Natalia

Stefan’s constant decay into outright conservatism did not fail to worry me, together with Trump’s rising popularity. I figured out that what specifically worried me about it had already been thought and eloquently talked about by Robert Wright in a TED Talk from ten years ago, so I will just embed the video and let yourselves understand the problems of the currently growing patriotism, conservatism and self-righteousness.

I can understand that. I like to think I can discern the parts of his philosophy that are pure dysthima and the ones that are actually useful to know. Especially because he basically explained why asceticism is encouraged in literally all religions—how then would his entire philosophy spring from his own particular suffering? Thank you for caring. An entire city is quite suffocating! I’d be much more concerned with the quality rather than the quantity of people that care about me. In fact, I’m sadly in a state of mind wherein, to a certain degree, I only care if one particular person cares about me or not, and he doesn’t. But well, that’ll dissipate with time and reflection, I am sure.

It seems to be that you indeed understood my argument, but did not accept it as determinism. After reading your post, I pondered and read more about the matter and reached the conclusion in my last post (that free will and determinism depend upon each other.) This is an interesting essay by Hobart claiming exactly that, from 1934. In this thread I did not want to address only “free” will, but the rest of Schopenhauer’s philosophy as well. You do not seem to be familiar with it. It goes much deeper than any philosophy discussed in this board, or any other philosophy at all. That’s why I call it “the ultimate red pill.” Here’s an introductory video: I do not fully agree with it; namely, I consider the Will as a product of natural selection and therefore only present in living beings. And I know that not everyone is miserable all the time, although he is right in saying that all suffering comes from willing. I fully accept personal responsibility! That’s one of the reasons why I’m a Libertarian/anarcho-capitalist. Read my previous post and Hobart’s essay on how personal responsibility is not destroyed by determinism. There’s no problem with the guy I chose himself, apart from getting into an adolescent narcissistic phase that rendered him unable to keep loving me, and now I’m pining, but that’s another matter.

Sorry for taking long to respond to my own thread, I have been reading and thinking a lot about the matter. I came to the conclusion that there’s no such thing as a free will vs determinism discussion, that those arguments are purely semantics. Free will and determinism pretty much rely on each other. I want to reiterate that the will itself is not free (and that’s my qualm with free will), but that doesn’t change things. I don’t say it is inexistent, unimportant or invalid—just that it, in all its complexity when found in humans, is predetermined. Certainly, humans have many wills, and they may conflict one another, but with “will” I mean the collection of all those desires. As Schopenhauer put it, “all desiring, striving, wishing, demanding, longing, hoping, loving, rejoicing, jubilation and the like, no less than not willing or resisting, all abhorring, fleeing, fearing, being angry, hating, mourning, suffering pains—in short, all emotions and passions.” You could call it the will to happiness. Libertarians (in the philosophical sense, aka the ones that believe in free will) seem to consider free will as the capacity of choosing long-term benefits over short-term gains, or choosing right over wrong. I don’t see what is the fundamental difference between choosing either that makes one free will and the other compulsion. Both choices would have one goal, to satiate inherent preferences or desires. Intellect itself is just an evolutionary tool to achieve such goal, as Schopenhauer pointed out. But then, I could be misunderstanding something. Such a will is by definition necessary for life, and thus predetermined, built by the billions of years of evolution. It is entirely compatible with determinism, since its conception obeys the laws of physics and cause and effect. And thus, Stefan’s non-argument that determinism is incompatible with preferences is absolute bullshit. Now, absolute freedom would negate the existence of this Will, and thus be incompatible with life, and with cause and effect. Perhaps it is something like this that determinists have in mind when arguing against free will: with absolute freedom I mean liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, the freedom of indifference. The freedom to be indifferent to the consequences of your actions. Possessing such a freedom, a positive, absolute freedom, would mean that you, when conflicted with any options, would have the exact same probability of choosing either, basically, you would decide your actions by random chance. It is the indeterminist, accidental argument. That is incompatible with both determinism and free will. If you deny that such freedom is possible, you’re arguing both for what determinists call determinism and what libertarians call free will.

Do you realize you’re using a trite against an argument you’ve probably never heard before? When did I imply people cannot change their opinions about a certain matter? It's just not a conscious decision. Just as there is no action or choice without Schopenhauer’s Will, there's no action or choice without an environment and circumstance. Ultimately, the choices you make are based upon what you want and don't want for your life, you try to achieve happiness and pleasure and avoid physical or emotional pain. And what brings you either of those was contrived by billions of years of evolution in order for life to maintain itself—it’s not something you chose. You can't decide what other people believe in for them. Christians buckling their seat belt would be what Max Weber called an action based on tradition or something like that. They don't ever think of what you do. It doesn't cross their mind. Besides, at least in my country it’s illegal to ride a car without everyone's seatbelt buckled. Besides, If only I could, haha. All of those depend on material things to exist. I believe there's a grammar term for that kind of noun. At least in Portuguese there is, but I can't remember right now…

Are you implying that capitalism is not bound to instincts? There are instincts for wanting to be important and do something remarkable that other people will appreciate. Those that have the most social approval have the highest chances of reproducing successfully. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s still an innate desire you have no control over.

Schopenhauer did use the term “Will” to refer to an immaterial entity, but I do not believe in immaterial things. I still think his concept makes a lot of sense, and there’s no real difference in the outcome whether the Will is material or immaterial. Same thing for “noumenon.” I still felt that was the right word to use, regardless of my disbelief of anything outside of the laws of physics. I have indeed read Nietzsche. Also Sprach Zarathustra is my favorite book and the one I used to teach myself German. I agree with you that Nietzsche does not rebut, but rather überwindet Schopenhauer. While I fully agree with Schopenhauer in the fundamental message of his philosophy (that man can do what he wills but not will what he wills), I do enjoy Nietzsche’s way of overcoming that. I taught myself German last year, but I’m kind of rusty now. It’s easier for me to read something in German than to write it. I’m glad my translation was accurate. And indeed, I don’t see Schopenhauer as depressing. He’s basically telling me that all I suffer from has no objective meaning, that in the end, nothing really matters. He gives me the ultimate perspective of my own life and of the world, I believe. Determinism is paramount to self-knowledge, as I see it. People over here seem to equate self-knowledge with scapegoating their parents to a certain extent. Steven Pinker, in his book “The Blank Slate,” pointed out that most parenting research is useless because it does not control for hereditariness. I’m not saying that treating children right isn’t important, but it’s not all. If you accept that a monkey reared by wealthy and virtuous parents will not even become a person, you accept that a monkey is not a monkey because it was reared by monkeys, but rather because it has the DNA of a monkey. You accept thereby that an organism’s personhood or lack thereof and much of its personality is dependent upon its DNA, which varies across individuals and populations. Caspi et al. 2002 is a good study showing how our genetic makeup mediates the effects of childhood abuse. Keep in mind that they researched ONE polymorphism in ONE gene. You have 20,000+ protein coding genes, each whereof may have a couple of polymorphisms. I agree that you can change those things. However, that does not address my argument that you have certain intrinsic desires which you did not chose, which you just have, and all of your actions are based upon them.

There’s the ad hominem I was expecting. Determinism came to me in one of the happiest periods of my life, two years ago. Although I admit I am reminded of it now partially because of my recognition of how my Will, or more specifically, my love for someone, will invariably bring me suffering until it wears off. [it’s not necessarily about the quality of my life; one could argue I have a good life, but I suffer nevertheless, for one thing that I lack and can’t help but desire.] But then, if that does happen, I’ll fall in love with yet another person, and he’ll leave me, or most likely, never be interested in me in the first place, and I’ll be miserable yet again. I have thought and researched about that over and over for months. That’s a good argument, but it does not refute what I said. You do have multiple desires, but all of them are “hardwired” in your material existence. A K-selection strategy is just as instinctive and out of your control as an r-selection strategy. And the fact that you can choose which desire to subjugate yourself to does not mean that you are free from the other. You’ll still crave for the ice cream, whether you quench your desire or you decide not to, or are physically unable to. This is something important about my argument that you failed to understand. The fact that you can delay gratification does not mean that you are free from your desires, since 1. you have something that you desire to achieve by delaying gratification in the first place, and 2. you don’t lose your other desires by ignoring them. It is interesting that you implied a desire to create children. The fact that all of us was conceived because of someone else’s desire—and that is true for trees and cows and grass and bacteria, each to the extent the complexity or lack thereof of their existence allows them to—just adds to my argument that desire is the noumenon of life. Perhaps not consciously, but unconsciously, they’re the same. A person can desire not to live (which would still be an irrational desire, since it’s the wish to end suffering or pain) but they can't change the fact that their body sure as hell wants to live.

I refer here to free will, or freedom in the philosophical sense. I agree with the libertarian view that people should be free from outside constraints. But my philosophy goes much further than libertarianism, I believe. No. I’d say that’s a byproduct of the fact that our instincts are outdated for modern life. Fast food tastes good, although it is unhealthy, because the nutrients that it has, throughout several generations of evolution, were rare and necessary in small quantities. For more about outdated instincts and supernormal stimuli, here is a friendly comic. People who consume fast-food, drugs and the like, are still exercising their will to live, in an animalistic, irrational sense. You might also be referring to self-inflicted pain that has nothing to do with supernormal stimuli. I’d say that such things do not need to be self-destructive. I happen to cut my skin quite a lot, but I’ve never gotten close to dying from it. Even suicide, however, would not be a negation of the Will. Suicide is often an act that comes directly from the will to avoid pain and suffering. It’s a futile, will-driven action just like all others. I was reading what other people were saying about that quote, and I stumbled upon this Zeit article. This quote says that denying that we cannot will what we will is logically absurd: “Der Mensch hat zwar einen Willen, aber er kann diesen Willen nicht selbst willentlich beeinflussen. Das ist auch logisch unmöglich: Wenn wir unseren Willen beeinflussen könnten – wodurch würde der Wille, der unseren Willen treibt, beeinflusst? Wieder durch einen Willen, einen dritten, vierten, fünften? Schon seit dem Mittelalter haben kluge Menschen dieses Problem der willentlichen Willenssteuerung erkannt.” My rough translation, not entirely accurate because German word order is a bitch: “Man has indeed a will, but he cannot willfully influence his will. That is logically impossible: if we could influence our will, which will would influence our decision to do so? Another will, a third, fourth, fifth will? Since the Middle Ages wise men have recognized this problem with volitional will control.” This matters because when making decisions, we weight the consequences of our actions and decide to do that which will have the consequences we want, or not have consequences we do not want. The Will goes much further than liking blueberries or not. You cannot change the fact that you desire money, or the comfort and opportunities it can bring, and therefore you seek it. You cannot choose to like someone or dislike them, and you act accordingly to how you feel. All of our actions, all the actions of all living beings, are determined by that which they want and have no logical reason whatsoever for wanting. This is still valid when people control their will—if I am a devout Christian and find going to church boring, I will still go because that will bring me closer to heaven—the eternal life. Likewise, I won’t be promiscuous, even though I may like sex, because I wish to avoid the suffering in hell. I’ve heard that one before. I do not see how that is the case. People can and do change their minds, although they may require certain situations to do that, what differs from person to person.

So you admit that we are bound. Do you realize that being bound and being free are antonyms? That's exactly what I mean, just worded differently. It's not really a counter-argument. It's not a mystical concept. It's something very real and physical in all living beings. I have not yet researched the exact neurological mechanisms of all desires as I have with those of aggression, but desires for food, sex, social acceptance, love, money, are all very physical and chemical things, so much that some of them can be turned off with an antidepressant.

I have been suffering from depression-induced cognitive impairment for a few months, so I apologize if I fail to get my point across, but this matter has been paramount for me for years. Two years ago, I came up with a concept. I failed to find a name for it wherewith I was comfortable, but it was the grouping of the individual desires that are present in all living things. It had something to do with instinct, but went further than just that, for it included humans’ desires that do not directly come from mere instinct. That… thing, materialized itself in the existence of all living things and in everything humans have created. Sculptures, paintings, malls, fashion, capitalism as a whole, laws, morality, forests, mushrooms… they were no more than the manifestations of that collection of desires. It was the noumenon of Life, if you will. [i use the term “noumenon” loosely, for I believe that it is a group of physical elements found in the body and DNA of all life forms.] Coming up with such concept made me question the possibility of such thing as a free will. “Is there any action at all without that [the noumenon of life]?” I asked myself, “if I created a robot with artificial intelligence, what would it do, apart from that which I, accidentally or not, programmed it to do?” What does it mean to be free, if you can do what you want, but you cannot choose what you want? Just as AI is programmed by humans, humans and other life forms are programmed by the billions of years of evolution that made their present existence possible. Even though Stefan and all of you are keen on free-will, I have never seen a rebuttal to that, to the fact that what you want is pretty much the same thing that all life forms do, although each individual pursues it differently—it’s not up to you, and it was decided billions of years before you were born, that the mere fact of your existence would intrinsically mean that you want to live and to reproduce, and that each of your desires is directly or indirectly related to that. The recognition that those desires are the noumenon of your existence would be the ultimate self-knowledge. All of that will be familiar to you if you’ve read Schopenhauer. I did, last year, as a 15 year old, and noticed how Schopenhauer had given the name of “Wille”—“Will” in English—to a concept very similar to mine; different, however, in that Schopenhauer attributed to it the phenomenal existence of all things, including those that had nothing to do with life. He also explored the concept and its implications much more deeply than I ever had, and I thought to myself—“isn’t that the ultimate truth—the ultimate ‘red pill’? The Will—our own desires—is the matrix we all live in, and it’s the source of all suffering.” “Meanwhile it surprises one to find, both in the world of human beings and in that of animals, that this great, manifold, and restless motion is sustained and kept going by the medium of two simple impulses—hunger and the instinct of sex, helped perhaps a little by boredom—and that these have the power to form the primum mobile of so complex a machinery, setting in motion the variegated show!” Schopenhauer also thought of something similar to my AI analogy, in regards to free will. In his prize essay on the freedom of the will, he points out how freedom is a negative. “The natural image of a free will is an empty set of scales. It hangs there at rest and will never lose its equilibrium unless something is laid on one of the pans. Free will can no more produce an action out of itself than a scale can produce a movement of itself, since nothing comes from nothing.” Just as an intelligent computer not programmed to do anything (if such thing could possibly exist) would be technically free, and wouldn’t do anything, humans and the rest of the life forms, if we weren’t programmed by years of evolution to have certain wishes, wouldn’t do anything, if such beings were physically possible in the first place. Our very existence and actions deny free will. “Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.” [Man can do what he wills; he cannot, however, will what he wills.] I disagree with Schopenhauer on many things, but in this particular matter presented here and in what it implies I see nothing but the ultimate truth. Would anyone here rebut that? On a semi-related note, I made this meme which only people interested in philosophy would comprehend, here it is: >inb4 ad hominem >inb4 ad naturam strawman

Haven’t read all of that yet, just wanted to point and laugh at something. Something more specific than the whole article itself.

I don’t know to which degree this is accurate, but I haven't seen anyone mention it yet. My guess is that trans men are not talked about because women don’t care or talk about trans men as much as men talk about trans women. Furthermore, trans women spawn memes such as “it’s a trap!,” women don’t make memes. Trans women are featured in porn and anime, women don’t watch porn and anime. So the same does not happen with trans men. Trans women are more discussed because they’re the ones who affect men, and men are the ones who discuss. It’s the same with homosexuality, nine out of ten times an homophobe will mention a gay couple instead of a lesbian one, because the former, unlike the latter, is repulsive for straight men, and men are the majority of homophobes or people discussing homosexuality in the first place. That's my guess.

Well, it’s up to you. I personally wouldn't let something trivial like that stop me.

I laughed when I watched that. He's comparing very small countries that have very few, racially homogenous people (excluding the immigrants) to a continental and racially diverse country, and claiming that there are more rich people per capita in the former countries entirely because of a government program. I’m from Brazil, and in this century the government adopted a welfare system VERY similar to Scandinavia's. We have welfare for the poor, for the unemplyed, we have socialized retirement pensions, hundreds of free universities (in which brown and black people have ~50% of the acceptances by law), a minimum wage that rises every year, and guess what, we’re still very much a shithole. In fact, we’re in a crisis right now because of that government. When will people realize that what makes a country great or not is not its government, but rather its people?