knowledge cos when anyone hears it they instantly dismiss it as artlely ridarcularse |
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(BTW welt, always a pleasure to see you) I'm glad to hear Either your actions / choices have causes, or they're random. Either way, or a mix of the two, you don't have libertarian free will. That's the Sam Harris argument in a nutshell Well, that's basically how I used to see it and I think it is a very strong point and it is very rational to hold it. Schopenhauer's defense of basically such a view in his 1839 Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will is my favorite defense of it. If the notion of free will collapses under close inspection, well, so much the worse for free will, and no amount of handwaving about its depth and mystery will make it any more respectable than astrology. Well, I agree that there's a very strong argument against the existence of a free will. If you argue strictly from within the modern philosophical tradition, which is usually said to start with Descartes, I don't see any way out - then, as far as I can see it, you have to accept that there's no free will. However, it also has to be asked how strong that philosophical tradition is. In 1641 Descartes raised the question whether the external world and other minds exist or not. He demanded a strict indubitable proof for that proposition and of course till this day none has been found. Of course proofs have been offered - including proofs by Descartes himself - but the fact that every few months you can find in philosophy journals academic philosophers who claim to finally have found a proof for the reality of the external world and other minds reveals that none of the proofs are convincing. If there were convincing proofs there'd be no need to go on to produce more and more of them. So if you are intellectually honest and argue from within a more or less Cartesian tradition not only will the belief in a free will be destroyed but the belief in an external world and other minds are reduced to the status of unproven - and as it seem unprovable - 'wild' metaphysical speculations |
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What I've said above is of course not a proof that this tradition is inherently flawed (and I have not even argued for the point that you have to see all other philosophers who use the aforementioned argument against free will as Cartesians or post-Cartesians) and there's much much more which could [and would have to] be offered against that tradition, but I think it's only rational if such problems make you SUSPICIOUS of that very tradition. There's something self-destructive within it. (Similar to the failure of logical positivism. If you argue that only propositions that can be empirically proven should be believed, then you set yourself up for failure since it's impossible to prove THAT proposition empirically.) So to sum up: I would trust the arguments against free will if the philosophical tradition within which these arguments are produced were trustworthy. It, however, is not fully trustworthy because it seems to not only undermine free will but also the very principles upon which it rests. (I'm aware that i have not DEMONSTRATED that in this post. I've only hinted at it.) There are deep problems with the modern Cartesian and post-Cartesian tradition and I think there IS a real and more promising alternative to it when you look at SOME aspects of ancient Greek philosophy, Wittgenstein and Heidegger. I'm too tired to remark on the other issues now. I'm also too tired to read that interview. I'll look at it later, though. |
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if you don't reflect on free will, it won't collapse on ya. the ability to make this choice cohesively proves the existence of free will |
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Ha ha! Very good. I was wondering how long it would take for Cartesian skepticism to be trotted out. The answer - not long at all. :-))) Here's the thing - the concept of free will is incoherent even from an ancient Greek perspective, because it's self contradictory. Do you make a choice because of your current disposition (and the state of the world, of which you are a part)? Then it isn't free. Does the choice happen irrespective of your state and the state of the world? Then how can it be will? (and how can it mean anything?) Strawson's argument about ultimate responsibility is pretty devastating, too. I think in order to defend the notion of free will you'd have to give an account of it that overcomes these very meaty problems, otherwise it's simply impossible. This is analytically valid even if you doubt the existence of the external world, and even if you posit some immaterial component of the self. Logical impossibility is the Final Boss in philosophy, irrespective of other concerns. ;-) Cartesian skepticism is a wonderful topic for discussion but doesn’t it function in this thread as a distraction - AS IT ALWAYS DOES - when one is in a sticky situation? Toss the Descartes bomb and run. This is what philosopher Stephen Law calls "going nuclear" and he devotes a chapter to it in his book Believing Bullshit. A draft of the chapter is available . We can do another thread on Cartesian skepticism if you like - I think the best take-down of the whole problem is Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In any case, I don't feel beholden to "ultimate skepticism" merely for doubting something that you hold dear. |
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Just a quick remark because I don't have much time and need to catch the S-Bahn. See, I'm not defending free will because I hold it dear or out of wishful thinking (do you honestly belief that's the only reason that could drive people to defend the concept of free will?). I've taken that problem seriously for a long time and I just can't accept the arguments of the Cartesian tradition anymore because they lead to incoherence. So why is the idea of an unfree will incoherent? To give a short answer: Because the people who claim to belief in it do not actually believe in it. And it is incoherent to claim to believe in something when you don't. Claiming that you regard x as true is not sufficient to establish that you do regard x as true. For instance: I might claim that I regard it as true that nothing is more important than serving my fellow human beings. But then, when I see a beggar in the street, I'm annoyed by him and will not even give him 10 cents. Then obviously my actions reveal that I do NOT believe that there's nothing more important than serving my fellow human beings. What one regards as true is shown by one's ACTIONS as a whole, not primarily by one's verbal assertions. That means that one can be unaware of one's actual beliefs and has to test them in practice by going from mere theoretical musings to full 'real life'. Similarly: Merely claiming that one regards the will as unfree is not sufficient to establish that one really regards the will as unfree; it has to show in one's actions; if you claim that the will is unfree, but act as if it were free , then your believe in an unfree will is very superficial. If one would really believe that the will is unfree, it would be impossible to bring oneself to act as if the will were free --- just like it's impossible and pointless to treat a doll exactly like a human being if you are aware that it's just a doll. |
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The OP is a trap to support gas chamber eugenics so there will be less "bad" people doing stuff, when really most shootings are false flags by the criminals that run everything. And it supports de-clawing the population so they can't defend themselves and will be easier targets for the rapidly approaching communist takeover. |
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From heartbreak to a paper cut: the study of pain. |
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But welt, if belief in free will were reliably shown to cause certain aspects of behaviour, that would be evidence against free will, not for it! I think if you're going to insist on free will, for a start you're going to have to give an account of it that doesn't contradict itself in the ways I've described and linked to in this thread. So what is your account of free will? |
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Well that's it isn't it, a definition? I thought pain made an interesting point when thinking about free will. Do we need protection from this free will to survive better as a species? So peeps, you think that choice interferes with the whole 'concept'? We'd need to talk about 'choice' first maybe? Sorry it's late and i'm not sure i can blag my way in this talk at the moment so i'll stop right now. |
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Oh well, I certainly believe in will and choice. But this "free" thing is ludicrous. Are you making choices a propos of nothing? Including your current state of mind? Not sure where you're going with pain. I can see pain being one of the factors in the confluence of causes that results in a choice and action, but it's not the only one. |
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Well with pain it's vast but a simple starting point would be death and why pain works as a protective mechanism from it. As such it wouldn't be daft to associate it as a natural 'blocker'. If we need to stay alive so much then 'free will' has to be blocked in places. At times. I'm sorry but i can't do this here. Nothing wrong with xlt but i'm not sure i want to start to get properly into this because it requires an awful lot of text and i'm lazy. Also there's nothing very fresh about 'long posts' on MBs. I tend to skip loads and did so in this very thread. I enjoyed that animation you posted. For some reason youtube associated Phillip K Dick with it (I can see why i would associate the two but not youtube!) as there was tons of links so i ended up watching a few documentaries and interviewsi had never seen. Thanks for that because i ordered some books and it made what started as a terrible day become quite tolerable. It's very cold though. |
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I will warm you up, sugar. We can continue on G+ if you like. Interesting point about pain - there are all kinds of psychological and physiological responses that override volition, like flinching away from something threatening, fight or flight reaction, etc. I was thinking about Phil Dick too! Just about everything he wrote relates to solipsism, false realities, and so on, very much like Descartes' demon scenario or the ol' brain in the vat. |
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I'M SORRY FOR THE BLOODY LONG TEXT BUT YOU WERE ASKING FOR IT In my PhD-thesis I defend an "anti-traditional" Wittgensteinian way of philosophizing. Traditional philosophy is theoretical. The problem with these theories, however, is that there are no absolutely strict criteria to which you can refer in order to decide whether a theory is sound or not. We're in traditional philosophy, as Wittgenstein puts it, in a place "where there is no friction and in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk" (PU, 107). So what drives that Wittgensteinian approach is a desire for a strict and non-wishy-washy method of philosophizing. How do you get such a method? By getting rid of theory and exchanging theory for description: "We may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place." (PU, 109) Why that is such a good method of philosophizing is a good question and I think most Wittgenstein interpreters have given very bad answers. The main-thing I'm doing in my thesis is defending (and modifying) that philosophical method. It takes me hundreds of pages to do so and I honestly wouldn't know how to summarize my answer in an XLT post. Anyway, but that's the back-ground from which I approach the problem of free will. So what's my account of free will? The practical everyday understanding of free will. You have to accept it in philosophical reflection AS LONG AS you accept it in practice. What is it? Well, let's say I might have the opportunity to cheat on my girlfriend and the motive that it'd be pleasurable to do so is a good reason for it and the motive that it'd be cruel is a good reason against it. In everyday-practice we act as if these reasons do INFLUENCE but not ultimately CAUSE our actions; therefore we are responsible for our actions. |
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An idea that is utterly mysterious. As utterly mysterious as the idea of how something could arise out of nothing or as mysterious as the idea of the existence of something atemporal which exists but never temporally came into existence. It's as bloody mysterious AS IT GETS! But, strangely enough, that's how we DO ACT and in a practical sense DO UNDERSTAND the world. That's what we have to deal with it. (At least if Wittgenstein is right and I'm right when it comes to my defense of him, ha-ha. If you don't accept it you get in even greater trouble.) (It's not at all like astrology. Astrology may be called mysterious, but it's not at all an integral and as it seems NECESSARY part of our everyday-understanding. Therefore the analogy between astrology and free will is false.) Our everyday-understanding, however, doesn't imply what one may call a hyper-free will: The idea that you could will just about ANYTHING; but of course it's impossible for me now to will to throw myself in front of a train; freedom means freedom within boundaries (as described above). Therefore "But welt, if belief in free will were reliably shown to cause certain aspects of behaviour, that would be evidence "against free will, not for it! is not evidence against a free will, but only evidence against a fictional hyper-free will. ANYWAY .. I'm 99,9999% sure this line of reasoning as presented here will not appeal to you. That's because it isn't very convincing ON ITS OWN, only in the context which makes it plausible. If you're able to read German and are very bored/very interested I could send you a (by now a bit dated) 25-pages long summary of my line of argument though (the shortest summary I managed). |
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Thank you, welt. Very much appreciate the effort you've put into your response here. This is why I still visit xltronic - I start a thread on sociopolitical things, end up discussing free will and then end up discussing it with someone who's writing / written a doctoral thesis on Wittgenstein. I have some knee jerk responses but I'll suppress them and do some more pondering before I write a substantial reply. |
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Well, thank you. I'm still writing the thesis and there are still many issues I wrestle with (including a proper account/description of the phenomenology of willing), so I profit from discussions of all forms. For instance now I feel I should include a passage in my thesis in which contrast the Wittgensteinian criticism of the Cartesian tradition with 'going nuclear'. In general I have the impression that I got most of my better ideas from discussing them with people who are not directly or not at all participating in the specific academic discussions I write about. They're more likely to emphatically say "That's complete bullshit, doesn't work and doesn't make sense at all" and that's often a good clue: Not necessarily that one's writing complete bullshit, but that one needs to be more precise. |
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People create the system, the system gets fucked, the people get fucked and fuck the system, isn't that what happend? |
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you see i just have to read the last comment instead of all that other bullshit and now i get it. |
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i refuse to read between the informed and the cretinous anymore. i read the 1st bit. about freedom, sartre was spot on. and if u don't know what i mean u don't deserve an opinion or a voice. |
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The idea that a human is separate from the universe is an anthropocentric illusion caused by our biological super computer brains processing information through an "I", which susan blackmore thinks of as a story the brain tells itself. So read the meme machine, then read 'a new kind of science' which shows that complex things like fluid simulation can be done with simple cellular automata rules. And if the universe is a computer algorithm, it is "computationally irreducable". This means there is no faster more efficient way to predict the future output than simply letting the algorithm run its course. Therefore nothing can "predict" the future. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Rule30.html |
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welt, instead of writing a wall of text, I'd like to address a few small ideas at a time. For starters, Cartesian skepticism - Descartes wanted certainty, so he began with the idea that whatever could be doubted, must be doubted - this is how he arrived at the demon tricking him about the existence of the world. It was logically possible that it was so, therefore he must take seriously the possibility that it was so and work through and past it until he arrived (or not!) at his certain conclusions. Now, is this embrace of logical possibility and the consequent jettisoning of what we take to be knowledge about the world the kind of frictionlessness that Wittgenstein was criticizing? I admit I don't know much about Wittgenstein so I want to get my bearings here. |
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if you need a few hundred pages for anything that's not a novel or a technical reference, you don't have a real point. you're just a wanker. |
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Can one poop out oneself? What did Descartes have to say about that? Descartes is the type of person who would go to a party, eat all the burritos then use philosophical nihilism to try to trick people that they never existed. He was a complete sociopath. |
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Logical possibility is a good key-word. Logic concerns the "laws of thought", how we think properly. Cartesian perspective: We can meaningfully engage in 'pure' abstract thought radically divorced from our involvement in the world. We are, as he puts it, "thinking things". Wittgensteinian perspective: Descartes presupposes a confused view of what thinking is. We are necessarily involved in the world with our bodies, instincts, natural reflexes and we necessarily occupy a position in a community of people who speak the same language as we do: We necessarily inhabit a certain shared "form of life". Thinking means doing something within this form of life as a whole. For instance, 'doubting that my employer gave me real money' is tied to techniques to check the money, going to the bank, potentially informing the police and so on. So is it logically possible to doubt other minds? Descartes claims it is. Wittgenstein would claim Descartes is only engaging in the fiction of doubting other minds because it's logically impossible. Thinking means doing something in one's form of life. If you necessarily can't bring a though "into action" it is logically impossible. If you see a person you know - and about whom you know that he's no stuntman who loves pranks - lying on the street, bleeding and crying like an animal, just hit by a car, it is logically impossible to believe that he might be an automaton with no consciousness and no mind. That thought would involve treating him like an automaton or showing doubt-behavior such as reluctance to help somebody who might be a mere automaton. However, no "normal" person would react like that, and a person who would react like that would be considered mentally disordered (because he behaves, so to speak, illogically). Is it possible to doubt the existence of the world? Short answer: Wittgenstein would say it's highly unclear what that even means since the global skeptic deals with the world just like the non-skeptic. |
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So the lack of friction that Wittgenstein points out is the lack of attention paid to our form of life. The form of life provides the "rough ground" which is the basis to even have any thoughts. |
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A quibble, though - logical possibility applies to states of affairs that are conceivable without contradiction. Wittgenstein on the other hand appears to be talking about states of affairs that are plausible given our background information about the world. I can conceive of a man who, however unlikely, only appears to be conscious though he behaves as though he were. However, I cannot conceive of a man who is a married bachelor. Also, it seems to me that Wittgenstein's position endorses naive realism. Should I reject heliocentrism merely because I speak of the sun rising and setting? Am I forced to be a realist rather than a nominalist about color just because I say a banana is yellow? Aren't there kinds of friction aside from our daily intuitions and habits that are just as sticky but in a different way? I mean, there are GOOD REASONS to accept heliocentrism even though it contradicts our superficial first impressions and idiomatic figures of speech. In Descarte's demon scenario, though, there are no such reasons. The only thing you can say about that scenario is that it is conceivable without contradiction - a bare logical possibility. There are no positive reasons to believe that the outside world is illusory, beyond possibility. I would also add, on a tangent, that Descartes' demon, Chalmers' philosophical zombies etc. are like Hume's questioning of induction and Plato's cave - thought experiments designed to inquire into our beliefs, how we justify them and why we hold them, not actual hypotheses about the world meant to be taken seriously for their own sake. No one reads Plato and cries "but of course men aren't chained up in a cave!" (at least I hope not) |
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When it comes to Wittgenstein you have to keep in mind that he attempts a radical break with the philosophical tradition. Traditional philosophers try to solve philosophical problems by developing a theory for which they aim to give an ultimate justification. Wittgenstein, however, doesn't want to give an answer to philosophical problems, but he wants to make the problems disappear by making us see that they are illusory problems. How does he want to do that? By REMINDING us of how we use language in ordinary contexts / by REMINDING us what we normally MEAN by the words we use and the roles they play in our whole lives. Thereby we gain an OVERVIEW of our lives and about the meaning of our words, and that overview, Wittgenstein claims, shows that the typical philosophical problems were only illusory. The problems are illusory because in philosophical reflection we want to attribute (pseudo-)meanings to certain words even though the words have other meanings. For instance: In the sentence "I can conceive of a man who, however unlikely, only appears to be conscious though he behaves as though he were." you give pseudo-meanings to the words man and consciousness. A situation in which the words are used meaningfully would be, say, in an accident. You were a witness and a emergency doctor asks you about it. You say "There was a man involved in it, he seemed to be unconscious for a while but then regained consciousness and informed me that he felt pain in his legs". That use of words will then to a certain degree determine how exactly the man will be treated in hospital. The use of words in that situation performs a job, so to speak. But there's no situation in which you can meaningfully say "That man, even though he appears conscious, could, however, as unlikely as it is, be in fact unconscious". That sentence can perform no job in our lifeform. It's a pseudo-meaningful sentence. The sentence "The earth evolves around the sun" has a meaning. It has an effect on how we perform spac |
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It has an effect on how we perform space-travel. So the Wittgensteinian rejection of Cartesian skepticism has, if you take Wittgenstein's self-description of his project seriously, nothing to do with the unlikeliness of that scenario, or with the idea that it goes against our intuitions or with the idea that it conflicts with our background-information. It is due to Wittgenstein's conviction that it is formulated in a philosophical 'pseudo-language' which does no job in the world. (Therefore Wittgenstein is often considered a pragmatist. I think that's not right and goes to far, though. I think W. merely beliefs that pointing out the jobs of utterances is the most effective way to remind us of what we usually mean by certain words.) And he believes that you SEE that it's really a pseudo-language if you work through his texts. Since Wittgenstein beliefs he's battling deeply held confusions about the meaning of our words it will, from his position, of course never be enough to give a simple argument. You need to force yourself to stare at our normal language use without starting to theorize and then a change in your perspective, SO HE CLAIMS, will come. Soooo … why not take a look at §§243-315 of his Philosphical Investigations. It's less than 20 pages! (And it's incredibly great as I think.) I'm not a dogmatic Wittgensteinian, though. I'm torn between traditional philosophy and his method. That's why I write my dissertation. I finally want to know if I should trust Witty or not. |
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" It is due to Wittgenstein's conviction that it is formulated in a philosophical 'pseudo-language' which does no job in the world." As a scientist but an almost total outsider to philosophy (and very possibly an ignorant outsider), this is what really annoys me about philosophy: So much philosophical literature seems so vague and long-winded, almost to the point of meaninglessness. Whereas in science you can put an idea over in little more than a bullet-point list and a couple of diagrams, in philosophy (and a lot of the social sciences, and definitely in business) things just waffle on and on. It's a good test in the sciences for whether or not your idea is bullshit - if you have to resort to long-winded waffle, it's probably bullshit*. Anyway that's the impression I get as someone in the hard sciences - like I say, a philosophy outsider and probably an ignorant one at that. Hwaet thinkest ye? *However - you might be able to summarise a scientific idea in a couple of short sentences, but if that sentence is made of jargon words, perhaps it's not all that different? PS: IDM |
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As a scientist you should appreciate that your discipline wouldn't be where it is today if it were not for philisophical reflection. Science and philosophy go hand in hand. There was a time when they were both one and the same. Anyway, I don't nearly possess the logical cababilities to partake in this discussion. Carry on. |
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