How many here are atheists?

[Caleb]

I'll try to get around to the Youtube videos at some point, though I can't promise to make it high priority. Videos are hard to respond to.

Meanwhile, this particular video may be relevant (notice I said, "relevant" and not that it contributes anything). 

[Caleb]

This is not a response. Just a vid that's on topic. I'm not necessarily endorsing it; just find this guy to have interesting insights sometimes though I don't necessarily agree.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-Kl-mnKveE

I know you said that you don't necessarily agree ... but I am a little confused by your posting this vid, because as I understand this gentleman (I know I came in midstream in his conversation,) but he seems to be roughly approximating my position, not yours.    Even the way he speaks of consciousness hints at the possibility that he is coming from a process philosophy perspective. "consciousness isn't a thing, it's a process"

[Caleb]

Yet more food for thought. Again, this is not a response to anything. It's just funny to me that some of the people I'm subscribed to happen to be on this subject right now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-tyWgk9MAw

This one is interesting, because the kid seems to be stuck right at the fork in the road between the two choices and can't figure out which one to take. He understands the problem with determinism and reductionism.  But he feels every inch of his being fighting the other conclusion because of the assumptions that our materialistic culture takes for granted.  In the end, he finds himself saying something that, if he follows it out, will help him tremendously in solving the riddle. The same thing I have been saying:  we need a better explanation of causation.

[J’raxis 270145]

OK, we're getting walls of text, as Russell likes to say and I admit it's to the point where I'm having trouble keeping up with what's already been said.

Mr. Everett, tear down this wall...

[dalebert]

I really do want to do a proper reply. The videos I'm posting are just topical things that happen to be in my subscriptions and really don't represent a reply. I need to say what I agree with or not, which is a funny thing to say when I don't claim to know a lot about the universe. All I have are speculations which seem like reasonable possibilities, not so much beliefs. Either a theory makes sense to me and seems viable or it doesn't. I'm not so much arguing for what I believe so much as for what I believe is possible.

In any case, I moved early in the week, got sicker than I've been in years and projectile vomited, was useless all day, and then had to crank out a strip for Wednesday and then was running late for volunteering at Free Minds Tv, then Thursday had to take off to Manchester for an allergy shot and go back to Stratham for another carload of my stuph, and then as soon as I got back it was time to make a strip for Friday (today) and I still haven't started. So basically I can't write a proper reply yet. I've had stuph brewing.

[dalebert]

We're going around in circles. I'm trying to avoid quoting you and responding point for point for the sake of succinctness. I really think we ought to go into a Stickam chat room sometime so we can have a back and forth dialogue and hopefully avoid this going around in circles with walls of text where we try to cover every point mentioned when half the time we're both talking on points that we didn't fully grock what was meant by the other to begin with.

First off, let's be perfectly clear. I'm not arguing against the existence of free will. I'm arguing that it's a vague term that I've never heard defined in a way to make it useful for conversation. It's a HUGE pet peeve of mine. I also feel a need to remind you that I'm not arguing the universe to be completely deterministic on every level. A tiny bit of randomness, even on an atomic level, could be like the butterfly's wings that alter weather patterns around the globe making the future indeterminate.

That we get emotional about someone's actions, blame and shame as you say, does not mean much. Blame and shame seem to have their uses; they're crude but effective for making progress to better states and so they evolved as part of our array of emotions. I've gotten angry when my computer doesn't do what I want it to do or when my toaster gets stuck and won't spit the toast out. I react that way KNOWING the toaster has no will. Emotions are messy but serve a purpose. I feel the same way about people sometimes. They're not doing what they're supposed to be doing IMO, and need to be corrected/fixed. That anger can be a catalyst for positive change. I do, however, think that we make better decisions when we react less emotionally to a person's actions as well and instead think of how to make the situation better like persuade a criminal to make restitution and make better decisions in the future. Fix the computer. Fix the toaster. Fix the person.

I'm not even sure I'm a materialist. That sounds like a simplification of what I'm talking about which is more about logical consistency. My point is, even if I have a soul, then this energy pattern or entity on another dimension that's impacting my choices- how it factors into my decisions logically MUST be deterministic or random or some combination of the two. And I say that with a different approach to determinism than you because I simply don't see it as a bad thing.

When you talk about agency being outside of either determinism or randomness, it ceases to have any useful meaning for me. Maybe my notions of determinism are different from yours. It's simply what I see as logical and reasonable. I don't want to have some internal motivation that emerges from who knows what for no particular reason. If I see an apple and I'm hungry, I might reach out to grab it and eat it. It would seem rather silly if I decided to reach out, pick up some air, and chew even though there's no apple there. Why in the heck would I choose to do anything if not for some reason?

My decisions do not feel meaningless. They feel purposeful. I don't know if the future is predetermined or not, but it doesn't matter in terms of my decisions, because I don't know the future. It's subjectively indeterminate TO ME because of the complexity of predicting the future. My decisions, whether deterministic or not, are a part of what shapes the future. I have motivations which I logically presume to come from the motivations I was born with combined with an elaborate construct of forty years of experiences and decisions, interactions with events around me, all of which I feel have made me a better person than I used to be. Perhaps what you're getting at with agency is that same sense of subjective experience of your own decision-making. It's subjective to you because you can't step outside of yourself. You can't analyze your own incredibly complex decision-making with complete objectivity and therefore you have this subjective experience which seems neither deterministic nor random.

[Caleb]

Dale,

Let me define materialist as succinctly as I can:  a materialist is one who believes that all existence can be explained as the interaction of matter and energy, interacting according to the laws of physics within the space/time world. While you have not explicitly said, "Hey, I, Dale, am a materialist," everything you said has referenced back to these concepts. You attempt to reduce mind, for instance, to its component "parts". In your last post, you said "I'm not so much arguing for what I believe so much as for what I believe is possible." And it has seemed to me that all of your assumptions as to what is possible are within the framework of the modern worldview, materialism. Nowadays, they are not using the term materialism; they are preferring the term "physicalism", but old habits die hard and I like the old word better anyway. It doesn't matter what you call it, it is the assumptions that I am challenging. Philosophy uses these labels. Probably no one likes the labels or feels that the labels completely sum up their position. (I have my own issues with process philosophy that I want to tweak somewhat.) And there is this constant interplay and discussion between philosophers to try to tweak the positions to sum up what is actually believed. One philosopher will say, "well look here, this label mostly fits my position, except right here I want to tweak it a little." (Usually this happens as a response to a discussion wherein his position has been critiqued by another philosopher:  these things are not done in a vacuum.) Then other philosophers look over his modified position, give it a new label (if he is lucky they will choose the label he originally chose and not come up with something more condescending,) and try to work out the ramifications of the changes. I have always said that the goal of philosophy isn't to try to come up with answers:  it is to illuminate the choices and show the ramifications of each choice. That's why two of my philosophical pet peeves are the stolen concept and ignoring the ramifications. Both I sort of feel are happening here, and that's what I've been trying to draw your attention to.

You continue to argue that free will is a "vague term" that it hasn't been defined. (For a good explanation of what language is and the extreme limits of definition, I highly recommend my little piece here: http://nhunderground.com/forum/index.php?topic=13821.msg246202#msg246202) I don't think the concept of free will is even a little vague. (I feel like I am repeating myself here.) And if it is vague, it is only because it is a stolen concept, imported from my worldview to buttress yours but without any grounding in your worldview. I don't think you understood the point I was making to you about blame and shame (we can add in more positive emotions, such as pride and a sense of accomplishment). You appear to think that I am arguing from the basis of the emotion itself, whereas I am simply arguing that the emotion is evidence of what you really believe on some level. Let me clarify. Given the proviso that sometimes our emotions are irrational, the fact is that usually our emotions are quite rational and rooted to our experience. Let me illustrate. Suppose your brother calls you to tell you that your mother has died. You experience sadness, grief, perhaps despair. These emotions don't exist in a vacuum. They are intimately tied to your suppositions, what you believe. You believe that your mother died. Now, suppose your brother calls you and tells you, "April fools!  Ha, mom didn't die, I was just playing a trick on you." Now, your grief goes away in an instant. Probably replaced by anger at your brother, rooted in what you now believe, that your brother was a callous fool who gave his own amusement priority over your well-being. Once again, the emotions are indicative of what we believe. So many of our beliefs are underlying, not stated, but nonetheless a part of who we are. So when you dismiss emotions like shame and blame etc., it feels like you are being evasive. I doubt intentionally so. You probably didn't quite understand what I am getting at. But what I am getting at is the thought that, (provided your blame and shame are not irrational), your emotions are indicative of underlying beliefs that you hold, and that those beliefs stand in tension with what you are advocating. You blame someone because you believe, at the core of your being, that they could have done otherwise. You feel shame because you believe, at the core of your being, that you could have done better. You feel pride and accomplishment because you believe, at the core of your being, that what you did was a meaningful accomplishment that represented the best of what you did achieve as opposed to what you could have done, (perhaps slacked off and watched t.v.) Do you get what I'm saying? The emotions themselves aren't especially crucial. Only the underlying beliefs that they represent, because when your worldview is advocating a certain position, it is relevant if even the speaker can't take his own position seriously.

This is the stolen concept, where you import ideas from my worldview (like freedom and purpose, and ultimately consciousness itself) to buttress its weak points, and it feels to me like your way of dealing with this is to paper it over and ignore the ramifications of what has been done. You borrow freedom, but then you paper it over with word games like "define freedom" - a useless exercise since no matter how much I explain freedom you are still going to proclaim it "vague", regardless of the reality. You want it to be "vague" because otherwise it is falsifiable within your worldview. You borrow purpose, but then you say, "well, I'm not really borrowing purpose, I'm just saying that it feels like purpose to me...." ok, but complete the thought. "It feels like purpose to me, even though it really isn't purpose or meaning." Do you get where I'm going here? You are sort of choosing to believe things that are completely without foundation. Why borrow these ideas in the first place?  There's nothing in the materialist worldview that I can ascertain that leads to any escape from nihilism. Just wild conjecture, as you yourself admitted: "All I have are speculations which seem like reasonable possibilities." Freedom and purpose are two wildly speculative ideas, which are absolutely not required by materialism. So why borrow them? You are borrowing these ideas because of one of two reasons:  1) either you like the concepts or 2) the two concepts fit within your experience. And ultimately, this is a little frustrating, because it makes the worldview completely non-falsifiable. If we refuse to work out the ramifications of what we believe, and if we try to leave concepts in a very vague state, and ideas will be imported without logically extending them consistently to see how they play out and whether they fit within the worldview, how can it be falsified?

Either way, neither freedom nor purpose fit within your assumptions. Let me demonstrate one of these assumptions. You said (twice!) in the last post that freedom must be explicable by either determinism or else randomness or else a combination of the two. This is wild speculation masquerading as fact. It is demonstrably false. All I have to do is ask you to describe freedom as either randomness or else as determinism, and when you fail, it has been reasonably demonstrated that freedom is neither. Of course, you can (and do) say that freedom is somehow a mix of the two, but I doubt you could explain that to me either. I guess I'll have to take that assumption on faith. To me, it's a bit like if I assumed that space must be either a property of matter or else energy. And you keep trying to explain space to me as a third principle in and of itself, but I keep insisting that space must be composed of either matter or energy. And then I keep answering to your explanations, "well, that's kind of vague," and "no one has defined space to me," and you beat your head against the wall, "It's only vague to you because of your assumptions that it has to be matter or energy, but just look at your experience and you'll see that space is its own thing," you say. And I retort that, well, perhaps it is your subjective experience of not understanding all the ways that matter and energy form to create space that is leading you to conjecture this third thing, space as a thing in and of itself, but that I have no conception of such an experience as space. Do you get what I'm saying here and why this conversation has felt a little surreal?

This has gotten way too long. I keep intending to do a little piece on what it means to be a perceiver, as well as to talk about skepticism, but those will have to wait.

[dalebert]

Let me define materialist as succinctly as I can:  a materialist is one who believes that all existence can be explained as the interaction of matter and energy, interacting according to the laws of physics within the space/time world. While you have not explicitly said, "Hey, I, Dale, am a materialist," everything you said has referenced back to these concepts.

OK, first off, then I'm not a materialist. I seriously doubt we have an inkling of what goes on in the vast universe. In fact, I think it likely there are entire dimensions of reality that we have yet no notion of. Sometimes I even see the world of mathematics as a dimension unto itself that is more real than any matter or energy and on which the existence of matter and energy appear to depend. I've been known to say, half in jest, that math is God. I'll go out on a limb here and risk mentioning quantum physics which I know very little about, but as Ron mentioned there appears to be a degree of non-determinism on the atomic level, a sort of probability of a certain event happening in response to say a photon hitting a proton, for instance. I even wonder if in fact EVERYTHING that can happen in such a case happens, and each event fractures off an entire dimension that's slightly different from the one you and I know. I rather enjoy using my imagination on matters that I don't fully understand. I'm a sci-fi/fantasy fan and writer, after all.

My world view is hardly written in stone as you seem to think. I'm not denying the existence of free will. If there is such a thing, it appears to be beyond our understanding at this time and we simply don't know. It has nothing to do with matter or energy. I'm saying you're trying to describe something I can't make any logical sense of. It seems you don't want to make sense of it. It's like you're adding 2 and 2 and telling me it can be 5. Math strikes me as something that is very abstract, exists eternally even without matter or energy, and yet is very real and undeniable. I'm just using it as an analogy for logic, trying to explain possibilities, even possibilities that could be contingent upon things we have yet to discover, but I need to at least be able to understand them in the abstract or there's no point discussing it.

It seems clear this isn't going anywhere and has gotten tedious for me. The more I think about it, there's probably nowhere for it to go. It's degraded into an argument of semantics. My definition of purpose simply seems different from yours. My world view, as you keep referring to it, seems dismal and depressing to you but not to me. I remember this conversation starting with you asking me what can I offer you in the "world" where I reside, philosophically speaking, and I guess it's reasonable to accept that the answer is "not much". We seem to have different needs and perhaps it's best to just accept that we are going to continue to disagree.

As I said before, I think we could try it in Stickam or something where we can have a live discussion but I don't have the patience for it in this format anymore.

P.S. I just asked Vitruvian what free will means to him and I agree with him that it exists as he described it but I'm quite sure your definition of it won't match his.