Re: Free will is an illusion....?
Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 8:00 pm
LOL just make sure none of those friends has a pig farm...
The Jane's Addiction Discussion Forum
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I guess this was a response to my post about challenging my friends to murder me?Juana wrote:LOL just make sure none of those friends has a pig farm...
Drive the 405 Freeway through LA during rush hour. It's easy.Adurentibus Spina wrote:I guess this was a response to my post about challenging my friends to murder me?Juana wrote:LOL just make sure none of those friends has a pig farm...
Yeah, really... but the idea isn't for them to actually attempt to try, but to recognize the force of their (moral) character on what they are actually able to choose to do. They can't actually *choose* to murder me, because there isn't anything in the past that suffices to cause them to do so.
Try arbitrarily willing yourself into a murderous rage... it's pretty difficult. Not even method actors can really pull that off.
mockbee wrote:
Don't try and dumb stuff down for us, unless you encounter evidence that deems it necessary......
[well, hopefully there is some stuff here in the entire thread that hasn't been drastically 'dumbed down'.............................]
I really have got the most out of looking up terminology on my own that I have never seen or don't know the meaning of. It helps elevate my thinking.
What is Open Yale Courses?
Open Yale Courses (OYC) provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the Internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.
Registration is not required.
No course credit, degree, or certificate is available.
The online courses are designed for a wide range of people around the world, among them self-directed and life-long learners, educators, and high school and college students. The integrated, highly flexible web interface allows users, in effect, to audit Yale undergraduate courses if they wish to. It also gives the user a wide variety of other options for structuring the learning process, for example downloading, redistributing, and remixing course materials.
Each course includes a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video accompanied by such other course materials as syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets. The lectures are available as downloadable videos, and an audio-only version is also offered. In addition, searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided.
That clearly counts as a sufficient prior cause for some.Pandemonium wrote:Drive the 405 Freeway through LA during rush hour. It's easy.Adurentibus Spina wrote:I guess this was a response to my post about challenging my friends to murder me?Juana wrote:LOL just make sure none of those friends has a pig farm...
Yeah, really... but the idea isn't for them to actually attempt to try, but to recognize the force of their (moral) character on what they are actually able to choose to do. They can't actually *choose* to murder me, because there isn't anything in the past that suffices to cause them to do so.
Try arbitrarily willing yourself into a murderous rage... it's pretty difficult. Not even method actors can really pull that off.
I can add that I have a friend currently at Yale (and a former prof is now a prof in that dept., and is one of my referees) and have been down there. Tamar Gendler is amazing. Not this coming year, but the year after, it's fairly likely I'll be studying at Yale for the year.chaos wrote:mockbee wrote:
Don't try and dumb stuff down for us, unless you encounter evidence that deems it necessary......
[well, hopefully there is some stuff here in the entire thread that hasn't been drastically 'dumbed down'.............................]
I really have got the most out of looking up terminology on my own that I have never seen or don't know the meaning of. It helps elevate my thinking.
@Mockbee
There are several universities that put their courses online for the public for free. You can watch the lectures, download assignments and some reading material; you are on your own with regarding to books, but I'm sure you can find them at a local library.
Yale has a nice site. Here is the link: http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy. This will take you to the philosophy offerings. There are currently two courses posted. There are a variety of courses. Just hit the "courses" link on the upper left side of the page to see all of the offerings.
What is Open Yale Courses?
Open Yale Courses (OYC) provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the Internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.
Registration is not required.
No course credit, degree, or certificate is available.
The online courses are designed for a wide range of people around the world, among them self-directed and life-long learners, educators, and high school and college students. The integrated, highly flexible web interface allows users, in effect, to audit Yale undergraduate courses if they wish to. It also gives the user a wide variety of other options for structuring the learning process, for example downloading, redistributing, and remixing course materials.
Each course includes a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video accompanied by such other course materials as syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets. The lectures are available as downloadable videos, and an audio-only version is also offered. In addition, searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided.
You can get some of the world's absolute best pizza in New Haven. No joke.Adurentibus Spina wrote:Not this coming year, but the year after, it's fairly likely I'll be studying at Yale for the year.
I mean... definitely check that stuff out.
I had pub-food in New Haven when I was there. With a good beer called "Three Philosophers": http://www.ommegang.com/index.php?mcat= ... beer_threeJasper wrote:You can get some of the world's absolute best pizza in New Haven. No joke.Adurentibus Spina wrote:Not this coming year, but the year after, it's fairly likely I'll be studying at Yale for the year.
I mean... definitely check that stuff out.
“From this kind of knowledge arises the highest possible mental acquiescence, that is (Def of the Emotions, xxv.), pleasure, and this acquiescence is accompanied by the idea of the mind itself”
The Ethics
“God or to the mind, it may rightly be called acquiescence of spirit, which (Def. of the Emotions, xxv. xxx.) is not really distinguished from glory.”
The Ethics
I know. I chose not to mention that.Adurentibus Spina wrote:New Haven is a terrible pit of despair outside of the Yale campus.
They should've named it New Hades.Jasper wrote:I know. I chose not to mention that.Adurentibus Spina wrote:New Haven is a terrible pit of despair outside of the Yale campus.
Maybe after that you can have a stay at Harvard.Adurentibus Spina wrote:They should've named it New Hades.Jasper wrote:I know. I chose not to mention that.Adurentibus Spina wrote:New Haven is a terrible pit of despair outside of the Yale campus.
Unfortunately, they just don't have a good Spinoza scholar there. I'd be more likely to try for a visiting studentship at BU (Aaron Garrett is awesome and a huge influence), or Wisconsin (Steven Nadler is also great, and was my supervisor's MA supervisor).Jasper wrote:Maybe after that you can have a stay at Harvard.Adurentibus Spina wrote:They should've named it New Hades.Jasper wrote:I know. I chose not to mention that.Adurentibus Spina wrote:New Haven is a terrible pit of despair outside of the Yale campus.
Well, you could always try to inform them that they need a good Spinoza scholar, and that you're willing to come in as a visiting scholar to demonstrate what they're missing.Adurentibus Spina wrote:Unfortunately, they just don't have a good Spinoza scholar there. I'd be more likely to try for a visiting studentship at BU (Aaron Garrett is awesome and a huge influence), or Wisconsin (Steven Nadler is also great, and was my supervisor's MA supervisor).
I will not delve into this but if I knew someone WANTED to die I would do it out of loyalty.Adurentibus Spina wrote:I guess this was a response to my post about challenging my friends to murder me?Juana wrote:LOL just make sure none of those friends has a pig farm...
Yeah, really... but the idea isn't for them to actually attempt to try, but to recognize the force of their (moral) character on what they are actually able to choose to do. They can't actually *choose* to murder me, because there isn't anything in the past that suffices to cause them to do so.
Try arbitrarily willing yourself into a murderous rage... it's pretty difficult. Not even method actors can really pull that off.
yeah, well, I knew that already and I do forgive and have forgiven a lot of things based on this kind of rationale but you can only do that to a point. I mean you can't keep forgiving a guy who continually steals a 100 dollars from you every week because his dad was in that "business" as wellAdurentibus Spina wrote:
The idea is this: if you recognize that people aren't freely choosing to be assholes or hurt you or others, or to make bad decisions, but are being caused by prior events which can be known, then it follows that if we want people to be different than they are, we should accept that they have been caused to be the way they are in specific ways, and try to remedy these things in the future, instead of hurting ourselves or acting rashly in the present because we do not understand what is going on.
You have asked why I believe in free will and I gave my reason. I believe in x because y. I'm not saying you need to believe what I think, but you asked why and I gave my reason.mockbee wrote:@LJF
It's curious to me that you haven't thought 'SCREW THIS!' and left. You interestingly keep coming back with the same exact thought again and again for eight pages. That's really odd....... That isn't a put down, think about it. Why haven't you acted on your likely thought; "these people are elitist idiots! I'm outta here!". You decide to keep saying the same thing. There is a reason why..........maybe ask yourself? You are welcome here, I'm just wondering what makes you inside want to come back over and over to say the same thing......... And no, other people are not saying the same thing over and over.....thoughts are definitely evolving.
And you don't have to answer this, but how old are you? That is a question purely out of curiosity.
LJF wrote:
You have asked why I believe in free will and I gave my reason. I believe in x because y. I'm not saying you need to believe what I think, but you asked why and I gave my reason.
40 yrs old and I dress myself, have kids and function in society.
We’re all schizophrenics now: Jonathan Kay on James Holmes, Sam Harris, and the morally terrifying case against free will
Jonathan Kay Jul 26, 2012 – 11:55 AM ET | Last Updated: Jul 27, 2012 10:54 AM ET
At his court appearance this week, James Holmes made a strong case for an insanity plea, without even opening his mouth. The Colorado mass-shooting suspect — who has dyed his hair a lurid shade of red, and refers to himself as “The Joker” — looked as if his brain were on another planet.
Holmes is 24 years old, around the age when the symptoms of schizophrenia typically become acute. Cho Seung-Hui, the mentally unstable Viginia Tech shooter, was 23 when he killed 32 people in 2007. John Hinckley, Jr. was 25 when he tried to kill Ronald Reagan, thinking that this would win him the affections of Jodie Foster. At trial, the lead psychiatric expert for the defense successfully argued that Hinckley was insane — specifically, that he suffered from schizophrenia, depression, “suicidal features,” and an “autistic retreat from reality.”
In other words, Hinckley was nuts. In the period leading up to his assassination attempt, he imagined he was Travis Bickle from the movie Taxi Driver, and also sometimes slipped into the notion that he was John Lennon in some sort of resurrected form. His notes to Foster began as love letters, but over time became weird and demented.
Yet, despite all these facts, Americans were outraged when a Washington jury came back with an insanity verdict. In the years following, numerous U.S. states responded to the Hinckley acquittal by tightening their standards for gauging insanity. (Three — Idaho, Montana and Utah — abolished the insanity defense altogether.) A national poll, taken the day after the verdict was read, found that five out of six Americans thought “justice was not done.”
I suspect you’d get a similar poll result from Americans if Holmes also gets off on insanity. All of us have an evolved instinct to separate humanity into good and evil categories. Human-engineered tragedies such as terrorist attacks and spree shootings push that instinct into overdrive, because the killers seem like the very embodiment of pure evil. The words “not guilty by reason of insanity” frustrate that instinct, and leave us morally unsatisfied. To victims and their families especially, the idea that a killer is not responsible for his butchery makes it feel like a hole has been ripped in the good-evil continuum.
But a new book raises a question that puts the very existence of that continuum into doubt: What if none of us are truly “responsible” for our actions?
The question lies at the heart of Free Will, by neuroscientist Sam Harris (an author better known for Letter to a Christian Nation, and other works in the “New Atheism” genre). Harris makes the case that every human being — the “sane” and the “insane” alike — are bound by rigid, deterministic forces that guide us through life according to the chemical reactions occurring in our brains, even if some brains obviously work better than others. Eating breakfast, going to work, switching radio stations, shooting the President to impress Jodie Foster: It’s all chemicals.
Of course, the argument is not new: Theologians have been debating the concept of free will for centuries, and the philosophical genre is so well-developed that it has generated a host of arcane sub-theories with names like “hard incompatibilism” and “Libertarianism Volition.” But Harris make his case in unusually stark terms, and he does so at a time when new brain-scanning technologies and other scientific breakthroughs are letting us examine the cerebrum in the way that watchmakers take apart the gears of a clock.
More than ever before, the brain looks to modern researchers like a mere machine, processing inputs and generating outputs like any other. On this understanding, a brain has no more capacity for “good” or “evil” than does a car or a microwave oven.
By way of example, Harris provides a list of five hypothetical killers — (1) a four-year-old who accidentally shoots someone while playing with his father’s gun; (2) a severely abused 12-year-old who kills a tormentor; (3) a child-abuse victim who, as an adult, shoots his ex-girlfriend after she leaves him; (4) a 25-year-with a solid upbringing, who kills a young woman “just for the fun of it”; and (5) a seemingly heartless murderer who later is discovered to have a large tumor that is short-circuiting his prefrontal cortex.
By conventional analysis, #3 and #4 would be branded evildoers; #1 and #5 would be given a free pass on grounds of age and biology, respectively; and #2 would lie somewhere in between. But Harris’ point is that, once you put aside our mythical religious baggage about good and evil (as he sees it), all of these cases are motivated by the same amoral whirling of a human brain’s synaptic gears. But not for the luck of the biological draw, any one of us — in another life — could be #1, #2, #3, #4 or #5: There is no magical, spiritual, free-willed force within our minds that will allow us to overcome the fate that is wired into the physical universe.
As an atheist, Harris is quite untroubled by all this. Indeed, he thinks his readers should be relieved by his revelations, because “few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems.” Once we all learn to shed our belief in notions like God and sin, moreover, he believes, we can build a “scientifically informed system of justice.” Under such a system, criminals would be jailed, yes — but only to pursue the explicitly utilitarian goal of preventing them from committing more crimes. Criminal justice would be stripped of any notion of retribution — since “a desire for retribution, arising from the idea that each person is the free author of his thoughts and actions, rests on a cognitive and emotional illusion — and perpetuates a moral one.”
On the level of scientific logic, I could not find a single sentence in Free Will with which I disagreed. Yet from a human standpoint, the book is quietly terrifying. As horrible (am I even allowed to use that word, Mr. Harris?) as monsters (ditto) such as James Holmes and Cho Seung-Hui may be, there is some deeply rooted psychological solace to be found in our collective ability to call them by that name — to make a line in the sand, placing the community of law-abiding fathers, mothers, sons and daughters on one side, and on the other marking “Here there be monsters.” To erase that line is to erase millions of years of evolutionary psychology, which has programmed us with useful moral instincts aimed at identifying and punishing harmful elements within our society.
I believe that free will truly is an illusion, just as Sam Harris says. But it is a valuable illusion, and one that is deeply rooted in every human culture known to anthropology — much like the belief in an almighty, which Mr. Harris equally dismisses. That’s why, like most thinking people, I have given up on letting it bother me. If the illusion of free will went away, we would be left with a world so morally stark and (literally) inhuman that, I dare say, even Mr. Harris himself would long for the fairy tales of good and evil he so cleverly debunks.
National Post
jkay@nationalpost.com
Drove to Buffalo last night it's my wife's 20 yr high school reunion, will try to have fun at that. Just got back from the zoo with the kids that was enjoyable. Not sure what I think about zoos.mockbee wrote:LJF wrote:
You have asked why I believe in free will and I gave my reason. I believe in x because y. I'm not saying you need to believe what I think, but you asked why and I gave my reason.
40 yrs old and I dress myself, have kids and function in society.
I truly hope you have an awesome day, I'm planning on having a damn good one myself.
I agree. There's a difference between forgiving and understanding. I don't think you need to forgive those who wrong you, but in understanding them, some will be forgiven, and others not, but you will also not be so bothered by them. It's more important that you are less affected (less mentally disturbed) by others, than that you forgive them.Matz wrote:yeah, well, I knew that already and I do forgive and have forgiven a lot of things based on this kind of rationale but you can only do that to a point. I mean you can't keep forgiving a guy who continually steals a 100 dollars from you every week because his dad was in that "business" as wellAdurentibus Spina wrote:
The idea is this: if you recognize that people aren't freely choosing to be assholes or hurt you or others, or to make bad decisions, but are being caused by prior events which can be known, then it follows that if we want people to be different than they are, we should accept that they have been caused to be the way they are in specific ways, and try to remedy these things in the future, instead of hurting ourselves or acting rashly in the present because we do not understand what is going on.