Sunday School

Sunday School 7th January 2024.

This topic contains 18 replies, has 7 voices, and was last updated by  TheEncogitationer 1 year, 1 month ago.

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  • #52127

    Unseen
    Participant

    As for picking a city, you could always easily give a different answer every time you are asked or answer “none of the above.”

    True, but there’s always a reason beyond your control for whatever choice you make. Such choices are made in your brain and you don’t control your brain. Your brain controls you.

    #52128

    Davis
    Moderator

    You keep using two different kinds of language as though “control” is meaningful if “choice” is meaningless.

    If free will is an illusion, then control is an illusion (as is morality or consequence). That’s fine, I’m not saying with any certainty any of that exist. But it is ridiculous to dismiss meaningful choice, and still hold onto anything like meaningful control or meaningful anything. If everything is due to prior events, and that negates meaningful choice (meaningful free will), it negates meaningful everything (including morality, responsibility, power structures, anything controlling anything be it automated for not etc). All that is left are very bad descriptors, not meaning, nothing meaningful.

    I am happy to admit we might live in a thoroughly utterly meaningless universe, at every level, including that of choice or free will. But I wouldn’t try to have my cake and eat it too by laughing at meaningful A while seriously discussing meaningful B, when the justification for dismissing A is the same basis for meaningful B existing. If one is so certain about lack of A, they should have the intellectual integrity, and act as though there is a lack of all that would accompany the lack of A.

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by  Davis.
    #52133

    Unseen
    Participant

    If everything is due to prior events, and that negates meaningful choice (meaningful free will), it negates meaningful everything (including morality, responsibility, power structures, anything controlling anything be it automated for not etc). All that is left are very bad descriptors, not meaning, nothing meaningful.

    So, if I doubt free will, you seem to argue, then meaning itself goes out as well as in the old expression “throwing out the baby with the bath water.”

    Well, meaning itself clearly does not go away entirely when you discard free will, or else you wouldn’t be understanding this sentence, which has a meaning. So, that’s a self-defeating argument.

    To the extent that people behave nonrandomly and rationally, determinism isn’t the enemy. Indeed, it’s what makes logicall and rational and predictable decisions possible. Nondeterminism is just another word for chaos.

    I maintain that the original problem with free will is at the definitional stage. What IS free will? What does it mean to have it? Please define it for us in a way that preserves what free willists really want: moral agency and the ability to feel superior to those whose actions frighten or dismay us.

    #52138

    TheEncogitationer
    Participant

    Unseen,

    I am a brain and the rest of my body and the products of the efforts of each. Problem solved.

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