Boydstun

SL, There is a widespread good in people of wanting to know the truth. Aristotle thought that even ALL people desire to know (the truth). One widespread thing people want to know today, as thousands of years ago, is what becomes of one's inner self and that self of one's loved ones when we die. Is it really just the absolute end as it might appear from the successive states of the deceased body, or is there future life, perhaps one brighter or darker than the earthly life (and for some an opportunity to sell post-death prizes and penalties for power and money in earthly life)? Decline the fake insurance policy of Pascal's Wager. Prize the truth come what may. As for widespread desire for protection against dangers, the main danger is not from interpersonal conflicts, but from nature. Getting to the discoveries and developments that can rescue one or one's loved ones from this or that particular occasion of bodily catastrophic failure (mostly from disease or old-age cascades) is not helped by prayers and blaming death on human moral failings, but by rational investigations into nature. I mention this vast sort of danger due to Objectivist-types' widespread knee-jerk salience of dangers from interpersonal conflicts as first concern among dangers and politics as top aim. There are plenty of religious people with whom I form political alliances. More importantly, religious friends and family and I (I purely naturalist, atheist) love each other very much. Those are choices open based on common values, including the value of truth, even as one keeps straight what are one's differences on what is true and how to get it. Nietzsche became so popular in the culture of Germany in the 1890's and up to WWI that there were some theologians serving up bowls of unity between Nietzsche and Christian religion in Germany. When I was first in college ('66–'71), there was Christian Atheism of Altizer.* More recently and probably more durably, there is The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (2007).

I remarked in 2009:

"Existential Possibilities Drained of Real Potentials" "Radical Doubt of Memory and Cognitive Imagination, Feigning Thought" 1–2–3–4

"Cogito Counters" & "Demonic Skepticism, Obscure Perception, Realist Concepts" 1–2–3–4

René Descartes: Dualism, Reflexes, and Living Machines

Kyary, In this quoted excerpt from Rand, which you likely would recall, she had no problem with and found it useful to look at attributes and actions separately from the entities to which they belong and to which she also applies identity in the stone/leaf example. She applies exclusionary identity to all of them, separately and together. Rand's entity is in quite a bit of difference with Aristotle's substance, though there is some overlap in their ontological placement.* Entity made a neat fit with identity, of course. Have you studied any of Whitehead's process philosophy? A comparison with Mainländer might be quite interesting. I would not put too much weight on order of learning categories of things as keys to ontological priorities and dependencies (I put weight on adult experience and science for that), but philosophers, including Rand, have tended to use order of learning as a bit of confirmation of priorities in ontologies (such as that attributes and actions have an asymmetric dependence on entities). An example would be child learning of common nouns for objects before verbs for actions. (I should mention that understanding A is itself [a mapping of self to self] comes rather late.) Concerning perception, we have a lot of gear for detecting motions and objects. Humans, and some other primates too, are able to categorize perceptually because they are able to percieve directly some of the invariant structural and transformational relations in the world. The visual system spontaneously extracts relational invariances in the optical flow across the retina. One result is our ability to see solid objects and their motions in three-dimensional space. An analogy between the visual system and a prism can be drawn. A prism is commonly characterized as a kind of fourier analyzer, a separator of harmonic components of light. Similarly, the visal system can be conceived as , among other things, an analyzer of projective geometry. Without any measurements, of lengths or angles, the visual system sorts out relations in figures that remain invariant under transformations of perspective. There are geometric signatures through which we can perceive as (human) walking any instance of that class of events. In vision we can also apprehend categorically skipping, jogging, or sprinting, We can perceive the various kicks of swimmers all as kicks. We can perceive the variations and underlying constancies of these categories directly, sensitively, and without linguistic articulation. (See "Capturing Concepts," [1990] pp. 14–16.) You mentioned Rand's claim that matter is indestructible and can only change its forms. There is truth in that taken as a statement of conservation of mass in chemistry or as conservation of mass-energy in physics. But that was not what she was working on in that statement. She was contrasting the continuing existence of inanimate matter with the discontinuing existence of life and the efforts required of life such that it continue (for a while) in existence. So, for example, when the character Tony dies in the arms of Rearden, all of Tony's chemicals are said to continue fine, but his life has gone out of existence. From what you have shown on Mainländer's general metaphysics, it looks to have the chronic mistake—from Aristotle to Schopenhauer to late Nietzsche—the mistake of projecting teleological actions from their true and only place, which is life (and its machines devised by humans), onto the whole of inanimate nature. Rand and I and modern science dispute the correctness of such a projection.

—SDF Tractors "ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food" OK. I would not need to discover it because my parents taught me how to do it, and in my childhood we did just that—enough fruit and vegetables (and honey) for the family for the entire year. How to grow it, to process it, and to preserve it. We got pork or beef by butchering it out on Grandparents' places, which were largely self-sufficient farms, where my parents grew up during the Great Depression. What America did you think you were addressing, writer? Folks like in Manhattan? Only office folk across the country too good to ever get their hands dirty and who don't know how the store food is produced? THAT was NOT the only American audience existing in 1957. Welcome to the rest of America and their abilities. There was not some sort of genius, like Galt or real ones, who invented tillage or the plow. The civilization in which those techniques first came about evidently did not know or have a clue that plowing would so enhance productivity. They invented it for other reasons of labor, as mentioned in the quote. My paleface ancestors came mostly to what is now MD and VA, including the part of VA where we live today, in the 1600's. At that time, it was all trees here, and to make a field, to till and plant, many trees had to be removed. They had iron axes and crosscut saws and knowhow from their parents. Bless all who brought about those tools and all who contributed to their invention and production. And in current practice, bless all the engineers and manufacturers and service workers who make my chainsaw possible. But not forget that we the readers of Atlas Shrugged are not all so devoid of hands-with-mind and love of it and so helpless as to deserve the demeaning rhetorical: "ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food." We do not depend from some speculated individual mind envisioning the important result and inventing the practice of plowing for higher yields, but on many minds accumulating success across the centuries to our own minds and ways of survival.

A Greek Sham The fire of the gods stolen by Prometheus was actually stolen by the story maker from man and given to the gods, omitting credit to man of having learned to start, control, and use fires without outside help.

I think the answer to your last question is Yes, but I'm unsure. I incline to think that cats don't have free will (cf.). Finding the neurological bases of free will in humans could lead to answering the question on cats definitively. Many have remarked that domestic cats don't have remorse, for what it's worth. Do All Mammals Have a Prefrontal Cortex?

Yes, it is a contradiction. I stated the falsehood "agency always requires free will," and then contradicted that thesis with the truth "a cat has agency without free will." Descartes or some of his followers might have seen an animal as just a more complex reaction system than a stone. I'd say there is an important qualitative difference between the two even though Descartes was right that the animal such as a cat has no free will. I don't know in the case of cats, but in the case of some monkeys, their behaviors are not only by habit and reflex, provided their prefrontal cortex is intact. Prefrontal cortex of the monkey can retain some things in mind for several seconds in absence of continuing stimulus. (That is not sensory iconic memory of animals—including us—which is only about a quarter of a second.) That memorial ability of the monkey is some amount of working memory and requires some ability of representation. Although the total abilities of the monkey are in striking contrast to a stone (or the monkey's body as a mass) reacting as in Newton's Third Law, Yes, the determinist maintains that the monkey's actions are all deterministic, predetermined. And the same for us humans with more extensive capacities for representations in the active making of our outputs, some of which some of us (e.g. you and I) say are freely chosen.

Yes, that is what we have all meant by determinism for a long time and still do. And they want to maintain they know there are no occasions of free will because no neural activity could possibly be the support for any such mental occasion. Their claim to that knowledge of possible neural-network interactions is mistaken. They have no such knowledge, and their thinking that they do so is due to a number of mistaken presumptions about the world.

It is extremely unlikely that free choices have anything to do with quantum indeterminism. The time scales are way off. I argued the quantum irrelevance in VS. So far as we know, at least in the inanimate world, QM by its own mechanism gives rise to all the determinism, such as trajectory of a baseball, that obtains in the classical regime. This has been studied and has expanded from the inception of QM to this day. The idea of indeterminacy in some events is ancient; it does not wait on the appearance of QM. It should not be confused with contingency. Aristotle is right in saying that today whether the Russians will be militarily victorious over Ukraine is indeterminate not only in the sense that it cannot be predicted, but in the sense that there is not now any such determinateness of such a matter in reality. Peirce agreed, and I agree. Leibniz and Rand could agree, but only because collections of free wills go into the outcome. Physical indeterminism in neural-network interactions with each other (supposing indeterminism occurs at that classical level of physics in this setting) cannot be identical with a neural-network-interaction basis of free will because free will is purposive, directed activity and mere indeterminism does not possess that. This was recognized about potential physical bases from ancient times, long before our modern knowledge of brain and its roles in animal life. The contemporary Aristotelian Roderick Long wrote his 488-page Ph.D. dissertation on some of that story: Free Choice and Indeterminism in Aristotle and Later Antiquity. One needs to clear one's head of these confusions: Agency always requires free will (to the contrary, a cat has agency without free will), and contingency requires living agents, indeed ones with intellegence and free will, or it requires chance (to the contrary, it requires only independent causal streams intersecting each other).

No. This IS the discussion of Free Will vs Determinism in the context of modern science, especially brain science. Both sides have always known we have constraints under which our choices are made. To sat that man is man is to say that concerning the given structure and function of his biology, including the distinctive character of his consciousness.

Just pages 183 to 188. Only the inanimate physics picture. There is a rebuttal of my view in this, followed by my rejoinder here.

Calling "sanction" occasions of failing to recognize evil and take actions to oppose it is incorrect English, a smearing out of the term sanction.

Because the old picture of the world needing to be held up was false. Our experience is that unsupported objects here on the surface of the earth fall, but the generalization to thinking the earth itself would fall if unsupported proved incorrect.

I think that conclusion about some determinists is correct if one has a correct sense of the agency of animals, which agency is greatly expanded in the human animal due to greater powers of memory, self-reflection, self-control, and free will. However, a determinist need not deny there are animals with agency (including humans) or deny that the Mars Rovers had some agency; he could say simply that there is not such a deeply originative agency for humans as there would be if they truly had free will. Think too of that particular milliliter of water about to go over Niagra Falls that I considered here. On the full deterministic picture, which I argued against there, of that milliliter of water, which is not an agent, a determinist need not conclude that that bit of water does not really exist as a bit of water because of it being fully determined in its current formation from factors in other things a year before (an absurdity and false, I argued) and fully determined in the particulars its future dissolution. Such a determinist, who would indeed reduce all occasions of apparent free choices to fully deterministic factors, we should call a non-eliminative reductionist.

Determinism is the idea that for us in all our human choices, actions, and controls, we are subject to the physical principle indicated widely in nature: A thing is at each time in a complete state, and in the given complete state a thing is in (regardless of whether anyone knows that complete state or everything about the future), a thing can do only one thing. To affirm Free will is to deny that that principle is operative in all our choices, actions, and controls. Free will is the idea that in some states we (the control system that is us) could have chosen another alternative to the one we chose. In those states, we were free to choose among various alternatives. I use the standard no-ambiguity definitions of determinism and free will in modern times in this post. The advocates of determinism and advocates of free will can agree that there will be only one succeeding actual state. And agree we can come to know more and more about neurology underlying choices and that we are going to get enough understanding of those physical processes to see whether in a given state only one particular next state could obtain or more. That will settle whether any choices seeming to be free have freedom or determinism in their physical bases. My old paper on this was titled "Volitional Synapses" because I accept that the issue is settled according to whether in the pertinent interactions of neural networks of the brain there are only single next-state potentials or some multiple next-state potentials of which one becomes actual. I argued against those who think we already know that it cannot possibly be that the relevant occasions of interaction are not deterministic, i.e., not single next-state potential. Likewise we can look into the control systems of the somewhat autonomous Mars Rovers and settle if those control systems are entirely deterministic or not (I presume they are). There is a fact of the matter, and it has no dependence on present limits of our state of knowledge of the control systems. And Determinism vs. Free Will is not in some essential dependence on facts about omniscience. Even without the issue being yet entirely settled by neuroscience, one can go on to think about social and personal-life ramifications should the settlement be determinism. We've seen historically at least the case in which those in power thought that individuals were products of economic determinism. What economic class someone was born into is all one needed to know about them. That was marxist Communism. Other potentials for society might be entailed, given determinism established not by the speculation of Marx. I myself will not be thinking on consequences were determinism correct; Nozick settled that well enough for me anyway. I'll run out my time in this area of philosophy following only pursuits of whether determinism is always the case for we individual human self-control systems or if in some choices our manifest freedom rests on multiple next-state potentials in neural network interactions.

This is incorrect and a very dangerous idea many have taken away from reading Rand. (A related incorrect take-away, which Rand later, correctly, denounced and clarified, is the idea that evil is impotent.) Evil is not always dependent on a sanction, and when it is, sanction from most anyone will do. Sanction from the (forum-shopped) witch doctor is common. Navalny did not sanction the evil of Putin, and he was brutalized and murdered by Putin all the same. Realistically, sanction from the victim is generally not a worthy sanction to the evil doer. To the evil doer, the sanction of the victim is generally as irrelevant as the sanction, were such possible, of a rat or insect. (Aside: Stalin fooled people into the "sanction" of not realizing that he was the reason they were forced onto a train to Siberia. They wrote him letters thinking that if he knew what was happening he would intervene.) Ayn Rand introduced the idea of the sanction of the victim and the dependence of evil on it in a situation in which evil was an ongoing parasitism on the victim. I'd leave validity of the idea to that sort of situation, nothing broader. One bad idea some readers take away from Atlas Shrugged is that they and their philosophical comrades are the Atlases holding up the world as in the book (kind of an iffy metaphor of the book, really, because of our modern conception of gravity) and that everyone else is significantly a parasite on them. No, our philosophical circle is not in that role. There are other real people who are in that role in this the real world.

I'm not familiar with the thought of Sam Harris. I looked him up on Amazon just now and see a number of popular-culture type books he has written. Those are not the sort of books that could be worthwhile for me to really advance my thought rather than dropping in on seeing what was going on in popular culture. Everyone has their own level of background knowledge under which a book might be accessible and have some new frontier for them in an area of interest to them. That is something I've found to be most accurately estimated by having the book in your hands before purchase. (Although, I've found that for fit with me, if a book has an "Author Meets Critics" session at a Meeting of the American Philosophical Association and I look up the book at the publisher or Amazon and the information there points to a fit for me in interest and level, then it is extremely likely to be a right fit.) There are sometimes books written for the general educated public that are a fit for me: Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics (from days of yore); Penrose's The Road to Reality (2006); Deacon's The Symbolic Species (1997); Grossberg's Conscious MIND, Resonant BRAIN (2021); the widely read books of Michael Tomasello (emergence of us with thought and morality from primate evolution and human ontogeny). These books are mainly scientific, not philosophy. Sapolsky writes that his viewpoint is closest to the views of Sam Harris in that they both reject free will "almost entirely on biological grounds." I notice that Harris's formal training in philosophy was not much.* I don't know if determinists—popular such as Harris and Sapolsky or academy-seated such as Derek Pereboom and Galen Strawson—will have significant cultural impact in terms of views on what man is or how society should(shall?) be structured. But I for one do not think that wide-readership success and its possibility of cultural impact is what is most important about having had a course of life and mind or right measure of worth in one's written works. Of the populars you mentioned, I've had at least online peeks at reflections of Hossenfelder, and as I recall, at least her physics was sound; I wouldn't know about how good are her representations of whatever she is challenging.

I have repeated the list of modern books above on free will because I have received the book by Robert M. Sapolsky Determined – A Science of Life without Free Will, and it is junk by comparison to those. To get to current top philosophy on free will informed by modern science buy not Saplosky 2023, but from the list above. To that list, I should also add the deep thinking on free will to be found in Robert Nozick's Philosophical Explanations (1981). Let me refer to Sapolsky 2023 by "D". Sapolsky does not argue with the sophisticated, scientifically informed on the issue of free will and determinism. He does not have that sophistication. His writing is horrible for this reader. There are hundreds of unnecessary words, wasting the educated reader's time, to deliver finally some little idea suitable for jr. high. Certainly this author does not deliver with the economy and substance of, say, Dennett's Elbow Room. The discussions by participants in this thread are more weighty than what this author is capable of. The subtitle of this book speaks of "a science of life" and that can give the impression the author is going to establish a science of life, which is not his aim. The subtitle should be read as "Among ways of looking at life, scientifically informed, without free will, here is one, mine." "This book has two goals. The first is to convince you that there is no free will,* or at least that there is much less free will than generally assumed when it really matters." (What does really matter more? That I encounter a bear one evening sitting at my mailbox out on the road and make a decision about what to do or that I wrote the poetry and essays that I did? I'll not be taking on the author's take on what really matters.) The author mentions some of the competent philosophers of our time who are on the determinist side and one of the compatiblists, but he does not really get into their level of thinking and the level of debates other philosophers have with them. The level of neuroscience he parlays is nowhere near what the educated reading public has received from neuroscientists Edelman (The Remembered Present), Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens), or Freeman (How Brains Make Up Their Minds). All of these, by the way, like Sapolsky, know of serious philosophical discussions pertinent to the vistas they are relating, but they do not get into the ring and really wrestle with those crucial deep thoughts. My own favorite determinist philosopher, informed by the brain science to that time, is Ted Honderich (A Theory of Determinism, Vol. I Mind and Brain, Vol. II The Consequences of Determinism, 1988). I think his Union theory of the psycho-neural relation is likely correct, but his conception of the level of determinism in the subjects of physical science, from natural arenas of physics to interacting living neural networks, is false, an unrealistic projection from isolated systems to the full chorus of nature. A pervasive FALSE from Laplace to our own era. That usual unexamined presumption is carried forth by Sapolsky, planting the image of a single neuron as required to be not a thing of entirely determined activities if free will (faith in free will, he would say) is to be validated in terms of neuroscience. And of course without the realistic biological context of structure and function the only alternative to the deterministic neuron would be a randomly behaving one (which could, I say, be useful for the generation portion, the generation-of-diversity portion, of the model of some, which is then followed by selection in biological process) useless and not the same thing as free will. The single-neuron image is a strawman for thought about free will as to neurology. I'll not be reading this book further. If I get to tackle free will big time in my scholarship, I'll be soaking up the books in my list above. The pages of D are of good material quality (at least in the hardback) and a pleasure to turn. I'll not be returning this book to the soil, but retain it for the philosopher who will be inheriting my library. In case he thinks better of it.

I'd think that expansion of our knowledge allowing us to expand our exploitations of the physical determinisms would expand our freedom of will. At least in the sense that we obtain a wider range of options over which to exercise our will. So I'm not inclined to accept the idea that free will arises out of limited knowledge. I already have the freedom of will to decide what work I'll do first when I go outside to work in a few minutes, and if I had all the knowledge of brain and muscle and things I'll be working on out there, my free will would not vanish. I think, rather, that my free will has an explanation in terms of all those unknown processes within myself; contingencies in physical processes are the house of free will. I do not think my free will is based on my ignorance of those internal mechanisms.

If that is a claim of his, then he is off in the old silliness that said there are no chairs because they are just an assembly of molecules or there are no tornadoes because they are just a conjunction of this piece of fluid flow and that one and that one . . . . and there are no seizures or high jumps . . . This would buy him absence of agent responsibility, but the idea that there is no agency of organisms flies in the face of ordinary experience and science, and he would need a better argument to show that determinism implies no causal responsibility (thence there be no liabilities in torts [which is not the same as criminality and its penalties]). Determinism, at least as stated in the modern age (Hobbes, Spinoza and on to our own time) is not about predictions and knowledge. It is about operations of things regardless of how far we understand them or can predict them. It says that all things always have complete states in reality, and, given that that is the case for them, they can do only one thing in their complete state at any time. So I could have only the height I have ended up with, commit only the corrected typos that occurred in typing this, etc. Sometimes the debate has proceeded under the assumption that the complete states at all times are presently known by God. So Leibniz, for example, in defending our manifest free will against determinist conjectures trying to model how the world works so as to show that that manifest free will is an illusion, argues that foreknowledge by God of future results does not show that none of our future results will have been arrived at with free originations from us.

That one was caused to do an intentional act that brought harm to some innocent person does not seem adequate for inferring that one was not responsible for the intentional act. The caused agent caused the act, all the same. Torts may still proceed, and with coercive penalties, all the same. Sapolsky seems to be claiming he knows that all of the preceding is false. That is, for instance, he seems to claim that determinism of an agent to do an intentional act implies that all liabilities should be removed against the agent of such an act. If Sapolsky is determined to regard as logical inference what others are determined to regard as invalid inference, as mere routine pattern of thought transplanted from other contexts, how can there be an objective fact of the matter? And if there is not objective fact on this issue or any other issue as to correct inference, why bother trying to think together with your fellows? (This objection is in the line of Epicurus and Rand/N. Branden.)