labmath2

So you want me to change my mind because you are right, but i have no capacity to change my mind. In fact it goes beyond that, you only think deyerminism is true because it was predetermined that it will be the case. You are having this argument not because you choosr to, but because it is your destiny to have this conversation. Finally, it is my fate to call you a dimwit. I wish i could stop myself from calling you a dimwit, but i cannot since i neither chose that thought or this action. Welcome to the world of determinism.

I think its also problematic when whites are grouped together. I am just less familiar with that side of the grouping. There are obviously differences between Askenazi Jews, Nordic descent, and A Russian decent. Any study that puts them all into one group should equally be scrutinized.

Its not the same question. This is asking if you actually know who your local representatives, city officials and state representatives. I have never met anyone who is not in politics that actually knows them. You will be the first.

Is it safe to say you keep up with local, city, and state elections enough to know if a candidate is evil?

HasMat your comment made me think there is a set of propositions that create the greatest conditions for humans to flourish and morality is our attemp at. As we approach those propositions we get better and better societies until we start deviating from them making us worse off.

What is subjective experience? I can add numbers and a calculator can add numbers, but there is sonething different about the two. There is a subjective experience of adding numbers that is true for me (and you) that simply cannot exist for the calculator. You would have to believe your subjective experience of adding could be objectively represented or transferred which i don't think the most staunch determinist believes. As Kevin pointed out, the alternative is to say subjective experience is meaningless fluff, which i also don't think determinists accept.

Surely if there is a distinction between your country and another country, there are also more pressing concerns. How many local elections did you vote in? How many city officials did you help elect? Did you vote for state representatives? If you have done none of those, then you have explain why your immediate environment is not more important than the country, but one country is more important than another.

The problem i have with race is the isn't enough research and we dont know to what extent people are being grouped together. A Japanese person will probably notice differences between a Japanese person and a Chinese person, but to what extent is an the average researcher going to care about those differences? This is particularly true of Africa where there are many group who live in different environments who are all categorized into one group when it comes to things like IQ. During one of the interviews Stefan did on differences between race, the guest pointed out that top sprint runners are usually west african descent and top marathon runners are from a particular place in kenya. It seems there are significant differences between Africans to warant extensive studies which to my knowledge has never been done.

I have read your response 4 times so far and it is so fascinating and i really don't know of there is a good response to it. I think it resolves the argument quite well.

I think i may have missed something. My position is that its a distinction that is predicated on the knowledge that there is a distinction. There is no real time distinction. Have you heard of the turk? It was a chess automaton that was popular until the creator revealed it wasn't really an automaton (there was a person operating it). Prior to the knowledge of the human in the turk, the turk was an unthinking machine in the sense in which you refer to chess bots. After it was revealed, people retroactively gave the turk human characteristics. Right until people knew, the turk was doing "a single dumb process." A mere imitation. If the reverse were to happen, would people instantly recognize that its not a human playing, but in fact a robot? On that note, its very possible that what we do is unique unto itself. But if we could replicate it, the entirety of human decision making on a computer and unless someone tells us which is which, we couldn't tell the difference, in what sense is it now unique? Unless we actually know how we do what we do in a physical sense (understanding how brain creates thought), are we not only assuming the difference? Would this conversation be less meaningful if you were a robot? No, not to me it wouldn't.

Again you assume what is going on in your mind is somehow unique unto itself. I do not think computers have minds. At the same time i don't think minds are anything more than another system of decision making. Is the way your mind operating when solving a chess problem comparable to the way a chess bot does it? In the sense that you have an input, the chess problem, you run it through some decision process, and out comes an answer and that is your decision. In this sense your mind is only unique in the sense that no two different chess bots solve the same chess problem in the exact same way. The process in your mind is different from the process in someone else mind and that is different from the way one chess bot does it and that is different from the way another chess bot does it. If your decision making scheme could be deciphered and we test it against the last 1000 decisions you made and it perfectly predicted your exact decisions well in advance of you making them, in what sense were you freely choosing. This is not to be confused with your personal experience of making decision which will always appear to be free will. From the perspective of the guy with your decision scheme, are you exercising free will? If understanding/intentionality isn't the middle man between input and output, then what is it?

Searle is an interesting guy. I am listening to philisophy of language lectures and its fantastic stuff (sometimes it goes over my head). Here, Searle makes one big blunder, he presupposes that intentionality is anything more than just a series of mental processes. Or to put it another way, how do you know if someone understands chinese as opposed to simulating the ability to understand chinese. This question is particularly applicable to chess bots. How do we know a chess bot isn't performing functions identical to what goes on in a human chess players mind? There are well made chess bots that even adapt to a players style if they play the same person repeatedly. Isn't the difference between simulation of a thing and the thing istelf a matter of perspective?

The problem with this position is that you seem to substituting experience with free will. While that is essentially my answer as well, i restrain it to the sense of our experience and not to the experience itself. By sense of experience, I mean I can live my life as if i was free to choose every step of the way, even if there was someone who knew (or could calculate) all the decisions i will make before i made them. This is why illusions are quite interesting. If our minds did not work in some predictable manner, then the illusionist would randomly fool people. The question now is can we decipher the mechanism of decision making that allows us to predict and control someone's life decisions. The determinist thinks yes it is possible.

Reading the recent exchange, i think the deyerminists are not doing a very good job making the best version of the argument. Here is my shot at it. Take any person and ask how do they choose? They use their brains. What does it mean to use their brains? As far as we know, the brain function is determined by the biology of the person and the environment they lived in and currently live in. The question is where does free will intercept. Lets try Sam Harris thought experiment, choose a city, any city, First there are thousands of city names that you could not have picked because you simply don't know them. Now there are city names you are familiar with that just didn't occur to you like Cairo, Madrid, or Paris. In what sense were you free to choose those cities? Of the cities that did occur to you, you choose one, clearly there is the free will. What if i had written a short story before the question that probed the reader to choose New York. Where does free will come in? Think of the Asch experiment and those whose perception actually conformed to the group, in what sense were they free to choose the right answer? The problem with the free will position is no matter how much can be explained without free will, it rears its ugly head where our understanding stops. In the same way magic and mysticism is used to explain things for which there are no immediate scientific explanations. Just like our lack of understanding about the world does not mean magic and mysticism is right, our lack of understanding about human decision making does not mean free will is present. While I am not a determinist, I am curious to know how much we know and can know about human decision making. Psychologists and illusionists would certainly have something to say about how our minds work. Maybe soon the neuroscientists will disposses us of this notion of free will.

What makes any collective valid? Simple, what makes any institution valid? An institution becomes valid by getting people to recognize that it is valid. Barack Obama become president of the united states by getting enough people to recognize that he is president of the US. The NFL is the official institution of American footbal because everyone accepts that they are.

I think your explanation is closer o the reality.

I have not done any research, but if memory serves members of the communist party owned property. The communist theory of property is not that personal property does not exist. They just have a lot more property that belongs to the "collective." The party determines which is private and which is public.

Why couldn't the soviet man have an attorney to make treaties with his neighbor defining the border of his front lawn? If i can convince all my neighbors that i own a piece of land (either directly or with the help of attorney), would i not own the piece of land?

I have not gone to therapy, but i am doing the slow process by reading books so take my comments with a grain of salt and a pinch of sugar. Why do you feel the need to suppress your emotions in front of her? How has self erasing helped you in the past? What does it feel like when she holds your hand? Have you ever experienced this feeling somewhere else before?

Our experience has influence over brain development. More specifically things like drugs, sleep, exercise and therapy can affect our brains which by extension gives us some way of fundamentally altering our consciousness. An example is someone who is depressed and decides to exercise regularly to manage their depression. Who they are will be noticeably different due to just one decision they made.

You caught me on the contradiction. I will rephrase, no theory of property that passes conforms to the laws of logic is superior to any other theory of property that conforms to the laws of logic. As for the lawn example, it was merely to illustrate that precise problem. There is no property righys that exist in some objective sense with which we can resolve the disgreement. Which is why we need istitutions that define and enforce particular property schemes.

You seem to completely missunderstand the first part and talk around the second. For the first part, even if all your response is true, you still fail to answer the argument. How would your experience be different if determinism were untrue as compared to now? The aparent answer is there is no difference. If you reverse the position and say there is free will now, then the world of determinism would be that of non living objects. For the second part, you seem to conflate absolute free will with free will. The absence of physical, biological, and phsychological restrictions on human intention and action is absolute free will. Free will is capacity to choose beween two or more options. What would you do if you had no desire to do anything? You could not choose your desires becaus that would presuppose at least one desire, a desire to choose your desires. It would seem non living objects are closer to this standard than humans.

In my yet to be cleared response to dsayers, i pointed this out, If ownership and property are not empirical facts and in fact institutional facts, then no theory of property is more valid than another. Property rights are really a scheme to solve the problem of scarcity.

Its not the first time I have heard this and there is a refutation. Theft, assault, rape and murder pressupose a set conditions. Particularly it presupposes the existence of a set of facts. For an act to be theft, property rights must exist and the item must belong to someone else. If property rights are factually accurate or logically derived from facts, then they cannot be violated. Since theft implies they can be violated, this makes them institutional facts (facts thst exist by virtue of human institutions). The more difficult part is understanding how actions can assert the validity or invalidity of institutional facts. Here you are positing actions represent assertions and that an action can represent both the assertion of the validity and invalidity of the same proposition. I can say for a fact that theft cannot both represent the assertion of the validity and invalidity of property rights. That would make theft itself a contradiction. Contradictions do not exist, only contradictory statements do. Its the reason why i cannot draw a circle that is also a non circle (a square circle). Why did i do the work of going through the lengthy explanation, because there are two possible resolutions. I can accept the invalidity of property rights (as defined by the current property rights institution) and therefore my action is not theft. Or i can accept the validity of property rights and use it to decieve others through theft.

You are just asserting the proposition as of its self evident. As long as ownership and property remain institutional facts (as opposed to empirical facts) there is no reason why any ownership scheme is impossible.