Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

All Activity

This stream auto-updates

  1. Past hour
  2. An Early Friday Hodgepodge Spring break with the wife and kids, and other travel/family obligations will occupy me over the weekend and into next week. I plan to resume regular posting here April 7, although it is possible I'll be back earlier. *** 1. If -- after having to rid your person of metal objects -- you then wondered how the headphones inside an MRI machine work, wonder no more. Hint: It's not the same technology as the sound-powered telephone, another neat piece of low-tech wizardry. 2. A couple of years ago, I replaced my laptop with a Framework computer so I could upgrade components over time or make simple repairs. I'm quite happy with it so far and, because there is a hacking culture among Framework users, I tentatively plan to replace the guts of my desktop with Framework components whenever that need arises. (Folks share instructions, specs for 3-D print parts they need, and do other things that make it easier for not-quite-hackers like me to join in the fun.) As always with such things, I keep an antenna out for interesting news, and have found a someday/maybe project (video) that is too neat not to share:In this video, I will go over why I felt the need to create my custom portable all-in-one computer. Thanks to #framework I was able to put together something that's super easy to assemble and reproduce. I generally use my #dygma Defy split keyboard, but working around my Macbook Pro's keyboard was always a pain, especially on flights and other places with limited space. One of the options I considered was a Lenovo Yoga, but I wanted something more repairable. My wife thought of the name Flying Lotus, which I really like, but like I said in the video is not for everyone...At the link are the video showing how he made this, the many uses and advantages his design opens up, and a link for kit parts to make one for yourself. 3. A little over a decade ago, this Arsenal fan was overjoyed to see the English Premier League become widely available over cable in the United States. Streaming services eventually plugged whatever gaps there were in cable coverage of the Premier League, as well as other competitions: Now it's possible to see just about any game live one has time to watch. Just when I thought I couldn't be any more spoiled as a fan, I learned of the many podcasts by more knowledgeable fans. My favorite is the Arsenal Opinion Podcast which is a near-perfect mixture of analysis and entertainment for me. I follow that one regularly. My second-favorite is FourFourTwo, which is all about tactics. I don't regularly go there, but it's really good, as exemplified by the below embedded podcast about the tactics of Arsenal's "Invincibles" undefeated team of '03/'04. There has never been a better time to be a soccer fan. 4. Recently, I noted that I had learned about NewPipe, an open-source software front end for YouTube, whose interface is even more frustrating to use on a mobile device than on a computer. Having now used it on walks and on errands for a week, I highly recommend NewPipe. Who would have thought being able to easily find what you know is out there, pick up where you left off listening, or even (gasp!) be able to put your phone in your pocket while listening might be desirable features in a streaming app? (Snark aside, it's possible some "update(s)" changed default behavior to become less usable. My wife's iPhone version of YouTube can run with a locked screen, after all. But if that's the case, why should I stick with something whose maintainers are that incompetent or capricious?) To install the Android version, I recommend verifying and installing F-Droid, and using it to install and update NewPipe. Incidentally, you can dodge many of the annoyances of YouTube on a regular computer by using an instance of Invidious. (Believe it or not, although both of these tout being free of commercials, that isn't at all why I use them. I do not object to commercials, as long as I can otherwise conveniently find and enjoy what I came for.) -- CAVLink to Original
  3. Today
  4. As far as I know, the claim that determinism is "useless even if true," is my own argument. (I don't see it in the Objectivist literature either.) A useless determinism does not convert free will into an "illusion." Saying that it does is the same sort of argument that says that, because tables and walls are really made of atoms which are mostly empty space, the solid tables and walls that we see are "illusions." They are not. The solidity of tables and walls is a fact that arises out of the nature of the entities involved -- the atoms, the forces between them, and the fact that our bodies are also made out of molecules. Free will is a fact, too, even if it's a fact that arises out of our inevitable lack of the omniscience necessary to exploit the universe's determinism.
  5. 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.
  6. Even setting aside the fact that one's own free-will is self-evident, I think the whole concept of "determinism" is flawed. It proposes that "if you know the entire state of a thing, you can predict exactly what it will do next." Although nature follows laws, these laws are averages, and there are always sources of noise. The gas laws for example arise from the random motions of innumerable particles. They are an average. There's no way any conscious could "know" the positions and velocities of all those particles. The amount of information is too big, even without accounting for "quantum weirdness." Some systems such as analog computers are capable of "unpredictable" behavior such as "strange attractors," where the system amplifies variations that started out being too small to measure, and thereby becomes unpredictable. This is also known as the "butterfly effect," wherein a (hypothetical) butterfly flapping its wings in Africa could eventually cause a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. It is possible to use the thermal noise of a resistor to generate unpredictable random numbers. As for humans, there's no way you could know the state of someone else's brain -- in your own brain. Is your brain twice as big and only half-full, to have room for the other person's brain-state? How long will it take you to memorize it? But even that wouldn't be enough because you'd need additional brain-power to think about the state of their brain, to make your prediction. That doesn't even cover their sensory input, which is also a factor in what they do next. Also, they would carry out the action you are trying to predict faster than you could predict it. We can form and use abstractions. Abstractions throw information away. We can use them only when the information thrown away (or not known in the first place) is demonstrably unimportant. If you want an exact prediction, you can't throw anything away, because of the butterfly effect. So when they say, "in principle, if you knew the state of someone's brain," or "in principle, if you knew the state of every particle in the resistor that is being used to generate the random numbers," that's like saying "in principle, if two were equal to three..." because nobody could know the state of someone's brain or the state of all the particles relevant to the resistor noise. The "principle" of determinism is therefore useless. It only exists because of religion and the religious conception of "punishment," which assumes a God and His followers who should punish people for making wrong choices. Saying that something wasn't your choice is a legitimate excuse. Saying that nothing was your choice is the ultimate generalization of that excuse. Determinism also seems to require a God who could "know" all this stuff, because no real consciousness could know all of it. I think it's right to reject the notion of "punishment," but determinism, being useless, is not the right way to reject it. I do accept free will, and I also accept the notion of self-defense, which requires keeping murderers in prison (as a form of retaliatory force) because they're not safe to let loose. Self-defense also requires exercise of judgment: if you want to prosper, you have to protect yourself and the people and things you care about from crooks and incompetents, which means having to determine who they are and how to deal with them (if at all). But this does not require "punishment."
  7. The notion that is perplexing is the idea that the phenomenon of experience is the reified self as awareness at base. That bodily development, change and eventual decay are conditions to the locus of consciousness/awareness, and that that locus is the self at base. The basic notions of the Vedic philosophies.
  8. Yesterday
  9. Not a response from me, but a short video from Sapolsky (1min):
  10. I might, but I had a discussion with a friend (determinist), for 3 hours where i argued Sapolsky's position.. and even my determinist friend did not to dare go as far as I claimed Sapolsky to be going. Which I find inevitable - and I think Sapolsky would wholeheartedly agree with me. As to your writings I'm not sure I follow you all the way. I do however appreciate the energy you put into it. It might have something to do with english not being my first language. This argument I certainly disagree with, and I think Rand refutes both determinism and compatibilism as far as I understand. I can elaborate further if wished. Thank you!
  11. Sapolsky's claim is that there is no Agent (my understanding) - we are mere reactions (or behaviours if you will). This is where I think Sapolsky goes wrong and contradicts himself in the deepest sense. He tries to make an objective argument, claiming there can be no objectivity.
  12. 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.)
  13. Brian Greene explicitly aligns with determinism. Kaku is indeed a defender of free will; I mistook him for someone else. Solvreven, I think the easiest way to get an opinion might be to provide your own short summary of Sapolski's view. I'm not familiar with his claims, so I searched on Reddit for a brief overview of his argument. I found one with lots of votes, so I'll extract the essential premise from it: "[O]ur bodies are subconsciously (unintentionally without our own input) acting on a series of electric waves in the brain and chemicals and hormones." (Source) I take the above to mean the following (which I'll write as if it were an argument): a) Everything that happens in my first-person perspective has a "twin" in the real world. Love and affection? Dopamine secretions. Anxiety? Cortisol. And so on. b) Dopamine and cortisol are physical things. c) Physical things act lawfully. If you drop a ball, it falls. If you touch an electric fence, you get electrocuted. d) Therefore, dopamine and cortisol act lawfully. e) Corollary: the mental "twins" of dopamine and cortisol (love and stress) also act lawfully. I will now give you my opinion on this. Physical things act lawfully. If a recording device observes reality for a quintillion years, it will only ever record physical things acting in a perfectly lawful manner. Now, let's put physical things aside for a moment. We still have one more thing to investigate: subjective first-person experience. For clarity, examples of first-person experience include: controlling how fast I'm walking on the street; deciding whether to get McDonald's tomorrow; and so on. Since our recording device can only observe one thing, namely physical objects, it is incapable (by design) to observe first-person subjective experience. It is cut off from some information, it works with incomplete data. However, human beings are privileged. They are not limited to observing their limbs, skin, toenails, organs. They have access to what is hidden from the recording device: subjective first-person experience. In addition to seeing everything that the device sees, they also know what it feels like to love, to jump, to look at a Raphael painting. We can now add the finishing touch: what you see introspectively is perfectly real. You really are controlling how fast you're walking, you really are deciding whether to get McDonald's. But science will deny this, and indeed, must deny this. Why so? Science, as it is today, does not consider introspection to be a form of faithfully perceiving something that exists. On the contrary: according to science, only the so-called outer senses (seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, tasting) record that which exists, while introspection is something that must be stripped away from science, to prevent poisoning the data with subjective elements. So for now, we must take refuge in philosophy. From a philosophical perspective, one possible solution to our problem can be simply stated as follows: the will is something eminently real. Of course, the will's existence cannot be inferred from physical objects. From the recorder's point of view, plants and animals just move in a determinate way, according to electrical and hormonal causes. However, from an animal's point of view, it acts exactly as it wants to act. With these results in hand, we can now look at what Objectivism claims, or rather, what Objectivists claim (since Rand wrote very little on free will). Some Objectivists think that "free will" is a pleonasm: where there's will, there's agency; conversely, where there's agency, there's will. This must be put to the test. Quoting my own example: Immediately, a new possibility shows itself to us, and it can be stated as follows: choice does not entail freedom. It just entails choice, period. Choice is choice, and nothing else. Human beings choose to focus, to live, to eat. This really does happen, it is no illusion. However, all choices can be traced to a sufficient explanation. It's up to philosophy to explain this harmony. I have already suggested compatibilism as a framework worth looking into.
  14. I was fascinated by those sophomoronic experiments which were prevalent on Youtube about 10 years ago, supposedly discounting the freedom of will. Something involving the wired-up test subject reacting to lights on a screen and pressing a button, thus 'showing' that the relevant part of his brain responded a split second before he made his physical selection--i.e. his brain 'informed' him which button to press. i.e. no free will: His act was "determined". What? As if the brain will not in every instance show activity prior to and during activities. As if the brain is pre-programmed deterministically to "cause" one's actions in any and all encounters outside the lab environment. I recall the young host of the show was thrilled by these superficial findings. He concluded (consistently) that no free will means nothing you do can be held against you legally or morally by others, equally that you do not need to take yourself to task for some failing. A great relief for the amoral. More, the personal choices of undertaking effortful thinking and character building can be dispensed with. Then the individual mind will be under attack. The result, individualism will succumb to collectivism-tribalism-racism (major determining antecedent - "ancestral" - factors used often to claim power through past 'victimhood') and self-esteem and pride must suffer since one also cannot be responsible for one's accomplishments. If no-free-will has arrived in the broader mainstream the world is heading for trouble, I thought. Sure enough - what we are seeing today. One can count on human nature to take the easy options. Free will demands far too much awareness and thinking work. While valuable in their own area, the neuroscientists (I refer to the popular Sam Harris, notably, who also, I gather, consistently eliminated "the mind" together with free will) have something to be responsible for bringing about this age of pronounced determinism/skepticism. (But who would expect proponents of determinism to take "responsibility" for anything they do? They had no other choice. Or was it due to your free will, Sam?).
  15. And to be more specific I have spent a lifetime becoming the ideal man, I'm not going to hide from lunatics and criminals but have them all brought to justice and insure that this can never happen to another individual in at least the United States again at first and then the entire world. Evil only has power via the sanction one gives it, and I will offer it no sanction and will defeat it and those involved in this mass Evil, not hide from lunatic criminals.
  16. I want a normal life in a proper society as myself. Not living like a caveman or in an evil society that attacks random individuals for no reason. (Screenshot of an upside down emoji and now a sideways face with its tongue out from insane lunatics that are hacking me.) Notice, that they aren't doing this to the people that made it, but only those like myself struggling to make it. I have zero interest in hiding from society but being the most important part of it as myself.
  17. How would it be dangerous? Yes, it would be rough living, inconvenient and isolated, living a shrugging life, but would it be better than living under your present targeted persecution?
  18. I think the essential in most religions could be characterized as a faith in a transcendental aspect of reality. A faith in the possibility of overcoming the seeming paradoxes in the gross physical environment of life on earth. The life and death of Christ, the perceptual aspects of a human being and the strive to offer an explanation or meaning for how non material aspects , ie 'love' or 'will' , can or do affect one's 'lived experience'. Why be 'good', what are the results of 'being good' , whence the good ?
  19. Without reifying the abstracted "self", and acknowledging the current unknowns about the evolutionary or neurological emergence of self-consciousness, one can observe extrospectively the emergence of the self in a child's growth from infancy to adolescence and beyond. And, one can also observe introspectively, the "emergence" or growth of one's own, continually maturing, increasingly distinctive self, as one engages productively with the world in a noble, purposeful way.
  20. Yes, as Bishop Barron says in the video, God is summum bonum, the ultimate good, to be served by serving others. The Bishop also says God is love, and to love is, quoting Aquinas, "to will the good of the other". Christian love is altruistic, unselfish love, thus is self-sacrificial. The end of this "love" is as depicted in their images of Jesus suffering and death on the cross, even if they also celebrate the myth of Jesus' resurrection. What is the essential Christianity: the crucifixion or the resurrection, or both?
  21. Defending Ukraine against Russia is not automagically the same thing as being in league with Klauss Schwab and the WEF. *** Today's GOP is not only not your father's GOP, it's much closer to his Democratic Party, with the lone exception being its full embrace of your great-grandfather's Christian prudery. Today alone, we have the increasingly nutty Issues and Insights -- within recent memory a redoubt of relative sanity on the right -- hawking pacifist Tulsi Gabbard as Vice-Presidential material:Image by Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons, license.The Samoan-American, a U.S. Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and decorated combat veteran, showed her plucky streak, and her inclination to think independently, while speaking in December at Turning Point USA's Americafest. She cautioned that "the future of our country is at risk." Her former party, she said, in language similar to that she used when she announced she was leaving the Democrats' fold, is "under the complete control of an elitist cabal of war mongers who are driven by cowardly wokeness." [links omitted, bold added]Following the links shows Gabbard also smearing Nikki Haley as a "neocon" and railing against "this ongoing proxy war against Russia." And since today's GOP has no real identity -- except as supposedly the opposite of whatever the Democrats happen to be at the moment -- this makes Gabbard a darling and automatically makes suspect stopping Russia's incursions against the West. To its small credit, even Issues and Insights can tell that Gabbard isn't a lockstep Trumpist. That said, it speaks volumes that the GOP is having trouble admitting that, despite Ukraine's imperfections and the fact that the Democrats somewhat support it, perhaps a proxy war now can be a good way to avert a real one later. This would entail seeing Russia as the threat to the West that it is. And after seeing "An Obsolete Alliance Turns 75" in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, all I can say is Good luck with that from today's conservatives:That the West felt entitled to dictate the forms, structures, and ideologies of the post-Cold War world was palpable to Russians and the rest of the world. It never occurred to anyone in power to ask what gave "the free world" the right to determine the forms of government, economy, and social mores in countries that were not their own. It was taken as a given that the West had such a right, and a condescending, patronizing, arrogant attitude was pervasive in the corridors of power in Washington. [bold added](1) This sounds like a leftist discussing the alleged "right" of pestholes during the Communist era to vote themselves into slavery. (2) And I guess we're supposed to not ask what gave Russia the right to just go in and take over neighboring countries? The piece is littered with errors and deserves criticism on multiple fronts (particularly using capitalist to describe either of Russia's oligarchic, post-communist political economy or that of the mixed-economy West), but my short, hot take is this: If you wanted to read a piece by a Democrat defending Russia against NATO, back when Russia was communist, you can get the same flavor by reading this piece -- against NATO, now that Russia is against "woke," never mind that their "woke" includes our enlightenment-era institutions as well as the leftist cancer that has, I admit, infected NATO. Russia has designs on the rest of Europe, and its threat will need to be addressed sooner or later. Whatever the merits of continuing NATO, it is fortunate that, whatever its flaws, it's still around now that Russia and many other authoritarian regimes have become actively belligerent. I would hazard a guess that bureaucratic alliance with less-than perfect allies is better now than no such alliance at all. During the Cold War, Ayn Rand, who emigrated from Russia, and saw that it had far more wrong with it than just communist rulers, said:Observe the double-standard switch of the anti-concept of "isolationism." The same intellectual groups (and even some of the same aging individuals) who coined that anti-concept in World War II -- and used it to denounce any patriotic opponent of America's self-immolation -- the same groups who screamed that it was our duty to save the world (when the enemy was Germany or Italy or fascism) are now rabid isolationists who denounce any U.S. concern with countries fighting for freedom, when the enemy is communism and Soviet Russia.Today's right uses globalism in a similar way: to smear as leftist, woke morons anyone who is concerned about what Russia is doing. -- CAV Link to Original
  22. I'd very much like to hear your thought on the book. I have not read it myself, as I'm almost done with OPAR, and I'm starting on a book called "Strategy" by Bob de Wit.
  23. I think this can only be done, having all the information of the universe - cause you have to put all previous information together, integrate that information in a correct way (correct model). To make such proof.
  24. 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.
  25. Kaku is a String Theorist, and his book Hyperspace and Brian Green's The Elegant Universe, are what started me on the path to the truth decades ago and they are not determinists.
  26. I never thought doing something so important for myself and the advanced of mankind would lead to something like this. The people in the world are more evil than in today's times than anybody could have predicted.
  27. Thank you Stephen. I do agree, but when exercise I listen to podcasts or audiobooks that's easier to follow. Also if you didn't see: https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-jim-rutt-show-transcripts/transcript-of-203-robert-sapolsky-on-life-without-free-will/
  1. Load more activity
×
×
  • Create New...