compatibilism

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phyllo
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Re: compatibilism

Post by phyllo »

Flannel Jesus wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 2:16 pm
phyllo wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 1:55 pm
But for a discussion of compatiblism and responsibility it's a poor choice, because it can easily distract from the 'are we responsible for our acts in a determinist universe' precisely because it is a moral issue with such strong divisions. It begs for tangents.
I'm not distracted. Are you distracted?

Consider "moral responsibility" in any context.

He won't discuss what it means. He won't discuss any alternate ideas about moral responsibility.

He has one idea about it and that's it.
What one idea does he have?
That in a determined world you are compelled to act one particular way by your brain and therefore there is no moral responsibility.

We have presented him with several ideas about how moral responsibility works in a determined world.

All of which he dismisses.
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Re: compatibilism

Post by Flannel Jesus »

phyllo wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 3:12 pm
Flannel Jesus wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 2:16 pm
phyllo wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 1:55 pm I'm not distracted. Are you distracted?

Consider "moral responsibility" in any context.

He won't discuss what it means. He won't discuss any alternate ideas about moral responsibility.

He has one idea about it and that's it.
What one idea does he have?
That in a determined world you are compelled to act one particular way by your brain and therefore there is no moral responsibility.

We have presented him with several ideas about how moral responsibility works in a determined world.

All of which he dismisses.
That idea itself is fine, imo. If that's what he thinks, I don't see any problem with him exiting the conversation continuing to believe that.

My problem with him is that he seems to want to be persuaded otherwise, but won't ever entertain anybody else's train of thought who does think otherwise. It's this game he plays where he baits you in by feigning curiosity, and then just refusing to allow that curiosity to take him somewhere in the conversation.
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Re: compatibilism

Post by iambiguous »

ME:
Well, in the either/or world some things are true and some things are false. There is no alternative world where it's the other way around. Or none that I'm aware of. One can't both get pregnant and not get pregnant. And, if pregnant, one can't both abort it and not abort it.
phyllo wrote: Mon Mar 20, 2023 9:03 pm "Things" are not true or false, statements are true or false.

Statements taken as true by one person may be taken as false by another. Statements taken as true may turn out to be false at a later time. And vice versa.
Right.

Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. But that is either true or false only if encompassed in a statement. John states that Russia did invade Ukraine then. Jane states that Russia did not.

So, the fact that it can actually be demonstrated that it is true pales next to that?

Well, unless human reality itself is all just a manifestation of solipsism or a simulated reality or a dream reality or a Matrix reality.

John states that Russia's invasion was morally justified. Jane states that the invasion was not justified morally.

Let's pin that down objectively.

Or...

Russia invaded Ukraine because the laws of matter are such that nothing happens in the universe other than as it must given the laws of matter. The human brain being just more matter itself. But Russia is still morally responsible for invading. And the invasion was immoral because that can be established as well. Just ask the philosophers and the scientists.

Or, if God does in fact exist, the theologians.
phyllo wrote: Mon Mar 20, 2023 9:03 pm A person who says "I'm pregnant." may be lying, or may be mistaken, or may be joking.

How will/can/should/did the person being addressed evaluate the statement?
Well, in a determined universe as some understand it, lying or being mistaken or joking are all interchangeable. Why? Because whatever you or others think you were being you and they were compelled by your/their material brains to think you were doing. Same with evaluations of that. Nothing is not fated/destined/determined to be because all matter is enthrall to the laws of matter.

We are just still completely baffled as to how human brain matter came to acquire the psychological illusion of autonomy. But we are no less as baffled as we are as we could ever be.

Whatever that means coming back to this:
All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was "somehow" able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter "somehow" became living matter "somehow" became conscious matter "somehow" became self-conscious matter.
Where this time we are the quivalent of the Flatlanders.
But, given free will, one can choose to have sex or choose not to. And if pregnant, one can choose to abort it or give birth.
phyllo wrote: Mon Mar 20, 2023 9:03 pm Or one's brain can choose to have sex or not to and if pregnant, one's brain can choose to abort it or give birth.

Or one's brain can compel you to have sex or not to and if pregnant, one's brain can compel you to abort it or give birth.

Why not those ways to phrase it?
And around and around and around we go...

Mary's brain compelled her to abort Jane. Going all the way back to, say, the Big Bang.

Jane was not to be like those of us not aborted going all the way back to what -- or Who? -- brought into existence the laws of matter themselves.

But "somehow" -- God or No God -- when matter acquired a biological existence here on Earth, and over millions and millions of years evolved into us, Mary did acquire the capacity to take into consideration the arguments made by a friend and did change her mind about the abortion.

Jane is now here among us able to contribute to the exchange.

Ask her how she would phrase these things.

Though again -- click -- I'm the first to admit my own thinking here does not reflect the most rational understanding of this going all the way back to the most rational understanding of how and why the human condition itself fits into the existence of existence itself.
HIM:

phyllo wrote: Wed Mar 22, 2023 8:33 pm Click.

Don't bother responding to me.

Click.
Nature to phyllo:

I challenge you to make me stop him.



Note to others:

Click.

What do you make of this? He wants me to allow him to post his own declamatory accusations regarding me, but he doesn't want me to respond to them.

Right, like, given free will, that will ever happen.

All of the points I raised above regarding the points he raised about me...?

Nope, nothing at all from him there.

But he still has his own obscure God and his own obscure objective morality to fall back on. And his own bizarre assumptions regarding determinism being just another manifestation of free will being just another manifestation of compatibilism.

Though not necessarily in that order?

Right, Jane?

8)
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Re: compatibilism

Post by iambiguous »

Flannel Jesus wrote: Wed Mar 22, 2023 8:55 pm
I'm not taking about determinism. I'm not taking about free will. I'm talking to you as a human being. Take yourself out of the debate for a moment and read what I said again. Forget you ever talked to me about compatibilism or free will.

Forgive yourself, or whoever else you need to forgive.
What on earth does this really have to do with the part where human beings grapple to understand forgiveness as either an inherent, necessary manifestation of the only possible reality...or "somehow" pin down how and why matter in the human brain "somehow" acquired the capacity to forgive autonomously?

And then the part where, given free will, we can pin down which behaviors ought to be forgiven and which must never be. For some here, not only will Mary never be forgiven for killing Jane, but she is likely to burn in Hell for all of eternity given the "mysterious ways" of their loving, just and merciful God.
Note to phyllo:

Help him out.
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Re: compatibilism

Post by Flannel Jesus »

Why are you telling me about some people here who believe in God who think she will burn in hell? Who cares what some here believe? Do YOU believe she'll burn in hell? I don't. And if you don't, and I don't, then why in the world would it be relevant to tell me that some here believe that.

Some here believe all sorts of nonsense, so what?
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Re: compatibilism

Post by iambiguous »

phyllo wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 1:07 pm
I don't believe that is the case, if the Mary and Jane situation is real. That's the center of his concern with this conversation, and he has talked about it publicly many times.
Abortion is good bait. It gets lots of people riled up and they are more likely to talk to him.

"Mary" and "Jane" are his ways of bringing issues out of the "clouds" of "abstraction" and back "down to earth".

That's why abortion keeps coming up.


I don't think it's a bad subject but there is no way to get past page 1 with him. That's the problem.
Click.

Abortion and bait:

Page one:
I believe what many would construe to be two seemingly conflicting [even contradictory] things:

1] that aborting a human fetus is the killing of an innocent human being
2] that women should be afforded full legal rights to choose abortion

As a result, the first thing many point out is that, regarding this issue, I am insisting women should be permitted legally to kill innocent human beings. And that doing so is in this particular context not immoral.

To which I respond:

"Yes, but..."

But:

Just because I construe the fetus to be an innocent human being does not necessarily [objectively] make it so. On the contrary, there are reasonable arguments proffered by those who see the fetus as truly human only at birth or at the point of "viability".

And even if everyone agreed the fetus was an innocent human being from the point of conception, I would still not construe the killing of it as necessarily immoral. Why? Because out in the world we live in there can be no such thing as true "gender equality" if we forced women to give birth against their wishes.

Abortion then is a human tragedy in my view precisely because, like so many other moral conflagrations, it necessarily involves a conflict of legitimate rights.

Consider:

William Barrett from Irrational Man:

For the choice in...human [moral conflicts] is almost never between a good and an evil, where both are plainly marked as such and the choice therefore made in all the certitude of reason; rather it is between rival goods, where one is bound to do some evil either way, and where the the ultimate outcome and even---or most of all---our own motives are unclear to us. The terror of confronting oneself in such a situation is so great that most people panic and try to take cover under any universal rules that will apply, if only to save them from the task of choosing themselves.

[emphasis my own]

In my view, moral dogmas are basically interchangeable when expressed as sets of essential [universal] convictions. And that is so because we do not interact socially, politically or economically in an essential manner; only in an existential manner. Which is to say that our behaviors bear consequences that are perceived differently by different people in different sets of circumstances.

That's the world we have to live in and not the ones we put together seamlessly in our heads.
Page Two:
If there is one thing I am clearly preoccupied with at ILP, it is relationship between moral and political value judgments and the existential trajectory of the lives that we live.

And, in almost every thread in which I post about this relationship, I eventually get around to this:

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my "tour of duty" in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman's right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary's choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett's Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding "rival goods".
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

This because in it are embedded two experiences that were of fundamental importance in shaping and then reconfiguring my own moral and political narratives.

Over the years, I have gone from an objectivist frame of mind [right vs. wrong, good vs. evil] to a way of thinking about morality in human interactions that basically revolves around moral nihilism.

And, then, in turn, this resulted in my tumbling down into a philosophical "hole" such that for all practical purposes, "I" became increasing more fragmented.

This hole:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values "I" can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction...or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then "I" begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

In other words, I am no longer able to think of myself as being in sync with the "real me" in sync with "the right thing to do".

So, I decided to create this thread in order for others to at least make the attempt to describe their own value judgments existentially. Values as they became interwined over the course of their lives in "experiences, relationships and information, knowledge and ideas."

The part where theory is tested in practice out in particular contexts out in particular worlds.


So, by all means, let either of them -- both? -- note how, given their own take on determinism, free will and compatibilism, they see themselves in the thick of things here. Existentially as it were.

Or, sure, wiggle, wiggle wiggle over to Stooge mode. :wink:
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Re: compatibilism

Post by iambiguous »

Iwannaplato wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 1:44 pm
phyllo wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 1:07 pm
I don't believe that is the case, if the Mary and Jane situation is real. That's the center of his concern with this conversation, and he has talked about it publicly many times.
Abortion is good bait. It gets lots of people riled up and they are more likely to talk to him.

"Mary" and "Jane" are his ways of bringing issues out of the "clouds" of "abstraction" and back "down to earth".

That's why abortion keeps coming up.


I don't think it's a bad subject but there is no way to get past page 1 with him. That's the problem.
It's an excellent subject for a discussion of objective morals, since we see the challenge of convincing one side or the other or some third side.

But for a discussion of compatiblism and responsibility it's a poor choice, because it can easily distract from the 'are we responsible for our acts in a determinist universe' precisely because it is a moral issue with such strong divisions. It begs for tangents.
Over and again, I dealt with this above:
[Torturing babies] comes closest to upending my own "fractured and fragmented" frame of mind. People tap me on the shoulder and ask, "how can you seriously believe that the Holocaust or abusing children or cold-blooded murder is not inherently, necessarily immoral?"

And, sure, the part of me that would never, could never imagine my own participation in things of this sort has a hard time accepting that, yes, in a No God world they are still behaviors able to be rationalized by others as either moral or, for the sociopaths, justified given their belief that everything revolves around their own "me, myself and I" self-gratification.

And what is the No God philosophical -- scientific? -- argument that establishes certain behaviors as in fact objectively right or objectively wrong? Isn't it true that philosophers down through the ages who did embrace one or another rendition of deontology always included one or another rendition of the transcending font -- God -- to back it all up?

For all I know, had my own life been different...for any number of reasons...I would myself be here defending the Holocaust. Or engaging in what most construe to be morally depraved behaviors.

After all, do not the pro-life folks insist that abortion itself is no less a Holocaust inflicted on the unborn? And do not the pro-choice folks rationalize this behavior with their own subjective sets of assumptions.

Though, okay, if someone here is convinced they have in fact discovered the optimal reason why we should behave one way and not any other, let's explore that in a No God world.

What would be argued when confronting the Adolph Hitlers and the Ted Bundys and the 9/11 religious fanatics and the sociopaths among us. Arguments such that they would be convinced that the behaviors they choose are indeed inherently, necessarily immoral.

How would you reason with them?
Strong divisions, weak divisions. What's the difference in a wholly determined universe? The divisions themselves are just manifestations/embodiments of the only possible reality given that the brains that create the divisions are just the most extraordinary manifestation of the laws of matter.

In a No Click world.

Same with tangents. Same with begging.

Then -- of course? -- back to this:
All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was "somehow" able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter "somehow" became living matter "somehow" became conscious matter "somehow" became self-conscious matter.
Unless, perhaps, it never really acquired it at all.
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Re: compatibilism

Post by phyllo »

Page 1 is the assumptions and the assertions.
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Re: compatibilism

Post by iambiguous »

phyllo wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 1:55 pm
But for a discussion of compatiblism and responsibility it's a poor choice, because it can easily distract from the 'are we responsible for our acts in a determinist universe' precisely because it is a moral issue with such strong divisions. It begs for tangents.
I'm not distracted. Are you distracted?

Consider "moral responsibility" in any context.

He won't discuss what it means. He won't discuss any alternate ideas about moral responsibility.

He has one idea about it and that's it.
Click.

It never ceases to amaze me just how preposterous he can be here. Over and again, I discuss moral responsibility given what "I" construe "here and now" a determined and a free will world to be. I'm mostly curious to explore the thinking of those who reconcile their own understanding of determinism with moral responsibility given the manner in which they understand compatibilism in turn.

Re Mary, her friend and Jane...or a different context of their own choosing.

If only -- of necessity? -- in taking that leap of faith to human autonomy.

But what else is there here given all that we do not know about the evolution of biological life here on Earth? What or who is behind it? And [perhaps] most crucially of all, is there a teleological component embedded in the "human condition"?

Or are we all just "somehow" embedded in the "brute facticity" of an essentially meaningless and purposeless universe?
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Re: compatibilism

Post by iambiguous »

Yet again...

ME:
iambiguous wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 6:28 pm
phyllo wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 1:07 pm
I don't believe that is the case, if the Mary and Jane situation is real. That's the center of his concern with this conversation, and he has talked about it publicly many times.
Abortion is good bait. It gets lots of people riled up and they are more likely to talk to him.

"Mary" and "Jane" are his ways of bringing issues out of the "clouds" of "abstraction" and back "down to earth".

That's why abortion keeps coming up.


I don't think it's a bad subject but there is no way to get past page 1 with him. That's the problem.
Click.

Abortion and bait:

Page one:
I believe what many would construe to be two seemingly conflicting [even contradictory] things:

1] that aborting a human fetus is the killing of an innocent human being
2] that women should be afforded full legal rights to choose abortion

As a result, the first thing many point out is that, regarding this issue, I am insisting women should be permitted legally to kill innocent human beings. And that doing so is in this particular context not immoral.

To which I respond:

"Yes, but..."

But:

Just because I construe the fetus to be an innocent human being does not necessarily [objectively] make it so. On the contrary, there are reasonable arguments proffered by those who see the fetus as truly human only at birth or at the point of "viability".

And even if everyone agreed the fetus was an innocent human being from the point of conception, I would still not construe the killing of it as necessarily immoral. Why? Because out in the world we live in there can be no such thing as true "gender equality" if we forced women to give birth against their wishes.

Abortion then is a human tragedy in my view precisely because, like so many other moral conflagrations, it necessarily involves a conflict of legitimate rights.

Consider:

William Barrett from Irrational Man:

For the choice in...human [moral conflicts] is almost never between a good and an evil, where both are plainly marked as such and the choice therefore made in all the certitude of reason; rather it is between rival goods, where one is bound to do some evil either way, and where the the ultimate outcome and even---or most of all---our own motives are unclear to us. The terror of confronting oneself in such a situation is so great that most people panic and try to take cover under any universal rules that will apply, if only to save them from the task of choosing themselves.

[emphasis my own]

In my view, moral dogmas are basically interchangeable when expressed as sets of essential [universal] convictions. And that is so because we do not interact socially, politically or economically in an essential manner; only in an existential manner. Which is to say that our behaviors bear consequences that are perceived differently by different people in different sets of circumstances.

That's the world we have to live in and not the ones we put together seamlessly in our heads.
Page Two:
If there is one thing I am clearly preoccupied with at ILP, it is relationship between moral and political value judgments and the existential trajectory of the lives that we live.

And, in almost every thread in which I post about this relationship, I eventually get around to this:

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my "tour of duty" in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman's right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary's choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett's Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding "rival goods".
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

This because in it are embedded two experiences that were of fundamental importance in shaping and then reconfiguring my own moral and political narratives.

Over the years, I have gone from an objectivist frame of mind [right vs. wrong, good vs. evil] to a way of thinking about morality in human interactions that basically revolves around moral nihilism.

And, then, in turn, this resulted in my tumbling down into a philosophical "hole" such that for all practical purposes, "I" became increasing more fragmented.

This hole:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values "I" can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction...or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then "I" begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

In other words, I am no longer able to think of myself as being in sync with the "real me" in sync with "the right thing to do".

So, I decided to create this thread in order for others to at least make the attempt to describe their own value judgments existentially. Values as they became interwined over the course of their lives in "experiences, relationships and information, knowledge and ideas."

The part where theory is tested in practice out in particular contexts out in particular worlds.


So, by all means, let either of them -- both? -- note how, given their own take on determinism, free will and compatibilism, they see themselves in the thick of things here. Existentially as it were.

Or, sure, wiggle, wiggle wiggle over to Stooge mode. :wink:
HIM:

phyllo wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 6:40 pm Page 1 is the assumptions and the assertions.
What can I -- must I? -- say? If he is not embarrassed by the substantive gap between our posts here, then I am not embarrassed to insist that he ought to be.

Click, anyway.
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Re: compatibilism

Post by Flannel Jesus »

iambiguous wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 6:54 pmI'm mostly curious to explore the thinking of those who reconcile their own understanding of determinism with moral responsibility given the manner in which they understand compatibilism in turn.
In my experience, you are very much not curious. Every time people try to talk to you about it, you change the subject, put up barriers, and shit all over the conversation.

You should read a bit about active listening.
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Re: compatibilism

Post by Iwannaplato »

phyllo wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 3:12 pm That in a determined world you are compelled to act one particular way by your brain and therefore there is no moral responsibility.
Well, if you got that answer, you got more than I did. I've seen questions with incredullity: like, How can we hold someone responsible if everything.....? etc. But that's not quite directly expressning opinion. And it more or less asks the other person to prove something. Rather than even expressing a qualified position like, well, I couldn't hold someone responsible if I knew that all their actions.....
If you got a direct statement of a position from him or read on here, I'd love to see the link. (though given the massiveness of this thread, I understand if you can't afford a research assistant)
We have presented him with several ideas about how moral responsibility works in a determined world.
Heck, you can changes the name of it, but there's nothing strange about isolating dangerous people as we already do with violence criminals.
All of which he dismisses.
Did you get a clear argument or did he simply repeat that there was nothing else they could have done?
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Re: compatibilism

Post by Iwannaplato »

Flannel Jesus wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 6:20 pm Why are you telling me about some people here who believe in God who think she will burn in hell? Who cares what some here believe? Do YOU believe she'll burn in hell? I don't. And if you don't, and I don't, then why in the world would it be relevant to tell me that some here believe that.

Some here believe all sorts of nonsense, so what?
So, we have an extreme version of 'holding someone responsible' in a universe where there is a hell, also.
But it would be good, I think, to come down to our more societal level responses to people who commit acts we don't like.

If a kid is a bully in a determined world we....
If the same kid is a bully in a free will world....

How should a school respond and parents respond? What is the difference?

If an adult steals from a cash register in a litte store in a city what is the difference if we know determinism is the case and if we know free will is the case?

Often in our world, we do to varying degrees take into account the background of the people. If the bully kid is beaten at home the school and the parents (the non-beating parent) may react differently. If the robber in the second example is poor or has some huge medical bill to pay, or was raped repeatedly in foster care, this might affect the way people and the judge may view the person in sentencing. One's political views may affect how much background matters. From 'not at all, you are completley responsible for the bad choice you made' to varying degrees of the background mitigating punishment or replacing punishment with rehab or with interventions in the bully kid's family by social services and no punishment for the child.

We're a bit fuzzy about all this as a species.

If we knew with certainty that everything is determined, would we still think of the background as a factor in meting out punishment or instead of punishment whatever measures we take? Since, it could be argued the bully with lovely parents and 7 non-violent siblings, is still utterly determined to be a bully so why should he be punished more than that person with a negative dramatic background? Or why should he undergo more unpleasant measures if we no longer think in terms of punishment?

I agree in that I don't think bemoaning the beliefs of Christians gets us anywhere.

How does it affect the way we view people and deal with them here, on the ground, in society and perhaps socially?

What differences would it make in our attitudes towards these people and what differences in the measures we think should be taken would KNOWING lead to?
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Re: compatibilism

Post by Flannel Jesus »

Tell me if I'm interpreting all those words correctly: yes, I, iambiguous, agree that talking about the Christian beliefs of other users of this forum is contextually irrelevant here.
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Re: compatibilism

Post by Flannel Jesus »

Part of why you don't get anywhere, biggy, is because you want to talk about too many things at once. You say you're curious about compatibilism and would like to understand it, but you don't seem to want to go through the step-by-step focused process of seeing the thought process, seeing where it starts, seeing each individual part of it and how that ends in compatibilism.

No, when I try to talk you through one of the early parts of the thought process, instead of engaging with the things I said you sort of just ignore it and go straight to "what about Mary and Jane huh? And what about this and what about that?" You make these big, sweeping posts about loads of different topics - some of which are just entirely irrelevant, like bringing up Christianity when neither one of us is a Christian. And that makes it hard to progress the conversation.

Like, imagine my kid says to me, "I want to learn how to build rockets, what do I need to do to be able to do that?" And I say "well you're doing to need to learn math." So my kid starts his first math lesson and the teacher starts with basic addition, and my kid interrupts and says "okay, 1+1=2 is great and all but how is this going to help me build a rocket? And what is the atmosphere like on Mars? And are shooting stars really comets? And what will happen to humanity when our sun dies?" How do you answer a barrage of questions like that from someone who still hasn't even taken the time to learn basic addition yet? You have to sit there and explain to the kid, listen, you can't learn how to build rockets if you don't take the time to learn addition first, we gotta take it one step at a time.

That's what talking to you is like. You're curious, allegedly, about compatibilism, but instead of engaging with a step by step process to understanding the thinking patterns, you interrupt with a barrage of questions like this little kid. "What about abortion? What about Mary? What about Jane? What about Benjamin button?. What about how human life gained autonomy?"

You want all the answers to all the questions at once, like that little kid, and just like that little kid you need to realise that you can only get to where you're going if you go one step at a time. If you want to eventually build rockets, then you're going to have to learn how to add first, so focus on adding for now, and not all those other questions you're asking. Focus.

If you want to understanding compatibilism, biggy, you're going to have to learn how to focus.

But, when we tell the kid to focus on addition, because he's never going to learn how to build a rocket if he can't add, our kid says "click. Shameless." And for some reason or another refuses to focus on addition. He's too stubborn. He wants all the answers at once, he doesn't have the patience to sit and learn addition from a teacher who can't tell him how addition is going to help him build a rocket.

If that kid never learns to focus on a step by step process of learning, because he's too impatient and he wants all the answers at once, he'll just never learn, and he'll never build a rocket.

You aren't going to get the answers you're looking for with the strategies you employ in conversation. Ever.
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