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Boydstun

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.)
  3. Yes, I did see that, and it begins to be something for getting a grip on his view. I have ordered his book, and it should arrive tomorrow. In the transcript you linked, Sapolsky remarked: Here he seems to be making the long-enduring move of thinking that if one has a reason for doing something and there are reasons behind having that reason and so forth on back, then necessarily you didn't have freedom over whether to do the deed. That is a controversial thesis, and he needs a proof of its correctness.
  4. I find reading compositions more exact and facilitating of serious thought than videos. I've not got Robert Sapolsky's Determined: A Life of Science without Free Will (2023). I may get it to add to the following of mine: Free Will – Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation, Maoz and Sinnott-Armstrong, editors (2022) Naturally Free Action by Oisín Deery (2021) Free Agents – How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin Mitchell (2023) A Metaphysics for Freedom(* & on to next page) by Helen Steward (2012) Laws, Mind, and Free Will by Steven Horst (2011) Deep Control by John Fischer (2013) Causes, Laws, and Free Will – Why Determinism Doesn't Matter by Kadri Vihvelin (2013) Why Free Will Is Real by Christian List (2019) ~Also, to the free will side~ "Volitional Synapses" –Part 1 –Part 2 –Part 3 "Ascent to Volitional Consciousness" –Abstract –Article
  5. I used "emergent" because I was reponding to Monart who had used "emergent." It seems sensible enough to sometimes use that rather than "caused," as when saying that the fluid state of matter emerged from a collection of certain molecules in a certain situation of temperature and pressure. Saying that "air is caused by the molecules composing it" is weird. And "air and its lack of resistance to shearing stress is caused by the molecules composing air and their collisions with each other" is also a weird way of talking. Shearing stresses are not something applicable to a molecule so far as I know. It is something that emerges at a macro level such as in our bones (hopefully with good resistance to shearing stresses) or in a breath of air. Additionally, causal relations in the story of how I came about are immediate and dynamical in my individual ontogeny in which evolution has provided the engineering-type structures in which such organized developmental processes can proceed. (Not only the background evolutionarily yielded structure is required, of course, but also a continuing sameness [within tolerances] of the environment in which the type of organism can survive.) So for thinking about causation and emergences of processes in the individual organism, it seems most important to be focused on individual development, not preceding evolution, while keeping evolution as important background of the present dynamics arena in which this is causing that and/or this is emerging from that. For the determinism worth having in a debate over free will vs. determinism, the determinism has to be a pre-determinism. To which the question "how far back is such and such in the present predetermined?" is sensible, and answers get more ridiculous the farther back the predeterminism is asserted, due to the circumstance that in the real physical, natural world there are a myriad of independent causal streams intersecting each other, continually resetting "initial" conditions and boundary conditions. All of that applies as well to emergences as it does to causation so far as I can see. Also, in stating Rand's mildly circular definition of the Law of Causality (that is, What is the Law of Causality, in applying identity to action?) using the phrase "caused and determined" in her definition (in "The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made"), one should, I suggest, not take the "determined" to mean necessarily determinism, but a broader concept determinate. More like: "caused and delivered as determinate." That way both the results of the mind-independent course of nature and the results of free will engineering things can be brought under a Law of Causality.
  6. Rand's sets the self in her first presentation of her mature philosophy thusly: "Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists" (emphases added). This talk of one possessing consciousness is just in the vernacular that the reader can readily get the meaning of sticking simply with common usage. Before this passage in the speech, Rand has been talking already of men living by the mind and of sacrifice and self-esteem. Additionally, this whole speech is set against the immediately preceding scene in which the young government man Tony dies in the arms of Rearden, and they have spoken of the absoluteness of that bullet wound and Rand has illustrated the absoluteness of life and death of a person, mind and body. Self can be an emergent property looking across animal phyla. Encephalization of a nervous system, such as in a snail, need not entail existence of a self, even though the organism has a (fixed) behavioral value hierarchy. Damasio has found neurological quarters and interconnections for different levels of the human self (The Feeling of What Happens). Much is known about the development of the human brain in ontogeny, and experts might tell us when self-consciousness is added to primary consciousness. However, none of those emergences are about emergence of consciousness or consciouness-related self from neurological process, and I don't know if emergence would be the right relationship between neurological processes we possess and those selves. To your first option, we could say that self used to include all those things would be very handwaving, but that it is true enough, and Rand assents, that human self is the whole mind-body organism. I don't think your following OR, taken as exclusive would be right. I leave open for now, at my stage of information, whether the relation of consciousness and consciousness-related self stand to their underlying neural process in a relation of emergence, and if they do so stand, I don't see that as in conflict with your first option. Rand's talk of consciousness is never a sort of reified abstraction, but part of some animal biology.
  7. A Review Welcome, Solvreven. Hope check it out later and comment. Can you post a written transcript here of what is said in the video?
  8. I’d like to mention another point, this one made by Rand, concerning the choice to live as it relates to ethics. That is: having chosen to live, the life is necessarily within the constitution, powers, and limits of what is human life. Human being has a definite nature just as any being has a nature, a definite living nature just as any living being has a nature. Notably, in Rand’s view, and mine, the nature of humans is that either one is rational or, in irrationality, one is making way for fulfillment of the standing condition of life: eventual disintegration of life to stillness, to death. Additional nature of being human would be such things as needs to breathe and to eat and to learn and to have companionship of the mind. In Rand’s view (and I concur in this point), life is the sole domain of valuations, significance, and meaning. With value arising only where life arises, I slide Rand’s relationship between value and the general world into one of the five kinds for that relationship noted by Robert Nozick in his PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLANATIONS (1981): we choose that there be value, but the nature of value is not up to us. About a year ago, the following mathematical feat was accomplished: a tile shape was found that tiles the infinite plane within the problem-rules that patterns of tile fittings do not repeat and there are no overlaps or gaps between the tiles. The tile shape that accomplishes this was initially called the Einstein tile because ein stein means one stone. That tile is now called Hat because its shape looks like the silhouette of a hat. In the 1970’s, Roger Penrose found a tiling of the plane using two shapes of tile. So the more recent mathematical accomplishment goes Penrose one better, we might say. I want now to get physical about these tilings, and this will bring us back round to the point about Rand’s metaphysics of value with which this post began. Theoretical physicists place theoretically an atom at each vertex of these tiles and see what sort of matter they get. They take the atom-vested tiled plane as a cross-section of a 3D material. A theoretical material. In the case of the Penrose tiling, the material turned out to be a quasicrystal. That solid material of the Penrose tiles was later found in nature. The matter that would result from the Hat tiling has been found to be a quasicrystal, but it shares properties of the crystal structure called graphene. As I recall, the pure-carbon crystal graphene was invented in the wake of the invention of fullerene (buckyballs), a sphere-like molecule purely carbon. Fullerene was first theoretically fashioned, then produced physically. Later it was found to also exist in nature. These coincidences of the artificial and the natural is perfectly fitted with Rand’s metaphysics in Galt’s Speech (in ATLAS SHRUGGED) and in her later essay "The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made” and in her buddy Leonard Peikoff’s essay “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy.” These Objectivist founders had emphasized that products of invention have determinate natures just as things occurring in the course of nature. That the former were inventions initiated by free human choices does not mean that the natures in the inventions are any less (or more) necessary than the necessities within the purely naturally given. The choice to live is choice for human life, and although we have continual and ongoing choices concerning that life, they are made within a human nature not up to us. quasicrystals – https://www.nobelprize.org/.../advanced... graphene – https://nanografi.com/.../60-uses-and-applications-of.../
  9. I noticed how easy it is to replace God with Existence in the most basic ontology of Spinoza's (Jewish, not Christian) system here (linked excerpt is from my fundamental paper "Existence, We" [2021 {scroll down}]). Perhaps that is part of why he was so often accused of pantheism and atheism.
  10. Einstein Tiling Is Getting Material Physicists have made a theoretical examination of what sort of material results if one places an atom at each vertex of the tiles.* This had been done with the Penrose tiles (1970's – 2 shapes of tile) covering the plane. The physicists look at such a tiled plane they have conceived as vertex-embedded with atoms as a slice through a 3D material. In the case of the Penrose tiling, the material turned out to be a quasicrystal. That solid material of the Penrose tiles was later found in nature. The matter that would result from the Einstein tiling (also called the Hat tiling because the shape of that tile resembles silhouette of a hat) is a quasicrystal, but it shares properties of the crystal structure called graphene. If I recall correctly, the pure-carbon crystal graphene was invented in the wake of the invention of fullerene (buckyballs), a sphere-like molecule purely carbon. Fullerene was first theoretically fashioned, then produced physically. Later it was found to also exist in nature. This coincidence of the artificial and the natural is perfectly fitted with Rand’s metaphysics in Galt’s Speech and in her essay "The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made” and in Peikoff’s “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy.” Objectivists had emphasized that products of invention have determinate natures just as things occurring in the course of nature. That the former were inventions initiated by free human choices does not mean that the nature of the inventions are any less (or more) necessary than the necessities within the purely naturally given.
  11. Apparently different aspects of the same entity at the same time. And I think that is smooth with the original paper of DeBroglie and with the way we learn to put together a particle as a wave packet in QM class (although the latter would be for ordinary QM, and surely we need to be at quantum field theory to be at fullest understanding of elementary particles). What's the point?
  12. Whether embracing God is negation of self would depend on one's conception of God. Spinoza certainly would embrace God, but his does not entail negation of his self nor suspension of reason. I think of mind as the instrumentation and control system of some higher animal bodies, including the human case. There is just an ambiguity in "self". Sometimes it mean mind and body, and sometimes only one's mind. If a Christian sect arose that preached resurrection of one's body, but without any memory of one's previous existence, experiences, thoughts or other minded persons, I don't think they'd win many clients. The mind of a human is the precious self.
  13. Love yourself! strongly suggests that self-interest cannot be entirely immoral in a consistent Christianity.
  14. The mind-independent universe is mass-energy, not philosopher-armchair substance. Knowledge of mass-energy and evidence for its amount in the whole universe being conserved back to and including the Initial Singularity is a glorious fruitful quest of science alone. Whether there are extensionless points in spacetime is, in the armchairs of philosophers, as stuck in the mud as all the centuries they wasted over the question of whether matter was atomic or continuous. Science got the answers and subtleties of that and delivered a solid stage for bringing the world into our service. Elementary particle physics has it that leptons, in their particle mode, are extensionless particles, perfect points of mass. The old sayings of philosophers that extension is more fundamental than weight is sensibly (on account of modern science) left back in those moldy old armchairs. Additional Note
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