promethean75 wrote: ↑Wed Sep 21, 2022 11:01 pm
"Jesus this type of shit is so fucking mechanical."
What he's doing is called the iambiguous shuffle. What u do is find a philosophical and political font with at least one defender. Then you find (or invent if there aren't any) objectivists from an opposing font, pit them against one another, and observe the intellectual contraptions that are used by all sides as supporting arguments.
You then make a note to nature that this is what passes as philosophy and dance like a banana.
Not quite what I experienced with Phyllo. What I experienced was 1) the assumption that it's relevant that some other philosophical position has problems if you are critical of a different one. For example, I don't believe in free will. Nor do I believe in determinism. If I mention the consequences of determinism or if I am critical, for example of an argument in favor of determinism, it is utterly irrelevant to say free will leads to the same thing or X would be true in a free will universe, etc. It's an avoidance of whatever point I am making. Further it's viewing philosophy as a choice between two teams. Perhaps there are more teams. Perhaps I am agnostic. More importantly it's a (potentially unintentional) way of shutting down discussion.
Oh, yeah well in free will it'd be X also, so we don't need to think about that. But also 2) which is more important. The focus on my post was on the understandible human reaction to thinking/realizing/considering the possibility that the future is going to be what it is and this was determined in the Big Bang.
This was immediately interpreted as me saying that one should give up. Nah. That we know the future. Nah.
IOW hallucinated straw man arguments I was not making. These were focused on and the human reaction to the implications of determinism were utterly ignored. The main point was ignored and made up issues were focused on.
I am certainly not expecting Phyllo or others to express emtional empathy. This is a philosophy forum. It's fine to focus on ideas. But cognitive empathy. IOW making an attempt to understand at the idea level why an idea of its implications might be disturbing or depressing, given that this was the focus of the post, I would expect. If you're not interested in that topic, then don't respond. If you are interested, but disagree, well explain why reacting that way is confused or not natural. And, of course, actually mention the reaction, since that was the topic of my posts. But when no effort is made to understand or even focus on the topic of someone's post, then don't pretend to respond to it.
Here the topic was avoided. Other issues were hallucinated. Then a very specific focus on a detail again avoiding the main topic of my posts.
It's crappy interpersonal and crappy philosophical response rolled into a few posts. I know, I should be patient and chase someone for post after post until they actually focus on the post they seem to think they are responding to. This had just happened with Iambiguous where he couldn't manage to respond to a really rather basic idea over post after post.
Do these guys just want to push their points and don't give a shit about other people's interests? Are they always trying to win? Is it hard for them to concede something? Do they not want to look at certain issues? Will they only concede something if they notice it first, but refuse when someone else points something out? Is it that they view life as having two teams (objectivist/non-objectivist, free will advocate/rational determinists) so anything goes in pursuit of defeating/foiling people on the other team?
I don't know and I don't care.
It's rude and time wasting. It ends up being a (probalby unintentional) piece of sticky human paper. Where people come, write something, get what is posing as a response that is not, and then you have to run around trying to get an actual response to your first post. Motive matters little. At some point or other people can feel a certain irritation at the battered woman or the man who is in a relationship with an abusive unloving woman. Even with friends at some point we will feel an urge to angrily say....
just leave him/him, come on, what's wrong with you, even if we have some subtler understanding of how this kind of dynamic can happen.
But online, man, then we spend 30 pages trying to get someone to concede something obvious or to actually focus on a point we made. This is, of course, also human. But it's not healthy. Why engage with people who can't (for whatever reason or at whatever level of awareness of what they are doing) manage to directly engage with what you are saying? That's a minimum. Might as well keep posting to someone who responds in a language you don't know or in gibberish.
So, what does this have to do with determinism and free will and compatiblism?
In a deterministic universe, even, some people/machines can be more flexible/versatile than others. We know this from machines that even most free will advocates would say were not free. Let's say we have a hoover that has a camera and if while moving it sees an object in the way it goes only to the right. That's it's programming or even it's physically determined choice every time via gears and other parts. It sees on object blocking its path, it turns to the right. Well, ths is less versatile than a hoover that can turn in either direction, even back up and try other angles. The latter hoover will likely save electricity and or hoover more of your floors.
If you can't quite respond to a post but have a habitual focus, or always respond as if attacking a position that might or might not be held by the other person, or any other one or two trick pony habit. You're less versatile than someone who can. Even in a determined universe. You may have no choice but to be this way, though this lack of flexibility is even more pronounced if the pattern is pointed out and one cannot change. Yes, this also would be determined, but it points to a meta-level lack of flexibility. Or what is often called an inablity to learn.