The philosophy thread general discussion

Thougth that one perspective I heard in the discord server was trash.

So there are two axes here. How well do you expect things to go in general, and how well do you expect that you can make them happen.

I think the -+ position might be the most motivated, but a — is probably the least motivated. You'd also have a stronger case for the latter being the baseline for pessimists. You'd have to assume the former were a lot more common than the latter to say that pessimists are more motivated.

Also, I think they may be misremembering pessimism for fear. When we are happy we tend to become complacent, but when our happiness is leavened by a degree of anxiety about potential future problems, we are motivated to avoid them. Too much anxiety is unhealthy and counter-productive, of course. So moderate fear can be motivating.

Of course, this whole model is overly simple. The single greatest motivator is desire, not fear or pessimism.

So, what are your thoughts on Determinism?

I haven't read a good explanation of what libertarian/incompatibilist free will is, and as far as I can tell the best evidence we have is that the world is deterministic (or random, which basically does the same thing as far as free will is concerned), so determinism seems much more convincing to me right now.

Don't you think that's there's something contrary to that?

what could possibly be contrary to that?

Do you actually have a counterpoint or are you JAQing for agreement with your own position?

I'm not sure I understand your question since your phrasing is somewhat ambiguous. Are you asking whether there's evidence for libertarian free will? Something else?

Namely, users pointed out in regards to whether Russia will be stuck as an autocratic hellhole forever, and others rebuked it by showing examples of countries that had different standings from different time periods (Like Bulgaria was one of the most democratic countries in its time, and how Spain got more than thirty years of reactionary right wing rule yet by today, it's one of the most progressive nations on Earth). So basically, each country follows their own course without being pre-determined by any standards of the nation's identity.

That seems to misunderstand the concept of determinism. Just because the preconditions that we know don't seem to be able to lead to the ultimate outcome, doesn't mean there aren't unknowns that lead there.

I see but still, especially in regards to others who seem to believe the US is destined to become a corrupt hellhole forever.

That sounds less like determinism and more like cynicism or even mystantropy.

Determinism (basically) means "from the same conditions, the same results" - that is to say, if you have a universe with certain conditions at a certain time, if you "unwind time" then things will always turn out to be the same. In other words (following, if I am not mistaken, van Inwagen's 1986 book An Essay on Free Will), determinism can be defined as "if you have complete knowledge of the condition of the universe at a certain time and complete knowledge of the laws of nature, you will be able to accurately predict the state of the universe at any point in time afterwards".

Since those people you mention are not a triple-O god, we can safely assume that they do not, in fact, have the requisite knowledge to make such predictions, and so what they say or don't say about certain countries being destined to be shitholes or whatever has no bearing on whether determinism is true.

That's not what determinism means, yeah. Now, determinism is flatly wrong, physics says so, though the question of free will is still inherently a really weird one that's actually meaningless if you think about it from a perspective that doesn't involve mind-body dualism.

But given condition A, then B shall follow doesn't necessarily mean the united states is going to sink into the ground or that russia will become a monarchy again, because countries are so big and complicated that condition A has never been around before so we don't know what comes of it.

That's one of the problems in political science and sociology, that it's very difficult, verging on impossible, to do controlled studies on political entities or societies much larger than the municipal (and also people get upset when you take over their government for science purposes so no one's ever actually done that as far as I know), so the best we can really do are simulations (either analogue or digital though analogue is probably better) and amalgamating case-studies.

Oh man, we have debated free will here so many times...

The line I have always taken is: classic physics assumes a fully determined universe, that is there can be no effect without a cause. In a fully determined universe, everything that happens happens because material forces caused it to happen, and if we could collect enough data about the conditions operating in the universe at any one time (like, say, back at the very beginning) then everything that happened after that would be fully predictable. There can be no randomness in a fully determined universe.

Free will is the supposition that the will (ie, the choices that we make) can occur free of prior causes. That is, our decisions somehow originate within us somewhere, and not exclusively the result of a chain of cause and effects going back to the Big Bang. If this were true, then science couldn't explain it. It could only be due to a spontaneous, uncaused effect within our brain, or else some sort of divine intervention.

Obviously, by definition, a fully determined universe is incompatible with free will. This is known within philosophy as "Incompatibilism" (I am an incompatibilist). The alternative is to define free will in a more restricted manner such that it could exist within a fully determined universe (for example, by declaring that "free" doesn't really mean "free" but "separate from the universe" or some such thing. Don't ask me, I don't hold this position).

However, maybe none of this matters, because there is now some evidence from within physics that the universe may not be entirely determined (ie, if you "reran it it wouldn't turn out the same). The experiments that support this conclusion are very complex, and the conclusions are still being debated. The theoretical models that allow for some degree of indeterminism are rather dense, but I can explain them if anyone is really interested in that level of detail (Bottom Line: the universe may not be determinable from our point of view, which from some theoretical perspectives is all that matters).

BTW—I am not referring to quantum uncertainty here, because that type of uncertaintly is compatible with a fully determined universe (the uncertainty collapses as soon as two or more forces interact with each other). Anyway, randomness doesn't support free will, because no one thinks sentient thought is random.

TL/DR: Certain models of free will may not be incompatible with the universe as we understand it after all.

Edited by DeMarquis on May 18th 2023 at 7:35:43 AM

You could fill an entire library with books on the subject. You really have to be more specific with that sort of question.

Also, it is always best to open with an opinion of your own.

Well, my point specific was the one constant of nations and whether regardless of government, it will always remain there. In my case, of whether nations like Russia or China will remain as reactionary autocracies forever or not due to their history and if the same would apply to the USA.

Yeah, that has nothing to do with determinism, unless you seriously believe the fate of nations is divinely ordained or something.

Which I don't. Countries have changed for better or worse throughout history, and there is absolutely no reason why they would stop doing so in future. The US could collapse next century, and so could China, or Russia, or they may not and continue to exist for thousands of years. They may continue to have the same political systems, evolve or degrade, or radically change them. That is all possible, but there is no guarantee that things will go any of those directions.

The fate of nations is a topic of history, not philosophy, unless you believe in predestination, then it becomes a question of religion.

It's interesting to note in this regard that once, not so long ago, the Muslims had a highly civilized and peaceful society, the US government was deeply corrupt, the British were a rising imperial power whose capital became an industrial dystopia.

If history teaches one thing, it's that nothing stays the same.

Yeah, determinism on national level is at best cynical or even misanthropic. At worst prejudice.

Seeing nations as for example, inevitably changing to solve their social problems and develop their own democracies on their own regardless of interaction with foreign influences would also be deterministic though, since a nations's future to identify and solve it's social problems and develop its own democracy in such cases is still being treated as inevitable. But that would be neither misanthropic nor cynical, more on the idealistic end.

Edited by xyzt on May 19th 2023 at 8:13:36 PM

Well, that too I suppose.

This is part of why I'm not as fatalist about China as many people, especially Americans, insist on being. Plenty of countries have freed themselves of colonialism and dictatorship over time and gotten better for its peoples. Changes can always happen, sometimes very suddenly and unexpectedly.

Heck, no one saw the fall of the Soviet Union coming. Even in the late eighties, people assumed the Cold War would either go on forever or end in nuclear armageddon... and then it was suddenly over, just like that. We have several tropes about that one.

A Chinese democracy is far from out of the question, especially given that we have an example of that in Taiwan.

Now, even I find myself thinking these sorts of things when I'm particularly upset about the world. However, it's fundamentally ludicrous to say that Russia or China can never be liberal democracies, it just is.

Yeah the idea that Russia and China can't change governments is something I've seen be used to justify racial aggression against innocent people from those countries.

Like I know a lot of people from various countries, both from school and out, and they deal with a lot of shit from assholes who judge and harass them based on the governments they can't do anything about. Sad really.