Belinda wrote: ↑Sun Nov 12, 2017 7:15 pm
Determinism includes freedom to choose if and only if you use reason.
This is incorrect, and maybe explains why you would support Determinism as an available option. You might think that it and free will can, on some terms, coexist. But understood definitionally, Determinism excludes free will, even if free will does not exclude some elements as predetermined.
Here's how the IEP, the peer-reviewed dictionary of philosophical terms puts it:
"Causal determinism (hereafter, simply "determinism") is the thesis that the course of the future is entirely determined by the conjunction of the past and the laws of nature."
And as OL puts it above,
"Either way, in determinism, all of your "choices" are caused by events previously, and so on. So the very idea of agency and choice vanishes to the remote (infinite?) past." So there you have the evidence that CD is the form of Determinism for which he's pitching.
There are other forms of Determinism, such as "Theological Determinism," in which the predeterminer is said not to be "the conjunction of the past and the laws of nature," but rather the preordination of the Supreme Being. But Causal Determinism is the thing we have in view here, and is logically speaking really the only available hypothesis for someone who believes that the domain of "the real" is exhausted by materials and the laws governing material interactions.
Ironically, people still
argue for Determinism. That indicates that they simply don't believe their own view; for whatever they
say about the universe being preset since its inception, they
act like it's not true. They act as though you CAN and SHOULD change your mind and start to believe in Determinism. And some of them even rail at you if you don't, as if to say, "How can you be so foolish and blind as not to change your mind and agree with us about your inability to change your mind?"
I suppose that there are some determinists who are so certain that they are right that the will not or cannot consider any other stance.
That's not a worry. Rather, the problem is that Determinism makes it
impossible to consider any other stance, if one remains true to Determinism -- but as I said, I've never found any of them that could be consistent with their beliefs.
The universe may have been "preset since its inception" but with the use of reason and accumulated knowledge of facts a man can be as free as possible within the preset conditions. Some men are more free than other men.
Not according to Causal Determinism. That feeling of freedom is just an illusion that some men have more than others...but for neither of them is it real. The deep truth, according to CD, is that their choices are all actually preset.
Ironically, this means that the "men" who imagine themselves to be most free
are the most deluded, according to CD.
At least the prole who stumbles along seeing himself only as the product of previous forces is correct in his self-awareness; but the one who supposes he has ANY freedom at all is not only still a slave to prior material forces, but too deluded even to realize he is. That's how CD reads the situation.
No. In a "preset universe" not only are events chaotic but reasoning men can make sense of chaotic events so as to exercise some control.
Incorrect, I'm afraid. If CD is true, then "making sense" is another delusion, and no events have ever been truly "chaotic." Rather, as the definition holds, they are nothing but the products of the past and the laws of nature; and those who think that by "making sense" of them that they can change anything have just failed to realize that they are preset anyway.
The benefit of uncertainty is so well documented that it's best just to refer you to the advent of scepticism in philosophy, and to the wickedness of those men who are bloody certain.
The benefit of uncertainty? And it's "documented," you say?
Oh really...
Well, I suppose being permanently uncertain is thought to keep people from fighting about anything...but I think that's a vain hope. It won't stop them fighting, as our present global situation makes very clear; but it will make them fight only for stupid reasons that they themselves no longer even understand or can properly articulate. They'll fight, but they'll no longer know really what they're fighting about. This is maybe a good description of much of our postmodern political debate...
What does one say about uncertainty's detriments? What do we say about the situation when people SHOULD know something, COULD be certain, and have every REASON to know something, but absolutely refuse to do so, because of some ideological belief about the value of uncertainty into which they have been indoctrinated? Maybe they're the most deluded of all, I would say. For they are
willfully deluded, not merely deluded by some accident.
Not to cast any personal aspersions here, but there was a day, not long ago, when certainty was associated with truth, and obstinate uncertainty with stupidity. I suspect that it takes an unscrupulous philosopher to raise what was once obdurate stupidity to the level of an intellectual virtue. But some of the postmodern ones have certainly done just that.
However, you and I needn't believe them.