Yeah, but there are other consequences of individualism. people are pressured to create their own identity, and this is often exploited by commercial interests. What would the economy be like if this wasn't the case?
Formerly G.G.
Indeed. There can be confusion when you are still trying 'figure things out'.
edited 4th Mar '16 1:07:23 PM by GAP
"We are just like Irregular Data. And that applies to you too, Ri CO. And as for you, Player... your job is to correct Irregular Data."
@Supermerlin/Native Jovian: Late to the party, but I wanted to get my 2 cents in.
No one argues that the will doesn't exist. The question is whether or not it's free. A will that exists but only as a set of steps in a completely determined chain of events going back to the big bang isn't free in any meaningful sense. The question isn't whether or not we make choices, obviously we do, but whether or not those choices are completely pre-determined ahead of time. If they are pre-determined, then they are not "free choices" in any meaningful sense. To believe in free will, you have to believe that there is some source of behavior other than purely mechanical physical forces that act as inputs to the brain. If you reject any such possibility, then by the most traditional philosophical definitions you are a determinist and do not accept free will. There is nothing wrong with such a position (it's consistent with the facts as we know them today) but it gets very confusing when people argue for determinism and then assert that they also have free will. If I understand Super Merlin's position, he believes the self exists but that it isnt free to any degree from pre-existing mechanical forces.
Okay that just isn't true. And yes you were just as assertive.
Set physics aside. Your decisions need to track back to stuff "in your head" to be yours instead of stuff that just happens. For you now to have complete control over what you do in the next moment implies internal determinism. If your always in control, and none of your decisions are random or in defiance of your own thought process, including the your thoughts about thinking, then given all of the situations you'll be in your decision is logically pend down as soon as you exist. This would be true even if nothing existed before you, or even if nothing else existed at all. What you think doesn't allow for free will is a requirement for it.
As for real humans, we have more agency than a chess program that had ability to have concepts, but which can only make object level choices. But a self improving A.I. with a much better understanding of how its mind works would have more.
So are you saying compatibilism is objectively false, and only libertarianism or hard determinism can possibly true even in theory? I don't agree with that.
I'm actually confused on how what I'm talking about isn't compatibilism. Only one thing can logically happen even if no can work it out ahead of time, because whatever method you used to decide. what ever part of you said no to the alternatives, contradicts the alternatives being done. That's what it means for you to choose, instead of things just happening.
"Your decisions need to track back to stuff "in your head" to be yours instead of stuff that just happens."
I don't think anyone has claimed that decisions you make aren't "yours". The question is whether your decisions are free. Your decisions come from inside your head, but what is inside your head comes only from your genes and outside stimuli, then that's what causes you to make the decisions you make. In other words, your decisions would then be determined, not free.
"If your always in control, and none of your decisions are random or in defiance of your own thought process, including the your thoughts about thinking, then given all of the situations you'll be in your decision is logically pend down as soon as you exist."
We seem to be in agreement, although your phraseology confuses me. Someone who wishes to argue the case for free will would have to somehow refute this statement. The most common ways of doing so are to suppose a super-natural component to the self, or else refer to either complexity or quantum uncertainty as a way of getting around what you call "internal determinism". So, for example, if very high levels of complexity are inherently unpredictable (one interpretation of complexity theory) then it might not be true that once the initial state of the brain is set, everything else, including all decisions, must follow in a pre-determined manner. There is a limit to how precisely an initial state can be specified (because of quantum uncertainty) and we know that there are highly complex systems that are sensitively dependent on very small variations in initial states. There are systems that, because of multiple complex feedback loops, are sensitively dependent at every step. So there are alternatives. But is seems to me that you have to decide which way you want to go: either believe in determinism and forget free will, or keep free will but somehow weaken determinism. You cant have your cake and eat it too- hence, no compatiblism.
edited 5th Mar '16 6:15:00 PM by DeMarquis
Supernatural. complexity, quantum whatevers, no of it helps. The argument doesn't really on physicalism. That's why "in your head" was in quotes. Merely complex systems aren't random, or unpredictable given accurate enough information. And quantum randomness, reduces the extent that you're in charge, and so is actively counterproductive.
[quoteblock] as a way of getting around what you call "internal determinism" [/quoteblock]
Why??? Your asking for the "freedom" to do things that you neither want to do, nor want to want to do, not want to want to want to do. To act contrary to your motives, not because of some greater motive, but because of no reason at all. If there was a reason that would be determinism.
And all of that genetic stuff only determines your decision by making you exist in the first place. Even if there was no causual origin to you, you'd still need to start somewhere. As long as you begin to exist, there must have been some initial state you started in.
edited 5th Mar '16 7:59:00 PM by supermerlin100
I have seen arguments for panpsychism and to me they are convincing. Particularly the pancomputationalist forms. Slightly less convinced on the typical panpsychist rejection of emergentism, which to me is obviously a physically accurate view of the world and physicalism (which traditionally rejects strong emergence) isn't.
As well, the rejection of the object-subject distinction in favor of a participatory universe in which intersubjective relationships and communication is physically how the world works, as opposed to to the typical dichotomy, seems obvious. And the extended mind is a natural fit in this perspective.
Anyway, I have seen a version of panpsychism in which free agency goes all the way down to particles. Haven't read their paper though, but it sounds interesting.
edited 6th Mar '16 12:49:40 AM by CassidyTheDevil
panpsychism "mysterious reality in the background, intrinsically unknowable" Okay wikipedia isn't the best source, but this just sets off warning bells. To the extent that this seems says anything checkable about the world it seem wrong.
Emergentism It seemed fine until " Emergent properties are not identical with, reducible to, or deducible from the other properties." And ended up just being another high brow label, to slap on our confusion. Are any of the parts doing something odd? Or is the system's behavior just difficult to summarize in a few equations, with elementary variables?
If qualia are physical would we expect a specie barely smart enough to talk about them at all, to not be confused? At best the mysteriousness of qualia doesn't prefer either theory.
Heat is a really simple case of reduction, people can actually visualize how that works. Heat can be said to exist. You can make claims about, and have them be true or false. Minds are a more complicated, case. It isn't at all surprising that we're confused. So their no special reason to invoke extra rules, or the supernatural. No need to say the territory is fundamentally confusing, to explain the confusion in our map.
That would be like saying the tiger your looking for is invisible, when you've barely looked for it.
Nope. Panpsychism is a direct implication from the laws of physics. Hyper-materialist idealogues were wrong on every level, most importantly on the logical contradiction in believing that falsifiability is the end of all truth, no further discussion, and yet believing in a unfalsifible philosophy that is gives a radically misleading perspective of how the world actually works. But of course, every time this myopic perspective turns out to have been wrong, they "materialism is just however the world actually works", and ignore how dumb that statement is.
It's not even wrong. And, at any rate, the Popperian "only falsification is useful in science" philosophy been relegated to the dustbin in and strict Popperians are just too blind to see that.
As for reductionism, it's falsified in any important sense. Strong emergence is real physical phenomenon, and claims that it isn't rely on arguments that have been proven to be mathemically undecidable and uncomputable. It's a phantom.
Mind explaining literally any of that?
What is it about relativity or quantum mechanics that seems fundamental mindful?
If it's not falsifiable how was it shown to be wrong, and when?
"Materialism is just however the world actually is" that's literally complaining about people being too lazy to make a new word. If their believes changed all the same, it's only annoying that they kept the name. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm using physicalism to refer to the idea that the universe can be described with relatively simple math, without explicitly accounting for the exist of mental things, in the same way you don't have to account for heat.
It might be true that we can't understand some things for all intents and purposes, but that doesn't mean there's no answer. And giving up as soon as you hit a difficult problem, is a sure fire way to never win.
If it's real, point to some examples.
V
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
For a layman, it's a lot easier to understand then any of your posts. 
I'll just drop this in:
We don't know that much about relativity or quantum mechanics at the moment, so expecting simple answers from something we barely understand (and is rather strange in places) may be a bit much.
Keep Rolling On
That's why I asked for their reasons, for think it. I'd assume they know that. Also there are people who know a fair bit about them, but I don't think there are any physicists in the thread right now.
edited 6th Mar '16 12:25:42 PM by supermerlin100
I'll try. Bear in mind I'm wearing a hat. I like this hat, but I have other hats, and I don't bother wearing a hat all the time. And I try with varying degrees of success not to take my hats too seriously, and be open to trying on other hats. I like collecting them.
That's how I think things should be.
Well, I admit I don't have a good argument there. But I'll note that panpsychism is diverse umbrella philosophy. Many actually consider themselves physicalists, believe it or not, although many physicalists have responded by redefining physicalism to exclude panpsychism.
In particular it's important to note that despite the name, there's a wide variety of positions on what exactly is supposed to be mindlike (I'm not aware of anyone who believes in full-blown human-style minds from fundamental particles to the whole universe), and also which objects possess some mindlike qualities.
As for pancomputationalism, many avowed physicalists believe in it. I could suggest a couple books if you're interested.
Look more closely at what I said. I didn't say it was shown to be wrong. I said that the perspective of materialism is very misleading about how the world actually works.
And what do I mean by that? Even if it makes no really meaningful predictions and isn't falsifiable, might it still be technically accurate, admittedly in a somewhat tautological sense?
Sure. Tautologies are trivially true and I think everyone can agree with that, mostly. But the issue is, beyond the tautological truths and the fairly conservative rejection of the existence of things like ghosts and magic* , what seems a simple proposition turns out to have a huge array of assumptions behind it.
)Mostly, this seems to be because of philosophical debates. These days to the extent people agree what physicalism is and isn't (there's debate there), there's many variants to choose from, and of course today non-reductive physicalism is vogue. And physicalists, reductive or otherwise, bicker with emergentists over "strong emergence", even though there's no real reason "strong emergence" needs to be kicked out of "physicalism" IMO.
BTW the reason I was referring to materialism when supposedly physicalism is the modern update is that I'm skeptical that most physicalists aren't influenced in their perspective by naive materialism even if they say otherwise.
But there's a perception issue at work here, the broad field of complexity science which among other things studies emergence is treated with suspicion by many hard-nosed scientists and philosophers even though there's been a huge amount of mathematical work in this area.
A large part of this is semantics. Almost nobody is actually arguing, as with the cellular automata analogy, that the extremely simple rules underlying them means that the whole system is exactly as simple as the initial program, or that them being unpredictable means no modelling of any kind is possible.
And so you see people who apparently think their opinions are radically opposed to each other even though if you look at their actual views they're pretty similar.
But of course philosophers are beyond this sort of thing right? I think everyone can agree on that. 
As many physicists have pointed out, Gödel's incompleteness theorems are a probable barrier to overly zealous theories of everything. I'm of the opinion that a TOE which could fit on t-shirt is possible and would probably have uses, but as many have also pointed out, the simplest parameter-free theory that describes our universe almost certainly predicts practically nothing, even though it might be the "true" TOE. Much like uncompressing the Library of Babel from a single bit, a huge amount of work would would be needed to translate that into useful models.
It is here that I scratch my head. I want there to be no limit to the number of new things to discover. That's not the same thing as giving up or thinking things are fundamentally incomprehensible. The idea that science will end up explaining everything and so go out of business disturbs me. And that's why reductionism lacks appeal to me, it's not that I don't like the spirit of scientific discovery, but it postulates that discovery will end.
edited 6th Mar '16 3:33:20 PM by CassidyTheDevil
The reason science prefers falsifiable claims is that you can't really do anything with the unfalsifiable ones. Because actually using the information requires putting it through tests it would fail if it wasn't true.
You can't build a rocket with tautologies.
Grr... <3
Just to address that last point only: The known universe contains a finite amount of information. Consequently, there is a limit to how much natural science can discover. Mathematical science, I do not think is limited by this as it studies something else.
edited 6th Mar '16 3:26:16 PM by war877
Please don't do stuff like this.
Which one do you hold.
No money.
There could be a piece of reality that doesn't move anything here, and doesn't follow from backed models. But why believe it?
I don't see any reason to think the T.O.E. would run into that issue.
edited 6th Mar '16 5:16:49 PM by supermerlin100
I do this in response to the tendency of people to make broad hand-waving claims while pretending logical certainty. I admit it's not really productive because it's dismissive and creates a lot of misunderstandings (not to mention it's more than a little hypocritical), so sorry for that.
But to respond more directly to the spirit of that question rather than the specifics, relativity or quantum mechanics may not be particularly mindlike.
But, in my mind when I was saying it flows directly from the laws of physics, I was actually thinking that it might the case that the principles of thermodynamics, evolutionary game theory, computability theory, information theory, logic, statistics, systems theory, and complexity theory aren't just useful abstractions but actually genuine insights which are extremely important to understanding the real world, and that in a certain romantic sense these principles mean that intelligence and life are actually everywhere.
As for the argument that relativity or quantum mechanics specifically are mindlike, as my agreement with New Age Copenhagen interpretations is minimal, I don't really have much to argue there. Other than noting that I think the participatory perspective on quantum physics which erases the object-subject distinction (see Wheeler and It-From-Bit) is on the right track, but the solipsististic conclusions some people draw from it are very mistaken.
edited 6th Mar '16 9:50:25 PM by CassidyTheDevil
Formerly G.G.
What would be an example of a postmodern/post structuralist society?
"We are just like Irregular Data. And that applies to you too, Ri CO. And as for you, Player... your job is to correct Irregular Data."
Grr... <3
Now my amateur armchair philosophy may be showing here, but I would say neither would exist. Postmodernism is mostly an artistic movement, and cannot quite be extrapolated into a culture. Post-structuralism is a way of analyzing culture, as contrasted with structuralism, another way of analyzing culture, and therefore cannot make a culture either.
Not exactly. Postmodernity
is a supposed state of society and culture where the idea of organized, linear social progress is dead, as is the idea that there can be one "ideal" culture and society for everyone. I'm no expert in that school of thought, but it impresses me as being linked to the idea that there is so much multi-cultural diversity and individual expression that a consensus regarding the "proper ends" of society is now impossible. Whether that's a good or bad thing seems to depend on one's point of view.
Going back to the Free-will debate, first I apologize for the delay. Real life intervened.
@Victin: "If my decisions don't relate to outside stimuli then I think the universe, and thus I, wouldn't exist." What I tried to convey is that if your decisions are the result of outside stimuli and your genetic inheritance, and nothing more than that, then your decisions are pretty clearly pre-determined, and not free.
"Why, in the same situation, wouldn't one make the exact same choice?" The reason is because (according to one school of thought) we can never know if the situation is the same or not, because the universe doesn't allow that level of specification (due to the uncertainty principle). Another way of saying this is that no two situations can ever be exactly the same. The universe just isn't built that way. That's what I meant by saying "...There is a limit to how precisely an initial state can be specified (because of quantum uncertainty) and we know that there are highly complex systems that are sensitively dependent on very small variations in initial states."
I think I explained my reasons why I do not accept compatibilism, but I can go over them again if you like.
@Supermerlin: See my comments to Victin, above.
"Your asking for the "freedom" to do things that you neither want to do, nor want to want to do, not want to want to want to do. To act contrary to your motives, not because of some greater motive, but because of no reason at all. If there was a reason that would be determinism."
Obviously, for your actions to be free, your motives must also be free. That is, your motives for action must not themselves be pre-determined. But another school of thought proposes that human beings have multiple, different, and in some cases incompatible motives and desires, and that our will is free to choose between them. Free Will supporters from the "Supernatural" or dualist school usually go for the idea that motives come from some sort of non-physical mind or soul, but the more secular complexity school will usually support the "complex set of motives that we much choose between" explanation. An extension of this argument holds that the motives are themselves a complex, indeterminate system.
Not going to engage in the panpsychism debate, since I have no idea what any of that means and I dont have the energy to look it all up. If someone would like to give me a quick and dirty rundown, that would be nice.
Grr... <3
Looking over the Wikipedia article, I think we are already living in a postmodern society. Or in other words, the definition of postmodernity is the times we live in, as opposed to some concept or idea. This raises a major issue. (or two)
In order to know what postmodernity means, we need to study the time period. It is far too early for that. No one is going to have an objective view on this for dozens of years. People very easily get things wrong when they neither have enough evidence, nor enough stuff to contrast the subject to.
The internet was recently invented. This is going to completely confound any investigation into other influences and trends on culture due to the massive overshadowing effect of the internet's influence.
At least nowadays anyone who still lives with their parents has "the economy's fucked" as an excuse.