Simon Paynton

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Elon Musk calls for ACLU to be defunded.

PopeBeanie wrote:
For believers in free will, I ask, do you believe you have power over determinism, or is determinism not even a thing?

It depends on how binding the restrictions are.

I’m not going to dismiss him, because I don’t understand him.  He might be Deepak Chopra by now, he might not.

Yes, but he deals in stories, human psychology and human nature.  It doesn’t have to make perfect logical sense.  It can have a psychological logic – a human logic rather than a mathematical or physical logic.

If you’re expecting a meticulously logical philosophical treatise, you won’t get one out of him.  But his stories make sense in a human setting.

Unseen wrote:
You talk about free will in a way that presupposes its existence. That’s what I accused you of in my prior post.

Maybe, but my point is, that there’s evidence for its existence.  If I had no free will, I could not respond to contingent, random circumstances by deliberating and picking and choosing.

Just because I can’t directly fi…[Read more]

_Robert_ wrote:
JP strikes me mostly as someone mostly trying to extend his 15 minutes of fame. To me he’s the “Hawk-Tua girl” of the identity wars.

I don’t think he’s a fame-whore at all.  Being a little bit up close to him, I was impressed with his integrity and responsibility.  He was quite happy to apologise and say he was wrong about somethi…[Read more]

_Robert_ wrote:
So, is he against egalitarianism, or just the overshoot?

He’s definitely against the overshoot.  I don’t pin him as anti-egalitarian.  I was following him from the early days of the trans-pronoun crisis in Canada, when I was in the middle of a breakdown.  Those opponents being “pummeled”?  That was mainly me.  I thought they were…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
By contrast, free will exists as a feeling we seem to have, like deja vu, which we all recognize is an illusion. If it exists and if emergence explains it, then it obeys rules like the rules birds and fish follow in flocking and schooling.

Everything obeys rules, but that doesn’t in itself imply complete determinism.  My free will…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
The squirrel does not respond as if it were giving careful consideration to its next move. It reacts to real events in real time. That reaction is entirely instinctive. That instinct is highly tuned and the reaction is faster than any considered choice could ever be. That instinct is the result of Evolution only and…

[Read more]

I agree that people are biased against him, because he’s not straight-ahead woke, and people just hate that.  But what kind of wisdom or knowledge have you gained from his lectures and books?  To me, he says a lot of stuff without ever actually saying anything.  I recognise that this could be because his belief system is new to me, therefore it go…[Read more]

@Belle Rose, what is it you get from Jordan Peterson?  I have sympathy with him and I don’t think he’s a right wing nutcase.  But I can never understand what he’s talking about, beyond his 10 rules for young men, which I think are a good idea.

_Robert_ wrote:
Ever stick your hand on a hot burner?

I could choose to leave my hand on the burner.  I’d be an idiot, but I could do it.

_Robert_ wrote:
That decision may have been made before the critter knew it would jump. The squirrel’s conscience was informed at some point. Yeah, I’d say a squirrel has some level of self-awareness.

Well, it has to respond to real events in real time, so I’m guessing it has free will.

PopeBeanie wrote:
Must not the feeling of free will at least be a product of determinism? A legitimate product of evolution? And very useful, fortunately, if not more pleasurable than the feeling of having no control at all.

That’s the way I see it.  Nature has endowed us with free will that we can use to navigate contingent circumstances as…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Your arguing in favor of free will is based on a belief you want to defend to the death, not on a fact or set of facts that can’t be denied or disproven.

Maybe, maybe not.  That’s irrelevant to the truth of any argument.  I see yours as the “argument from ignorance” or “argument from dumbfounding”.  In other words, “we can’t work…[Read more]

I see free will as a faculty, or cluster of related faculties, that emerges from the biological substrate of the living brain, in the same way that morality emerges as a number of related faculties from the physical reality of obligate collaboration driven by the biological pressure to reproduce and survive and thrive within a risky ecological niche.

jakelafort wrote:
I can’t get involved in philosophical issues regarding morality. It strikes me as a vacuous endeavor when juxtaposed against the real world. Consequentialist, deontological blah blah blah. I suppose it is okay if you are so inclined in terms of PERSONAL principles.

Some of us think that diagram should be taught in primary s…[Read more]

PopeBeanie wrote:
Can one just think of morality as an emergent thought process, with societal ramifications?

Morality emerges from collaboration.

Unseen wrote:
Nothing happens without sufficient conditions being met,

We think for a reason: to calculate what we have to do to achieve our goals, to thrive, survive and reproduce.  There is therefore biological pressure to think.  As for what direction this thinking takes, then within constraints and limits, and acted upon by influences – i…[Read more]