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That sentence should be read with the one immediately prior to it…. in mind ! After reading this, the recollection of volition as a "type of causality" came to mind. While maybe not quite coming to a full circle comes to mind, grasping free-will/volition as a subtype of causality was raised in this "compatibilism" thread a while back. Consider it a recursive approach: weighing volition as a subtype of causality against determinism as the whole enchilada of causality.

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 wording just right. They don't ever get to just agent-cause vs event-cause.

Your clarification didn't help. Because you still said it is because you know how things work. So no, I don't really know what was meant. I'm actually not so sure that it should be described as a type of causality. Although maybe we could call information processing something like a type of explanation, something related to Aristotle's 4 causes (as I said before, it doesn't translate into "cause" in the same meaning as English). In that sense it probably could be a type of causality.

If one views free-will/focus/choice as a sub-type of causality, how does doctrine of determinism square with this? The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. Determinism applies this to every action, including the action of choice, which fundamentally is to focus, an exercise of free-will. The contradiction arise when one considers the action of choosing performed by a mind as preordained by antecedent factors. If the action of an entity is determined by the entity which acts, the complication arises when one cannot physically identify an entity called the mind, much less the action that asserted to arise from it. And while a refutation on the terms set by those who claim to be the gate-keepers of such matters has not been identified, the opposing horn of the dilemma has been well established, demarcating morality as physical actions arising such as to be judged as good or evil. Results, such as inexcusable deaths in Nazi concentration camps are easy enough to categorize as evil. Individuals have been held accountable in numerous court trials for actions taken under the guise of following orders. Such verdicts grant credence to a sub-type of causality operating within the wider theater of inanimate materialistic causality. A rock, rolling down a hill, crushing a carload of occupants has no moral culpability. An individual, leveraging a rock to roll down a hill in order to bring about that same result (knowingly or unknowingly) is the basis of the differences between homicide, negligent homicide, etc. Under societies familiar with how varying nuances can color the moral character of the actor, the choice/focus/free-will as agencies available to a mind of a conceptual being should be guiding the verdict accordingly and give its rightfully deserved consideration. The metaphysical basis of morality was not articulated clearly and concisely until Miss Rand explicitly provided the correlation between the two. If you grant the validity of her discovery, then it was true in every philosopher's time from before Thales, and even beyond. There is something amiss (or inherently wrong) with the notion that assertions need be refuted. The onus of proof lay on he who asserts the positive, comes to mind. If an onus of proof has been met, then those who fail to accept it should fall suspect, not the one that supplies the criteria necessary.

If it were explicit, it would actually so, I'm not sure you are quite using "explicit" correctly. Anyways, until you define your terms it's all meaningless. It seems like you are associating physical determinism with mechanism and reductionism, and indeed this is a typical package deal of determinists. But there is a different type of causality, namely Aristotelian agent-causality, which Rand and Peikoff both go through pains to argue for. So clearly she believes in the law of causality, but not a mechanistic one. Secondly, metaphysical libertarians believe free will is incompatible with physical causality, and that a mind or will of some kind overrides physical causality. Adherents include philosophers from the idealist tradition, like Descartes, Berkeley, Kant. Clearly Rand does not believe this. For her, the volition that characterizes consciousness is finite, limited, and depends on a naturalistic functioning of its dependent organs, and fully abides by the laws of causality. She does not classify the lungs as deterministic and the nervous system as indeterminate. That would just be odd. There are just non- or sub-conscious systems that operate vegetatively or involuntarily, and clearly parts of consciousness that have active focus and control. Both are causally determined to operate according to their natures.

Currently playing in the mobile library (a 2011 Chevrolet Silverado) is the History of Philosophy, Volume 2 - Modern Philosophy Kant to Present. In lecture 7, Leonard Peikoff presents how pragmatism can be derived from elements of Immanuel Kant or David Hume (among others). It's 2018. It must be time to google "pragmatism on free will". The lead paragraph returned is: The idea that the truth of a belief can be judged by its consequences is the hallmark of pragmatism. But even William James, the consummate pragmatist, justified free will only tongue in cheek. ... There are important asymmetries between the doctrines of determinism and free will that favor the former. Feb 16, 2009 Wait. It looks like a link from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/ So [William] James offers his pragmatism as a technique for clarifying concepts and hypotheses. He proposed that if we do this, metaphysical disputes that appear to be irresoluble will be dissolved. When philosophers suppose that free will and determinism are in conflict, James responds that once we compare the practical consequences of determinism being true with the practical consequences of our possessing freedom of the will, we find that there is no conflict. Is Mr. William James sacrificing the question of "which is right?" on the alter of "practical consequences" here? Dr. Peikoff's point was that pragmatism can graft itself onto any philosophic system in order to attempt to dissolve it. If the term "determinism" is unpalatable, should we just dilute it, or better yet, toss it out. If volition is too volatile a term, should we substitute a more compatible term to take its place. Which science studies how volition operates? Does this science answer, or leave unanswered, the question of "Which science studies the methods of the science that studies how volition operates?" The law of excluded middle states that volition either is, or is not, a type of causality. If volition is a type of causality, then it is the rest of the story. If volition is not a type of causality, then bring back a Paul Harvey type to tell the rest of the story.

No. Individuals choose the reason for selecting an option. Your fellow debater is lacking a basic understanding of causality. Causality is a relationship between an entity and its actions. Your opponent is using the misunderstood meaning that causality is a relationship between action and reaction. Volition is a type of causality, and the individual is the cause of the choice as well as the reason for the choice. He implies that causality is a relationship between a reason and an action, as if the reason for doing something is causing the action, independent of the individual doing the acting.

Taking free-will as a sub-type of causality, bearing in mind that man is not a deterministic specie, Miss Rand's forte sheds light into the dark corridors where the causal nature of wrong ideas could lead helping to provide an illuminating contrast using her chosen art for the communication of a moral ideal.

2046 The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. Free will is a sub-type of causality. There is nothing in the law of identity that prohibits an entity of a specific kind from having a specific nature. I can agree that the Ayn Rand quote in the Lexicon isn't the best citation to the OP. Here's a more apt one from her 1955-1977 journal: The "determinism" to look for in human psychology is logic. The logic of a man's basic premises determines his motivation and actions. (This is in regard to [the view] that the science of psychology cannot exist unless man is subject to determinism.)

Dogs and viruses are fundamentally different things, yet the differences you have offered between a human and a computer are not fundamental with respect to the type of causality at play, which is what we're discussing. When I say types of causality, I do not mean different laws of causality, of which there is only one: entities act in accordance with their identities. Rather, I am referring to a difference between inanimate entities, which can act in one way and one way only given the context they are in, and entities with volitional consciousness, which can choose between two fundamental options (focus or unfocus) in a broad range of contexts. To equivocate the two types is to equivocate volitional consciousness entities with inanimate unconsciousness entities. This is a very different understanding of 'metaphysically possible' than I and Ayn Rand have. Maybe you disagree with my interpretation of Rand but I think a re-reading of The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made would change your mind. I did not avoid answering it and the fact that you posed the above question, "What would lead you to in reality pick anything else than what you did the first time?", indicates to me that you still don't understand my position, and the position that I think Rand held. I choose whether to focus or not, and based upon this fundamental choice there are factors which cause me to pick certain things. Ultimately, it is me- the human entity- that leads me to pick or not to pick again what I did the first time. That is, my choice is a type of causation which arises by the identity of my nature. That you think my fundamental choice must be necessitated ('lead me to pick', as you state) by antecedent factors, as implied in your question and belief that I'm evading, proves to me that you are a determinist, despite your explicit claims to the contrary. In any event, I don't see this discussion really going anywhere. I did learn a lot by thinking my ideas through and discussing this with you and Harrison, but we might just have to agree to disagree on this topic.

You present three conditions that, if met, should establish a group of objects as a composition, and thus an object. You then argue that the universe meets these conditions, thus making it a supercomposition and an object. I'll present an objection or two for each condition identified. Systematic While it's true that causality is a law of nature, there are at least two types of causation: physical and volitional. Most actions in the universe are caused by physical entities. But some are caused by mental entities. And the mental actions, specifically those in humans, are affected by the faculty of choice. I do not see this fact accounted for in your view of the universe as systematic. Also, you argue that "there is nothing to remove from the universe, and there is nothing to add." Yet a type of causality, human volition, and more generally consciousness itself, is added and removed every minute of every day on Earth, as new people are born and old people die. Relational Again, you leave out mental existence, and describe only the spatial and chronological relationships between physical objects. This failure to integrate mental existence with the theory of compositionality might exemplify a more fundamental failure to integrate mental existence (consciousness) with the conception of object by mentally distinguishing it from entity during the early stages of conceptual development. Emergence You present time as an emergent quality of the universe. But time is a quality of objects in motion, not the universe. Time is a measurement of motion, which would not be a unique trait for a supercomposition, since even molecules move. Bonus Objection Without being able to perceive the supercomposition directly, how can you ever be certain that a particular phenomenon actually emerged from the universe? Perhaps time, or anything else, is an emergent quality of a composition before the supercomposition. Perhaps there is a pre-supercomposition, beyond which exists even more entities of the universe. Perhaps these entities have no time and therefore cannot be composed on that basis. It does no good to counter that the universe is necessarily composed of all things, because you did not start from a conception of the universe. You started from perception of entities. Thus you must get from the entity-level object to the universe-level object. Which now seems impossible, since, again, you have no means of objectively identifying a universe-level emergence.

Does this follow then? People have a nature. Some people just sleep. No people who just sleep take medications that have been determined to cause sleepwalking. Some people sleepwalk. All people who sleepwalk take medications that can cause sleepwalking. The broader point is with regard to compatibilism. Objectivism holds that choice is a subtype of causality. Compatibilism seems to hold choice as an aberration, a role of the dice, rather than self-governance of a mind with regard to what it accepts and does.

Thank you for bringing this up. I'm not sure if it's been mentioned in this thread already, but even so it bears repeating: Dr. Peikoff doesn't define causality as a mechanistic chain of events, and many determinists do take this view. For him, causality is the behavior of entities acting according to their identities. Many determinists reject volition, because they hold that all of existence is a chain of events that are necessitated by previous events, and therefore volition is impossible because it would mean an event which is not necessitated by events which occured prior to consciousness. If it is understood that causality is the action of entities according to their nature, then it can be easily understood that entities of different natures will behave differently, and that a "mechanistic" view of causality is grossly insufficient to explain such diverse phenomena as actually exist. Then the position that conscious entities operate on a different type of causality than unconscious entities, or that living entities operate on a different type of causality than inanimate entities, and so on, becomes much less controversial. It's only on the premise that there is one type of mechanistic causality that all entities *must* conform to, all appearances and evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that forbids people from accepting or even comprehending this view.

Both. You cannot form a concept of causalty without first having a concept (if only an implicit one) of identity--causality is a corrolary of the axiom of identity. But the route by which you, as a person, determine that things are what they are and contradictions cannot exist is an inductive one that begins with the first moment you open your eyes after birth. When you begin making observations of objects, you will eventually come to the (implicit, usually) realization that they are what they are and do what they do regardless of what you would prefer or any other mystical or imaginary force that could somehow interrupt this situation. But organizing this implicit knowledge into explicit, logically-stated laws of metaphysics is rather a complex task. The fact that we lack sufficient knowledge to predict something perfectly (or the means to obtain that knowledge, which is supposedly the case in terms of whatever existed prior to the big bang or inside the nucleus of atoms) does NOT mean that it is exempt from the law of causalty or identity. You are making one of the main mistakes of the Primacy of Consciousness view where perception and knowledge somehow determine reality. "I don't know how to predict the outcome" is NOT THE SAME THING as saying "the outcome is totally random and divorced from causalty". Dr. Peikoff even discusses this in OPAR to some extent when he talks about volition, saying approx. that "the opposite of determinism is not random chance, but causality" or some such. A man's behavior is neither random nor determined--it is often very easy to predict a man's choice in advance if you know the man. Volition is a matter of a different type of causality (chosen) rather than the mechanicially determined billiard-ball sort of causality that physicists study. How it operates, I have no clue, but I can observe that it operates just as I can observe the billiard-ball type of causality in operation even though I don't have much of a clue about that, either.

I think David was using "predetermination" in a special sense here. There are many usages of "determinism." Human actions are, as everything else, subject to causality. But volition is a specific type of causality which is different from "mechanistic determinism" which is a causality that applies only to that which is subject to the laws of mechanics. In ancient Greece, Democritus originated the idea that everything, including human action, is subject to mechanistic determinism, which is sometimes referred to as "billiard ball metaphysics" because everything would then be more or less a chain reaction caused by atoms bumping into each other. It was refuted by Aristotle, who defined causality in terms of the nature of the entities that act. Aristotle argued that human actions are "teleological," or goal oriented. Volition is a result of man's nature as a rational being. It is a causal process, by which a man focuses or unfocuses his attention on certain facts (that's the primary choice), and selects a course of action to obtain the goal he's set for himself. The difference between human and non-human action is that, while humans act according to "final causation" (teleology), the material world opperates by "efficient causation" (every event is the result of antecedent causes). You could say, in a certain sense, humans act "because of the future" and inanimate nature acts "because of the past." In short, the "proof" for the fact of human action being different from non-human action derives from the fact that only humans are capable of reasoning, and therefore making plans and setting goals. The fact that humans do this, can plainly be observed. And there is no reason to think, as Democritus (and his followers to this day) suggested, that this is merely "an illusion."

Good job. Having soundly defeated me, you can ride off into the sunset until I bring up something worthy of you like you said you would a post ago. Or you could explain how it is concept stealing to suggest that perception is subjective and imperfect, while including your own. You could explain why subjective knowledge means an assertion has no value. You could explain how in the sweet jesus a determinist universe forces people to believe that perception is subjective and prevents them believing it is objective. This is the most hilariously inept attempt at an argument, so also the one I'd most love to see you tackle. Or, and this might be shocking, you could attempt to refute a single one of the problems I originally brought up. 1. How our perceptions can be objective. And no, pretending I am claiming objective knowledge(when I am not) and that it is thus a fallacy won't do. 2. Why a rational person cannot hold a value to be of greater importance than their own life/ a certain type of life. 3. How voltion can be a type of causality. How it is free if it is caused, hot it is at all if it is not subject to causality. Anyhting? No.....? Nothing at all?

I'm actually more interested in getting back on track to our discussion. Do you have a response to the third part of that above post of mine concerning what my argument is and is not resting on? Meanwhile I'll answer your below objection really quick. I never said that there isn't a cause of that volitional action. I will admit that the type of cause is a little different, though. Remember that causation deals with entities acting according to their nature. A volitional action will have a different type of causality then a non-volitional action because of the differing natures. The cause of volitional action is a combination of consciousness and values. So what was the cause of God's initial action of motion in the universe? The answer must lie somewhere in His values. No contradictions there.

I'm confused about what you mean.. Are you saying he will act as if he has free will, or that he will act as if he is determined but thinks he has free will? This is where I think you're using the terminology differently than Dr. Peikoff (and I think that his use of the terminology is much less misleading and more consistent with the traditional usagage). You seem to be using determinism in this section to be exactly equivolent to causality. Determinism means, and has always meant, the belief that human actions or behavior is necessitated by forces outside of consciousness. "Internal determinsim" is a contradiction in terms. Since the time of Democritus (at least), it has been the determinist position that the "internal" is merely an illusion fed to us by faulty sensory perception, or some such inadequacy of the mind. This has held true for every determinist that I've studied, from Materialistic determinists like Democritus, Skinner, and Hobbes, to Idealistic ones like Hegel (and contemporary determinists who are normally a mishmash of these, sometimes smuggeling in premises from the advocates of volition when the contradictions of determinism become too obvious). Well, not being a psychologist, I was using "anorexia" to mean merely a habitual psychological evasion of the fact that one's body needs sustenance, but that is probably not a proper or acurate use of the term. But even in the case of actual clinical anorexia, I don't think it's the case that the anorexic person must starve himself in all circumstances. (Except maybe in some extreme cases). But for the purpose of my example, just forget I said anorexia and pretend I said, you were evading the knowledge that you needed to eat for whatever reason. In order to have chosen differently, your reason would have to be different, but that's an internal, mental difference and therefore volitional not deterministic. But you're begging the question. The idea that all cognitive factors are directly dependant on a person's environment, history, personality, etc, (depending somewhat on what you mean by "personality" and "etc") and nothing else is exactly the proposition under criticism by the Objectivists. The question of whether there might be an ultimate necessary connection between physical and mental processes is a scientific one, and Dr. Peikoff explicitly says in his History of Western Philosophy course that there may be such a connection, but that the available evidence is insufficient to conclusively say one way or another. Philosophy says merely that both physical and mental processes necessarily exist (which is immediately validated through sense perception), and that the type of causality which governs the physical world is called "deterministic," whereas the type which governs the mental is called "volitional." I'm quite convinced at this point that "hard" determinism merely means "consistent" determinism, and that you only consider "soft" determinism to be more problematic because it attempts to find middle ground between determinism and volition, but that it's not in fact problematic, because the elements of determinism which are considered necessary by soft determinism are not necessary, and not true (or at least are stated in a way which is unecessarily confusing and misleading). When you say "humans don't have the knowledge of what deterministic factors influence their decision," do you mean that humans are incapable of knowing these factors? If the factors are unknowable, what possible evidence could we have that they exist? Hm.. So you're saying that the man didn't actually chose to cut the green wire, because if he had chosen the red wire instead, it would have disarmed the bomb? At this point, you've completely lost me.

Well, to give the Objectivist answer (based on Peikoff's essay) in a nutshell-- the original poster was incorrect to posit that "Ayn Rand and Objectivism say that all contingent truths are also necessary truths." Objectivism rejects the whole notion of contingent vs necessary truths altogether. The "analytic-synthetic dichotomy" is the ultimate culmination of a long history of epistemological theories. Since it's the most consistent version, Peikoff smashes the necessary/contingent distinction (which was its predecessor) by refuting the analytic-synthetic. But if you want a specific, detailed refutation of the "contingent truth/necessary truth" distinction, Peikoff offers just that in his lecture on Locke in his "Founders of Western Philosophy, From Thales through Hume" lecture series. Specifically, he gives a detailed acount of Locke's version of this distinction, along with a history running through the ages, and in the final lecture on Objectivism at the end of the course, gives the final refutation. It's a really good course, and I was looking earlier today to see who had published it in book form-- I know someone had at a certain point, but it might have been a limited time only type of deal. Anyway, just thought I'd plug that course one more time. In it, Peikoff answers (in the 60s) a lot of the arguments that Ayn Rand and Peikoff were "not aware of," according to popular accusations from certain academics. I wonder how he pulled that one off? And volition is just one type of causality (in the Aristotelian tradition of causality being entities acting according to their natures, not the earlier tradition of mechanistic determinism, which Aristotle provided the answer to).

Causality is completely compatible with Objectivism. Determinism is a type of causality, it is also compatible with Objectivism. Reductionism, the idea that no compound or complex entity really exists because it has more fundamental parts, is not compatible with Objectivism. So right away we are off track here, this will not be a discussion of free will vs. determinism it will be about the validity of the method of reductionism in understanding any aspect of reality whatsoever.