Kevin Beal

Right, exactly. What people are looking for is those same bitcoins in the same amount transferred between accounts and not to another public address. Then they assume it's the same person, which sorta makes sense. Mixing services basically do what you said but the mixing pot is much larger. But that can potentially be problematic if the mixing service is keeping records of the kind that would identify you, and assuming they got audited. Then it's pointless. But certainly there are viable solutions to anonymity for the reasons you mentioned.

This is an awfully painful thread, haha. If child abuse is the issue, then it doesn't make any sense to me to be going after listeners of FDR. It's like a bad joke.

Maybe it's a failure of my imagination, but I don't see this connection. I experience things as unpleasant too, is that mystical? If you are going to suggest mysticism on my part, please be thorough in your explanation. Vague implications are just irritating. Determinists do this a lot: they make vague implications that free willers must be mystical and they are anti-scientific and all of this without ever demonstrating how it's the case. The irony is that the basis for their criticism is that it seems that way to them, haha. It used to frustrate me, but now I just roll my eyes. Come on, this is just lazy. And the reason I make the distinction between different "causalities" is because determinism results from an equivocation between multiple senses of the word. Cause A produces effect B can take place over time (like push-pull), or it can be a snap-shot (like emergent phenomena). These two senses of the word are different. The equivocation occurs when you say that a push pull description fully accounts for a subjective first person emergent phenomena. But if the only form of causal description were push-pull, it wouldn't even account for physics, much less biology, neurology, consciousness etc. This point must forever be ignored or denied by the determinist, and this is completely apparent to anyone who looks for it. To me it's completely transparent. That's why I will keep reminding you

I cover all of that in previous posts (in some cases multiple times) and don't feel like repeating myself, but I don't mind restating the definition I'm operating from since it is a major source of confusion: Free will is the acceptance that the way that we experience ourselves acting causally on the world according to our own goals and preferences is causal in the way we experience it. In other words that me choosing to lift my arm and having it go up is a valid causal description of events as they actually occurred. It's the insane belief that we aren't insane, haha. This is opposed to the belief (determinism) that this description (I have causal powers) is necessarily illusory because... causality and rocks don't have free will, so we don't either and the standard determinist lines you are familiar with.

You've misunderstood. I'm talking solely about push-pull causality. This precludes emergent phenomena. That's a second kind of causality. Actually I do take issue with this, at least in the way it is phrased. Causality causes nothing. Causality isn't a thing to cause or be caused. It's deceptive in noun form, but it just means that effects have causes. I don't know how many times I need to repeat that... What evidence? I bow to evidence and if you present it, that's of enormous value. But to pretend that there is no evidence for the free will side is dishonest for one obvious reason: we experience it for most of the day. And if your evidence is "causality is a thing" then you are going to have to actually try a little harder than that. Demonstrate how the fact that effects have causes necessitates a determinist worldview. Determinists suggest this til the cows come home but never actually demonstrate it. I suspect it's because when it's actually laid out for all to see, it's not so convincing anymore. And you say that red is an illusion, but you've missed the point. Saying it's illusory doesn't actually escape the problem presented. This is because the experience of seeing it is itself what the red is (as far as consciousness is concerned anyway). If you see red, then you see red. A rose is a rose is a rose. The challenge is still out there: demonstrate how you give a third person account of a first person mode of existence. I dare you, double dog dare even! And it's really amazing to me how people can completely disregard the performative contradiction like it's trivial or (as you said) sophistic. I can only imagine that you haven't actually considered it fully. The craziness of your position can only logically be continued to be held if you reject the idea that you reasoned it through and that the prefered state of having this correct conclusion is illusory. The logical consequence is that you are insane. "I'm right and you should believe me, but there is no prefered state of having correct conclusions" or "here, you throw this away". There are two things wrong with saying that the definition you provide here necessitates determinism. 1. This is perfectly consistent with free will in that I chose to lift my arm and the damn thing goes up. My arm lifting was caused by my choice to have it go up. 2. This is not what causality means actually, no. It's one way in which we describe things causally, but molecules getting together in a lattice structure causes solidity is another. This doesn't even require time at all.

There is absolutely nothing stopping parents from teaching children mystical bullshit in or out of school. I went to school with some very religiously disturbed children.

It's theoretically possible to trace it all, but there are plenty of ways that you are (for all intents and purposes) anonymous. Certainly more anonymous that Forbes is making it out to be. Mixing services can make it (effectively) impossible to track who owns what bitcoins, by putting your bitcoins in a huge collections of other bitcoins and randomly picking out the same quantity and sending it to another one of your wallets that is anonymous. You could also purchase physical bitcoins from someone who wont save your personal information. Or pay someone to in a way that's off the blockchain (like with fiat for example) to send you bitcoin to an anonymous wallet. This site has some good information on that. And Kirstov Atlas (who, I think, is a member on the boards) just wrote a book on this very subject that comes highly recommended (I haven't read it yet). I don't know nearly enough, but if the only reason that we think that bitcoin cannot be anonymous is because all transactions are public, then I think that's kinda lazy thinking. I'm not worried personally. There have been a lot of scare stories put out there about bitcoin that ended being bunk.

Alright, it's done! My challenge has been risen to, and vanquished for the mythical dragon that it is. Determinism is proved, let's all go home.

Haha. Well that's not very nice! It's not bad at all. That's why psychology is a science and it's relations described causally. It's not a push / pull causality, but it's still causal. And the way to understand why it's not just a matter of variables is to imagine the color red example. Try it. Try and account for red the way you would an object's chemistry or physics. It's not even a comprehensible request. Consciousness is a first person mode of existence while basketballs are third person. I think it means that I'm an idiot.

I don't understand what this means... I'm so confused

More about causality Does GUT show that entities exist? Well, no. Existence existing is prior to scientific questions. Does it show that a thing is itself and not another thing at the same time? Well, no again. There are necessary presuppositions we all have to make before we can even have anything like a GUT or physics or any other scientific discipline / theory. "Causality" is one of those things we have to accept before going anywhere. It's not a force like gravitation of electro-magnetism. It's not something that is measured anymore than existence is measured. I'm not a physics guy so physicists please correct me if I've got it wrong, but when you do a physics model, you are not measuring "things were affected", but rather you measure the features of objects in relation to other objects or forces. There is no "change-o-meter" so to speak. When these molecules are brought down to X temperature they move around at X speed. You know, that sort of thing. The idea that "causality" (and I hate that word since it's a noun like it's a thing in itself) is a force of it's own is what is magical. It's not a force anymore than existence is a force. It's prior to forces. Functions vs features and why there is a distinction I think the trouble is when we confuse features for functions or vice versa. All things that describe the way that an object exists (including it's relation to other objects) like the fact that I have ten fingers and two eyeballs are are features. That's what is literally happening. However when we talk about the world we understand things by describing them functionally. That is, my eyeballs serve the purpose of letting me know that there's a spider coming down it's line next to me in the shower. Or that a worker bee's job is to care for the larvae and produce wax. My job at my company is to be the front-end developer. But nowhere are these things ingrained on cells or tissues of my body, or the worker bee's or my eyeballs. It's just a convenient way of understanding the features of these objects. Functions are observer relative, that is they don't exist, but are true according to standards we use to understand it. That is, we can look at my eyeballs and if they get cataracts then we say that it's not serving its function as well (it's dysfunctional). But as far as features are concerned, cataracts just are. That isn't the say that functions are illusory or bad or anything. It's convenient to talk about my computer being affected by bad programming without proper garbage collection such that it is dysfunctional, or that it's getting overloaded with too much information or it's misbehaving or something like that. The reason I think this is important is that we infuse functions into features sometimes in our heads and conflate the two and create magic! An example being that we look at the amazing order and beauty in evolutionary biology (sorry Rainbow, I know you disagree, but you're wrong) and we see how the worker bees do their "job" so well and we might think that it's intentional, that a creator made those bees to work that way, when that is boloney. Why I think this is relevant is because our understanding of things is causal in form: "this effects that which effects another thing" when the only thing real in the description are the features themselves. The velocity, the mass, the molecular structure etc. What is not happening is a "process" or calculation or anything like that. The process is in our minds, in the physics model. Simulations An analogy that may help is to think of the difference between the weather and weather simulation software. There are ways that we understand the weather as doing rain when these conditions are met and tornadoes in this other condition and we recreate via the symbol manipulation that computers perform. But it's not as if there is an actual storm going on in your computer. The process is observer relative. This is the exact same mistake that people make when they say that the mind is a computer program, and the brain it's hardware (Strong Artificial Intelligence). And observer relative doesn't mean we can't say anything objective about it, it just means that the actual meaning is dependent on human observers. Just because there isn't anything inside the electric existence of a bitcoin that makes it as valuable as $620, that doesn't mean that it isn't true that it is worth $620. Conclusion Yes, in fact causation is very broad and vague and applies in mutually exclusive ways all goddam day!

The coma test is about moral absolutes. "Give to charity when it's convenient" is not universal, thus not a valid moral proposition. You don't get to make these kinds of distinctions. You can't say "thou shalt not murder, except when wearing a green costume". Moral absolutes cannot be true one time, but not another or for one person and not another. It has to apply universally. A man in a coma cannot murder, and if a child murders a person, it's still evil. One reason this point about universals and moral absolutes is important is because the consequence of the fact that something is immoral is that you can use force to prevent it. And you can absolutely use force to stop a child from murdering someone. But giving to charity, eh, no...

No, consciousness is necessary, but not sufficient. I think we can agree on that. And absolutely consciousness and free will are physical and are causal. I'm not sure how that could be denied. I just take issue with the idea that this results in determinism (which it doesn't).

Actually this is covered in detail in the book. You cannot make arbitrary distinctions between people. Being in a coma is not a valid moral category.

Determinists, you are mistaken as a matter of fact about your conception of causality and scientific reduction. So here's a short lesson. Causality Did you know that the first way that infants learn about causality is through push and pull exercises? They learn to have an effect on the world in that way, and in an instant they understand particle physics. But then we learn many many more forms of causality that aren't push / pull, that aren't atoms bouncing off of each other, because surely the world would be pretty ridiculously simple if that's the only causality there were. A soup of non-descript particles like an aether never amounting to anything we know is real about the world. The causality of states of systems producing emergent phenomena is another example. Molecules that come together in a lattice structure produce the solidity we experience every day. Accumulations of H2O molecules producing liquidity, and large neuronal systems producing consciousness. The term "causality" only means that effects have causes. That's it! It's not a law of physics. It's even more basic than that. That's why we can have equally valid causal descriptions at higher levels (I chose to lift my arm) as on lower levels (the motor neurons signaled my muscle fibers to contract). That's why there are other sciences that are not physics-based: psychology gives a causal account of adult dysfunction by looking at childhood trauma (for example) biology gives an account of the features of species through an evolutionary model economics with an a priori look at how bubbles form, etc. These are not physics or push pull causality and we accept their validity without much reservation (except Rainbow Dash on biology). Reduction There are two ways that reductions happen in science: eliminative and non-eliminative. That is the reduction should explain why the phenomenon is illusory or give us a deeper understanding of it's mechanics. We now know that sunsets are illusory, that the sun isn't setting behind the mountains, but rather that the earth is spinning on it's axis relative to the sun. That's eliminative reduction. We learned that solidity is actually to do with the structure of molecules in a lattice formation causing fields of force to form a boundary. But there is still solidity. We just understand it a little differently now. That's non-eliminative reduction. When you try and reduce consciousness (much less free will) you immediately run into problems. There is a naivety in thinking that it's just a matter of gathering more variables to account for. This is actually mistaken. If you take the eliminative approach (which you have to if you are a determinist for reasons I explained in my first post) then you've already failed. That's because, as Descartes accurately pointed out, if there is nothing else that I know, I know that I am conscious. And that's because the illusion of consciousness would itself be consciousness, as consciousness is our first person subjective experience of the world. It is the perceiving, the judging, the deciding, etc. If however you take the non-eliminative approach you have an enormous challenge that no one as yet has been able to accomplish. And many academics who are determinists and materialists in the philosophy of mind don't even try. They concede that consciousness cannot be reduced and go back to trying the first approach. Daniel Dennett for example says that consciousness is fluff, it's meaningless, has no causal powers of it's own, humans would be the same with or without it. 1st Person & Qualia The reason they don't try is this: with 3rd person objects in the world like trees and mountains, we can give a non-eliminative reductionist description of these things, and we do all the time in science. The reduction leads to a third person description, but with consciousness you have to start with a first person object that is inescapably subjective in it's mode of existence. If you try and only give an account of behavior while ignoring the qualia of consciousness, you can absolutely reduce it. We may even get to a place soon where we can find pains in the body by looking at brain scans. But you have left out the qualia and your description explains nothing whatever about it. Consider the color red. A color blind person may know everything there is to know about the color red. They know it's wavelength is 600 nanometers. They know how it is received in the eye by the cones. They know how that sense data is communicated chemically and electrically to the visual cortex and have seen it get incorporated into a unified conscious experience of a rose from the outside. But they will never know what red actually looks like. Actually, they might if they take LSD or psilocybin mushrooms, but you get what I mean. Conclusion Just take a little time to ask yourself why you think "causality" necessitates a determinist worldview. There is a premise there that's taken for granted. And that's not very scientific of you Just try and give an account for the color red with a reduction. You can't and nobody bothers trying. Please familiarize yourself with what the debate actually is before making obvious points about the physical world that take 2 seconds to consider and portray it as if free will proponents have not really considered it. "Oh, the universe is causal? Why did I never think of that!?" It's insulting and it's obvious and it neither adds or explains anything. I considered myself a determinist for a long time. I would guess that I could argue the determinist position better than anyone on these forums. And the performative contradiction Stef points out bothered me, the necessary illusion conclusion bothered me, the obviousness of the arguments bothered me. So I decided to look into it. I actually know what serious and sincere consideration to the free will side looks like because I've done it. And simply repeating over and over again that determinism == causality is just annoying. I don't believe that's sincere at all. At least saying it doesn't make it so. It is a failure of your imagination as it turns out. I don't actually expect this to convince you. Arguments never do. I just want to show you that there is more to the debate that determinists ever realize. I don't mind it at all if people are determinists, my problem is with completely obvious arguments advanced as insight into what is actually a very complicated issue. It may well turn out that I'm wrong, but not because "causality == determinism". You are going to have to try just a little harder than that.

Heya Steven! Welcome to the boards How'd you find the show? I think it's awesome, but what is it about the show that drew you in?

Heya James, Just speaking for myself, I agree with what this person is saying, but want to quibble on one point, which is about the "be a man" thing. I believe he (I'm assuming it's a he) has misunderstood the problem with that phrase, and here's why: The phrase "be a man" only has the effect it does on men / boys who want to be men and masculine. If the phrase were "be a snorlax" it's not likely to trigger the same shame, right? And the phrase is "be a man", and not "don't be a man", so that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There are a lot of man-bashing things out there that make men look bad, especially coming from the people who produced the film, which is why I have my own reservations about the film (I haven't seen it yet). But boys get their idea of manliness from the men around them, especially the ones they admire, right? So I don't think he's right about that. And what would be shaming or effective about that phrase: "be a man"? Well because it implies that he's not masculine. And since as men / boys our masculinity is tied so deeply with our identities, to deny us that, it's like suggesting that we are worthless. To be a man is not only to have a dick and balls, but to function as a man. I function as the junior developer at my company. If someone said to me "be a developer that's actually good for a change" that would undermine my identity as developer and (if I was a little less wise) I would feel ashamed and feel worthless. That's how I understood it anyway. I got that phrase growing up, and felt the shame, and I never remember thinking that it was because I didn't want to be manly. I've wanted to be manly since before I can even remember.

You said the problem was with the formulation "here do this, it'll make you better" and that fits the form you took in saying "here, look for internal solutions, it'll make you better". That's what I meant by hypocritical. The form isn't any different simply because the solution is different, right? And to elaborate on the other thing I said, about it being unhelpful to suggest simply that it's a matter of perspective that must be changed. What I mean is that you didn't explain where the error in thinking was, why it is in error. As the reader, I have no idea why you are suggesting it beyond that you think it is right. What you did instead was insult people who were trying to offer insight into a problem by calling them enablers. And to insult the OP by suggesting that he's unconsciously conspiring to be enabled. And now that I'm projecting. These are some very strong statements that require a deep understanding of psychology. If you possess this knowledge, then please do share, if not, then I'd ask you to "discover it" as you said you would.

The actual experience of gathering meaning, being confused as to what a sentence means, or misunderstanding the meaning the words are meant to convey are subjective experiences. Linguistics is a shockingly confusing subject, at least for me, and that there are a lot of very tricky subjects in linguistics that aren't as yet understood, but the fact that you can gather meaning at all is proof of at least some objectivity. This is via shared consensus over the meanings of words represented by "definitions". It's nothing to do with the actual field that american footballers play on that determines the value of a field goal: that it equals 6 points. It's ontologically subjective, but the actual truth claim that "a field goal equals 6 points" is objectively true epistemically. The consensus is the basis for the objectivity.

Sure, I'll PM you since it's off-topic.

June doesn't care about the truth of the proposition because many proofs have been offered and ignored. This is a personal fixation on dsayers. June has been requesting dsayers' input on this point on several threads that don't really have anything to do with the topic. June cannot take a hint. It's basically harassment at this point.

I originally linked the wrong podcast. Here's the right one: The Molyneux Problem And Universally Preferable Behavior http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_2246_the_molyneux_problem_and_UPB.mp3 This is a fully explicit conversation on the topic of moral opposites. It should answer your concerns.

I would love to see a determinist explain what the free will position actually is to the satisfaction of a free will proponent. Because if we're talking about two different things, then debate is meaningless, right?

So, I have been putting a lot of time and energy and thought into this discussion and the topic in general, and it's not enjoyable or worthwhile to me to talk about it when the person I'm talking about it with doesn't acknowledge any errors that they've made, or accepted any of the explanations I offer. What that does is irritate me and if I don't watch it, I get passive aggressive and snarky and I begin to participate in the subversion of the truth of the topic. And I've already addressed your question at the end more than once, and I don't want to keep going in circles. So, I'd just simply ask you if my posts have been helpful in better understanding the position or not. That was the goal in posting about this, was it not? Have I succeeded in explaining what the free will position is or haven't I?

Neither one. This is a false dilemma. This is because "nothing forcing" ≠ randomness. There is nothing determining my choice of path through the park, but neither is it random which one I pick. I chose it. When I choose things, I don't go "eeny meeny miney mo, pick a tiger by it's toe" to come to my ultimate decision, and even if I did, I would still be choosing a random, which is still another option. Two things: 1. There is absolutely nothing about making a decision that requires you to choose to make that decision, or that if there were, that it must lead to an infinite regression. You are going to have to demonstrate this point. 2. Determinism doesn't escape this supposed problem simply because what is being "regressed" isn't a choice. If it's a problem for one, it's a problem for both. But I don't choose to get angry. So, not the best example. Also, this is a specious argument. This is saying that because we don't know some lower level of explanation, we can't understand a higher one. That is until we understand everything about quantum theory, we can't understand newtonian physics. And then when it's discovered that something even smaller or more basic than quantum theory exists, then all of that goes out the window. But the fact that we know that quantum physics is a thing is precisely because we do understand physics. Further, we can apply this same reasoning to the argument itself: how do you know that there is any more basic question? We can start there and it will be quickly apparent that you don't know why, and they you will have to concede for the sake of consistency that your argument is boloney.