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I think that's basically the whole thread. People often subconsciously think a thing having an identity is just mechanical causality. So they think you have things acting according to their identities, but you also have free will, so how to make that work. But they're making something that is all bottom-up causality, like an artifact in the Aristotelian sense. So they hear this Objectivist line about a new type of causality. Well there must be a new type of casualty, meaning a new mechanism. So they spend 6 pages looking around for a new mechanism, or seeing how they can change the wordi

This example was reminiscent of this quip by Albert Einstein, without the hearing of the ticking, or the hope of ever understanding exactly how it works: In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way to open the case.

I have the book and have read it through. I'm not sure I am completely satisfied with the level of detail reached. Nor do I believe there is quite enough of an integration/reconciliation (this is in reference to the article) with a persistent dichotmously and disparagingly labelled "material world" (label used not in reference to the article). An undecided mind is still roving over the possibilities... narrowing in on the choice, the freedom from being wholly determined I would assume must extend continuously until it has been made. Whatever choice is, if one is ever definiti

A worthwhile set of schematics to think with, I’d say, SL, at least to get started. I notice that internally, there are random processes that affect a human life in a deterministic way, such as the appearance of a cell mutation (truly random at first cell alteration) we call cancer. It could deterministically become, say, non-Hodgkins lymphoma. In the particular case of person having it, though in advance of therapies, we might say it’s a matter of chance whether the therapy will be effective in this case; that is just our ignorance, and when the particular outcome eventuates—say death from th

This is very insightful. I agree. It might be that after eons of observation and study of brains (ours, animals, and possibly artificial ones), once unimaginable technological innovations which allow us to see the brain at work in real time in all its complexity have been achieved, we might be able to see or confirm the riddle of free free will from a third person perspective, only by determining and distilling (controlling and isolating) those aspect of some pattern in ourselves when we are actually engaged in the use of our "free will"... by hook or crook will require the teachings of

ET, concerning your original question of this thread, I notice that if one is looking at various objects and their actions or behaviors or if one is interacting linguistically (as here or as in the Turing Test setup), one knows by one's thinking sort of looking that one has some freedom in directing that inquiry. Then too, one's bodily movements, the ones the medical folk would call voluntary, seem to straddle the external and the internal. One might know little about how one is directing from the brain to one's finger movements on the keyboard, but one has at once direct access to both (the i

ET, to learn something, it's better to read than to listen to podcasts.* The better we learn, the better we can explain in the organic weave of a conversation. I am one who prefers to communicate and exchange views in written text (such as this, or in print). With text, we can go deeper, notice our contradictions better, find gaps in our reasoning better, and make links to further drill-down literature. The written published work I mentioned in the ancestral thread to this one, the portion of he chapter by Ghate, with all its excerpts from and citations of earlier Objectivist writings on

Ain't gonna happen, Jack

Of course. You are asking a specific question, to be answered in ways that have already been done. And I know the difficulty of the question. You have the basic idea of what free will is, but if you want the deeper understanding, there is no reason not to go straight to the people who have already thought about this. I'm not even saying read hundreds of pages - if you look at the distinction about nutritive, vegetative, and intellectual, that should help a lot. Just keep in mind that unmoved mover doesn't mean the origin of mechanical action in an entity. The unmoved mover is the idea

The fentanyl was at a possibly lethal level, but the meth was at a low level. One problem is that Floyd might have developed a high tolerance for fentanyl. Also, he was not found at home. There were other known factors. The fentanyl intoxication, however, is substantial grounds for reasonable doubt.

It should be said that the rioting started up anew towards the tail end of this trial, prompting a whole new round of curfews across Minnesota. In conjunction with the severed pig's head at the residence of one of the witnesses (etc) it seems fairly obvious what happened here. Chauvin was attempting to deal with an unreasonable and uncooperative individual, who was already in the process of dying (please remember that his drug dealer feared legal liability for this). He used less force than would've been permissible under the circumstances and called an ambulance in the attempt to