No free will = giving up?

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Lintar
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19 May 2017, 9:07 pm

thinkinginpictures wrote:

Therefore, Scientism is the only thing that counts. Everything in the universe can be reduced into material reality. There exists no such thing beyond this, if there does it will have to be described through a material reality.

It follows simple logic.

Nope, sorry, but this isn't "logical" at all. Far from it. As I pointed out in my previous post, 'scientism' is a philosophy, not the end result of a chain of logical reasoning based upon scientific evidence. As such it is only as good as the axioms that sustain and underlie it, and as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to this specific philosophy it is a case of "garbage in, garbage out".

How could you, or anyone else for that matter, possibly KNOW that material reality is all there is? Why does anyone believe this? It's patently not true. What about first-person perspectival experience? Qualia? Are they just to be dismissed because they cannot be accounted for via a rather limited (and therefore often useless) philosophical approach?

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19 May 2017, 9:17 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

...Susan Blackmore's alma mater, where people who'd swear up and down that NDE's are carbon dioxide effecting the brain

God yes, absolutely hilarious stuff

Such naivete :roll:

It just so happens that NDE's, unlike other forms of altered state, are coherent, life-changing, extremely vivid and real (many even say they are more real than what we loosely refer to as 'reality'), many are veridicial (which means the event reported by the one undergoing the NDE report events they could not possibly have known about, and these events are confirmed), and the popular 'explanations' for them (ex. anoxia) laughably inadequate.

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19 May 2017, 9:23 pm

Lintar wrote:

Ah, but thinkinginpictures only listens to objective and sober people, hence I had to supply him a list of serious and sober evidence against physicalism from objective and sober people. You have to speak to people where they're at.

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techstepgenr8tion
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19 May 2017, 9:25 pm

I have to post this again I think. Below is a lecture from Mike Silberstein, a philosopher of science and not a woo-peddler in the slightest, putting on his steel-toed boots regarding both panpsychism and strong emergence.

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Lintar
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19 May 2017, 9:26 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

Lintar wrote:

We can't say that we are at the mercy of blind, purposeless forces

And yet each and every one of us are bundles of said forces and you could peel those forces away until there's nothing left - whether those forces are truly purposeless or not. Self awareness has nothing to do with it, Newtonian physics and misplaced trust in reductionism has nothing to do with it either.

We are much, much more than just the sum of our 'parts', as anyone who knows anything at all about people will be able to tell you. The reductionistic approach doesn't work for everything, it is a hopelessly simplistic and naive way of approaching subjects of such complexity.

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19 May 2017, 9:27 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

Lintar wrote:

In other words, he only listens to people who already agree with him.

Last edited by Lintar on 19 May 2017, 9:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Lintar
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19 May 2017, 9:29 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

Whenever I come across usage of the word "woo" I know that I am in the presence of someone who is committed, for purely emotional reasons, to the blind faith of materialism. As for the video, I'll have to look at it later, because I am now at work and it wouldn't look good if I were spotted wearing earphones.

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19 May 2017, 9:47 pm

Lintar wrote:

In other words, he only listens to people who already agree with him.

What he's saying though is too pervasively believed and it's believed whole-heartedly by a lot of people who've had some introduction to science in college but who really aren't keeping track of what's happening in the scientific community and are usually ignoring both philosophy and philosophy of science to boot. The number of people who actually have the time or interest to do all that reading and listening are really few and far between.

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techstepgenr8tion
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19 May 2017, 9:49 pm

Lintar wrote:

Whenever I come across usage of the word "woo" I know that I am in the presence of someone who is committed, for purely emotional reasons, to the blind faith of materialism.

It sounds like my posts so far in this thread have been completely unreadable (which by now I perhaps have to accept myself as a freak of nature).

You may or may not like the video, I wouldn't make any promises. I posted it more for thinkinginpictures than for you though.

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Lintar
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19 May 2017, 9:55 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

Lintar wrote:

Whenever I come across usage of the word "woo" I know that I am in the presence of someone who is committed, for purely emotional reasons, to the blind faith of materialism.

Sorry, yes, maybe I did misinterpret something you wrote here. I haven't actually watched the video yet. I'm on 'Wrong Planet' because there are at this time no tourists coming through the door (I work as a volunteer at the local tourism information centre). I get to use their computers for free :mrgreen:

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19 May 2017, 10:00 pm

jrjones9933 wrote:

I've known a number of Thelemites who make a clear distinction between free will and True Will.

Find me two Thelemites who agree on much of anything though. They've got two things that are incredibly difficult to explain to outsiders as well - Knowledge and Conversation, which Crowley pounded in the importance of as much as Tibetan Buddhists pound in Bodhicitta, and then they have Crowley himself to explain which is even more difficult (ie. Andy Kaufman could hardly hold a candle to the complexity of his jokes and trolling - although I'm sure he could have if he'd dove into gematria).

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techstepgenr8tion
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19 May 2017, 10:05 pm

Lintar wrote:

Sorry, yes, maybe I did misinterpret something you wrote here.

Well, on one hand I strongly disagree with free will and on the other I think materialism/physicalism is nearing its end - an end which is increasingly clear to its own in-group.

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20 May 2017, 3:02 pm

friedmacguffins wrote:

We are self-aware.

Lintar wrote:

Yes, self-awareness is what makes all the difference. We can't say that we are at the mercy of blind, purposeless forces, and therefore lack free will, because we are not billiard balls constrained by simple classical rules of causality: too many people who argue for the absence of free will tend to think in purely Newtonian terms, a paradigm that has been shown since the 17th century to be hopelessly inadequate when it comes to describing systems that are anything more than extremely simple.

Let's say that the billiard balls become self aware, and recognize that they are on the table, being stricken by the cue.

Are they unintelligent, just because they are moved by outside sources?

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20 May 2017, 7:39 pm

friedmacguffins wrote:

We are self-aware.

Lintar wrote:

Let's say that the billiard balls become self aware, and recognize that they are on the table, being stricken by the cue.

Are they unintelligent, just because they are moved by outside sources?

An absurd hypothetical. One of the defining features of a billiard ball is that it doesn't have any of the ablities that we have (like intelligence). That was one of the points I made. I did so to highlight the point that we are different from most things in our universe, and that is why we have free will. We are special, whether you like it or not.

jrjones9933
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20 May 2017, 10:37 pm

I also dislike determinism, but I have to acknowledge it's effects. It also makes for better public policy than free will.

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20 May 2017, 11:38 pm

If you're giving up because you believe in determinism then it was fated to be so.

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