Re: Autonomy?
On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 2:25 PM, meekerdb wrote: >> The processes in the >> spiritual realm would still either be determined or random, > > > Would it? Or is that just an assumption? Is it necessary that there be laws > that determine everything not random by antecedent states? It's not so > clear to me. Can you give an example of something neither determined nor random? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Autonomy?
On 17 Jun 2012, at 06:25, meekerdb wrote: On 6/16/2012 8:34 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 2:17 AM, meekerdb wrote: It seems pretty clear. It's an ability to make decisions in a spirit realm and have them implemented in the physical realm. That entails that physics is not closed, i.e. some physical events happen for a purpose but without an antecedent physical cause. This not meaningless because with sufficient experimental resolution it could be tested. If we could follow in detail the workings of a subject's brain and we found that there were physically uncaused events that led to actions and decisions and these events almost always contributed to the realization of express plans, values, and desires of the subject then we would have say that was evidence for nc- free-will. How would that be non-compatibilist free will? It's not compatible with physical determinism. I'm sure what spiritual determinism would mean. The processes in the spiritual realm would still either be determined or random, Would it? Or is that just an assumption? Is it necessary that there be laws that determine everything not random by antecedent states? It's not so clear to me. and we would still have to decide whether they were consistent with what we wanted to call "free will" or not. Well Sam Harris says that's what everybody who believes in 'free will' thinks it means. Personally, I'm a compatibilist; but I understand the problem people have with compatibilism. If your actions are determined by something outside of you then they are not an expression of your 'free will', but under determinism every one of your actions can be traced back to causes outside of you - even to before your birth. They conclude from this that determinism precludes 'free will'. I conclude that 'free will' is an approximate social concept which depends on our ignorance. You might say so, but it is still "real", for saying it is not real because it is a higher level notion depending on our ignorance, would make matter and physical realities also unreal, because they might also be approximate social concepts depending on our ignorance (and most plausibly is, assuming digital mechanism). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Autonomy?
On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 meekerdb wrote: > I don' believe in this spirit theory anyway; I was just trying to show it > was a testable theory. > I have never understood why things are supposed to become less self-contradictory in the "spirit world" than in our world or how spirit theory is somehow fundamentally different from physical theory. If "spirit" caused X and X caused Y then both X and Y came into existence by a deterministic process. As for spirit itself there are only two possibilities, spirit came into existence for a reason or it did not, and you can say exactly the same thing about an electron. > Of course if you take Bruno's view then you risk making materialism an > untestable theory, since no matter what result you can say,"Well it must be > due to a deeper physical phenomenon." > I don't see why it *MUST* be due to a deeper physical phenomenon; nearly every physicists alive says some things have no cause and I can think of no obvious reason why what they say MUST be untrue, so I'm pretty sure they're probably right. I said I couldn't think of a reason but of course I could believe in mystical crap for no reason whatsoever, lots and lots of people do exactly that, but apparently something has caused me not to follow them and embrace the unreasoned life . And testable or not of one thing I am certain, materialism is true or it is not; although I may never know which it MUST nevertheless be true that everything happens for a reason or it does not. And I really don't think any of this is rocket science. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Every Event has a Cause as Metaphysics
In his book An Essay on Metaphysics in Part IIIc Causation, Collingwood has considered what could mean that every event must have a cause. This could be interesting for a discussion on free will, as Collingwood shows that causation presupposes free will. In other words, if free will is to be abandoned, then causation must be abandoned as well. Below all quotes are according to R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition with an Introduction and additional material edited by Rex Martin). I will start with a quote from Function of Metaphysics that nicely shows that 'Every Event has a Cause' happens not to be self-evident. p. 409 "We are accustomed nowadays to say that every event must have a cause. When we say this, we are speaking as metaphysicians. We are saying something which fully expressed would run thus: our ordinary or scientific thinking rests on the presupposition that every event has a cause. Speaking as scientists, i.e. in so far as we are engaged in ordinary thinking as distinct from reflecting on it or studying it historically, we should not say that every event has a cause, we should only presuppose it. Now, suppose someone were to reply to our remark that every event has a cause, by saying 'You may be right, but of course remember that Newton didn't think so. He divided events or states in nature into two classes, uniform motions, or states of rest, and accelerations or decelerations; and he thought that the second class had causes and the first not. Newton thus held that some events have no causes'. On hearing this, most people, I think, would be at first incredulous. They would say 'but surely it is self-evident that all events must have causes, and Newton can't have failed to see it. He can't have thought that the uniform motion of a body through a certain tract of space had no cause. He must have thought, as we do, that it had a cause, viz. the same body's previous movement through an adjacent tract of space.' When we had overcome this incredulity by studying the text of Newton for ourselves, incredulity would be replaced by indignation. We should say 'I am now convinced that Newton did think that some events have no causes. But it was stupid of him. It isn't true. Actually all events do have causes, and if Newton thought otherwise, he was wrong'." Collingwood has shown that what we find nowadays as self-evident has started with Kant only (just a bit more than 200 years ago). p. 328 "(a) That every event has a cause, (b) That the cause of an event is a previous event, (c) That (a) and (b) are known to us a priori." Collingwood has started with three different senses of the term 'cause'. p. 285 "Sense I. Here that which is 'caused' is the free and deliberate act of a conscious and responsible agent, and 'causing' him to do it means affording him a motive for doing it. Sense II. Here that which is 'caused' is an event in nature, and its 'cause' is an event or state of things by producing or preventing which we can produce or prevent that whose cause it is said to be. Sense III. Here that which is 'caused' is an event or state of things, and its 'cause' is another event or state of things standing to it in a one-one relation of casual priority". He has referred to these senses as the historical sense, the sense of the practical sciences of nature, and the sense of the theoretical sciences of nature respectively. p. 289 "That the relation between these three senses of the word 'cause' is an historical relation: No. I being the earliest of the three, No. II a development from it, and No. III a development from that." XXX. Causation in History - p. 291 "This is a current and familiar sense of the word (together with its cognates, correlatives, and equivalents) in English, and of corresponding words in other modern languages. A headline in the Morning Post in 1936 run, 'Mr. Baldwin's speech causes adjournment of the House'. This did not mean that Mr. Baldwin's speech compelled the Speaker to adjourn the House whether or no that event conformed with his own ideas and intentions; it meant that on hearing Mr. Baldwin's speech the Speaker freely made up his mind to adjourn." XXXI. Causation in Practical Natural Science p. 296 "The question 'What is the cause of event y?' means in this case 'How can we produce or prevent at will?'. This sense of the word may be defined as follows. A cause is an event or state of things which it is in our power to produce or prevent, and by producing or preventing which we can produce or prevent that whose cause it is said to be." p. 297 "The search for causes in sense II is natural science in that sense of the phrase in which natural science is what Aristotle calls a 'practical science', valued not for its truth pure and simple but for its utility, for the 'power over nature' which it gives us: Baco
Re: Theology & deepities
On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: > Note that you will find Kurt Goedel among the authors of ontological > arguments on the page above. Somebody mentioned the exact same thing a few months ago and this is what I had to say about it: That was in Godel's later years when he went off the rails and thought he had a rock solid logical proof for the existence of God, fortunately even at his worst he retained enough sanity to know he should not publish the thing. Godel was I think an even greater logician than Aristotle; nevertheless he was always a very odd man and he got odder as he got older. He sealed his windows shut because he thought night air was deadly, he wore heavy woolen coats on even the hottest days because he thought the cold was deadly too, and for unknown reasons he insisted on putting lots of cheap plastic flamingos on his front lawn. He ended up starving himself to death, he refused to eat because he thought unnamed sinister forces were trying to poison him. The great logician weighed 65 pounds when he died in 1978 from, according to the death certificate, lack of food brought on by paranoia. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Every Event has a Cause as Metaphysics
On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 11:03 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: > For me personally, it is a puzzle why modern physics still needs that > every event has a cause. I don't know what you're talking about. Modern physics does not say every event has a cause, in fact it says the exact opposite. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Autonomy?
On 17 Jun 2012, at 16:54, John Clark wrote: On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 meekerdb wrote: > I don' believe in this spirit theory anyway; I was just trying to show it was a testable theory. I have never understood why things are supposed to become less self- contradictory in the "spirit world" than in our world or how spirit theory is somehow fundamentally different from physical theory. If "spirit" caused X and X caused Y then both X and Y came into existence by a deterministic process. As for spirit itself there are only two possibilities, spirit came into existence for a reason or it did not, and you can say exactly the same thing about an electron. Spirit and matter are data we want to explain. We have the appearance of both and we try to relate them in a consistent way. We can perhaps agree that consciousness-here-and-now is the only truth we know which seems undoubtable, so it might be more easy to explain the illusion of matter to consciousness than the illusion of consciousness to a piece of matter. If we accept that mind is basically information handling/computation, then a mind is confronted to the first person indeterminacy and the illusion of matter has to be recovered from that. The spirit realm is just arithmetic, with comp, given that you can prove in arithmetic the existence of all dreams (assuming comp), and that physics is only the way some dreamers see some (sharable, first person plural) deep (long) computations. > Of course if you take Bruno's view then you risk making materialism an untestable theory, since no matter what result you can say,"Well it must be due to a deeper physical phenomenon." I don't see why it *MUST* be due to a deeper physical phenomenon; nearly every physicists alive says some things have no cause You might provide references. The "collective hallucination" of the collapse of the wave has, in his time, resuscitated that idea, but it does not make any sense, and is not necessary, as Everett showed. and I can think of no obvious reason why what they say MUST be untrue, They are not even wrong. Event without reason might exist but cannot be invoked to explain anything. To invoke them as such is just equivalent with "I dunno and will never know". The "will ever know" is too much. It means "don't ask". Now first person appearance of randomness can have a reason, like in the self-duplication, or with incompressibility. so I'm pretty sure they're probably right. I said I couldn't think of a reason but of course I could believe in mystical crap for no reason whatsoever, lots and lots of people do exactly that, but apparently something has caused me not to follow them and embrace the unreasoned life. And testable or not of one thing I am certain, materialism is true or it is not; although I may never know which it MUST nevertheless be true that everything happens for a reason or it does not. And I really don't think any of this is rocket science. We can know things, like if mechanism is true then materialism is false (or true in an trivial epinoumenic sense, which means contradicting occam). As I said, it is more easy to explain the illusion of matter to consciousness than the illusion of consciousness to matter. And comp makes just this utterly precise, when you take the time to do the reasoning. Bruno John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Theology & deepities
On 17 Jun 2012, at 17:09, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: > Note that you will find Kurt Goedel among the authors of ontological arguments on the page above. Somebody mentioned the exact same thing a few months ago and this is what I had to say about it: That was in Godel's later years when he went off the rails and thought he had a rock solid logical proof for the existence of God, fortunately even at his worst he retained enough sanity to know he should not publish the thing. This is not correct. Gôdel makes this in his normal mind, and his purpose as to convince (himself) that we can do theology "analytically". He did not intent publication indeed. We can criticize his definition of God (St Anselmus' one, formalized in the modal logic S5), but his proof is valid. Gödel, actually nobody, never claims this proved the existence of God. That it is interesting or not for theology is debatable. Gödel did defend the point I often make: theology can be done scientifically/analytically/axiomatically. In fact I don't believe that some field are more serious than other. Some people can be more serious than other in any field. For historical reason, some field are still culturally influenced by authoritarian powers, and that is a reason to encourage rigor there so as freeing us from authoritarianism. Godel was I think an even greater logician than Aristotle; nevertheless he was always a very odd man and he got odder as he got older. He sealed his windows shut because he thought night air was deadly, he wore heavy woolen coats on even the hottest days because he thought the cold was deadly too, and for unknown reasons he insisted on putting lots of cheap plastic flamingos on his front lawn. He ended up starving himself to death, he refused to eat because he thought unnamed sinister forces were trying to poison him. The great logician weighed 65 pounds when he died in 1978 from, according to the death certificate, lack of food brought on by paranoia. A lot of death are not easy. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Autonomy?
On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at Bruno Marchal wrote: > > We can perhaps agree that consciousness-here-and-now is the only truth > we know which seems undoubtable, so it might be more easy to explain the > illusion of matter to consciousness than the illusion of consciousness to a > piece of matter. > If consciousness is more fundamental than matter then it's difficult to explain why it's easy to find examples of matter without consciousness but nobody has yet found a single example of consciousness without matter. Yeah yeah I know, it's all just a illusion, but why only that illusion? Why is the "illusion" always that matter effects consciousness and consciousness effects matter if one is more fundamental than the other? >> I don't see why it *MUST* be due to a deeper physical phenomenon; nearly >> every physicists alive says some things have no cause >> > > > You might provide references. > Why? I think it would have been pompous and downright condescending to do so, you will certainly have no trouble finding such references without my help. But if I had said "many physicist think it is a logical necessity that every event must have a cause" then THAT would indeed need references! > > Event without reason might exist but cannot be invoked to explain > anything. > To say that X happened not for any physical reason and not because of God but for no reason whatsoever is a explanation and it might even be true, but the trouble is it might not be and if you assume its true and give up there is no hope of ever finding the true reason if there is one. So there is the possibility we could spend eternity looking for something that does not exist. > To invoke them as such is just equivalent with "I dunno and will never > know". > These answers to a question are all different: 1) I dunno. (What is the capital of Wyoming?) 2) I dunno and may never know. (Is the Goldbach Conjecture true?) 3) I dunno and will never know. (What are the first hundred digits of Chaitin's Omega Constant?) 4) Although meaningful the question has no answer. (Why is there something rather than nothing?) And either a chain of "why" question is infinitely long or it is not and you eventually come to a "why" question that cannot be answered because there is no reason behind it. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Every Event has a Cause as Metaphysics
On 17.06.2012 17:15 John Clark said the following: On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 11:03 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: For me personally, it is a puzzle why modern physics still needs that every event has a cause. I don't know what you're talking about. Modern physics does not say every event has a cause, in fact it says the exact opposite. But then why to talk that every event has a cause? I believe that in discussion on free will this is mentioned pretty often. Why not to forget about this? By the way, I believe that in Grand Design, Hawkins is talking about cause and effect. Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Autonomy?
On 6/17/2012 6:52 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 2:25 PM, meekerdb wrote: The processes in the spiritual realm would still either be determined or random, Would it? Or is that just an assumption? Is it necessary that there be laws that determine everything not random by antecedent states? It's not so clear to me. Can you give an example of something neither determined nor random? No, not that I know to be such; but believers in contra causal free will think that at least some of their actions are. But they would qualify that by "not determined by *antecedent physical* states". I don't know whether they would allow that psychological states must be either deterministic or random. My point is that "determined by *antecedent* states" and "random" is not a logically exhaustive classification. There is even an interpretation of QM (mostly associated with Henry Stapp) that looks at "random" events as "caused by future states". Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Autonomy?
On 6/17/2012 7:54 AM, John Clark wrote: On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 meekerdb mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote: > I don' believe in this spirit theory anyway; I was just trying to show it was a testable theory. I have never understood why things are supposed to become less self-contradictory in the "spirit world" than in our world or how spirit theory is somehow fundamentally different from physical theory. If "spirit" caused X and X caused Y then both X and Y came into existence by a deterministic process. As for spirit itself there are only two possibilities, spirit came into existence for a reason or it did not, and you can say exactly the same thing about an electron. > Of course if you take Bruno's view then you risk making materialism an untestable theory, since no matter what result you can say,"Well it must be due to a deeper physical phenomenon." I don't see why it *MUST* be due to a deeper physical phenomenon; nearly every physicists alive says some things have no cause and I can think of no obvious reason why what they say MUST be untrue, so I'm pretty sure they're probably right. I said I couldn't think of a reason but of course I could believe in mystical crap for no reason whatsoever, lots and lots of people do exactly that, but apparently something has caused me not to follow them and embrace the unreasoned life . And testable or not of one thing I am certain, materialism is true or it is not; although I may never know which it MUST nevertheless be true that everything happens for a reason or it does not. And I really don't think any of this is rocket science. I don't know whether you actually misunderstand or you just gloss over the distinction for rhetorical purposes, but the question is not whether things happen for a reason or don't happen for a reason. "X or not-X." is tautologically true. The question is whether the reason has to be prior physical states. People who believe in a spirit world think not and my point is that this is testable in principle. You may object that if a person in physical state X on one occasion takes action A1 and on another occasion takes action A2, it just randomness. But if A1 and A2 and Ai...all tend to acheiving a prior stated goal of that person it is hard to maintain they are just random. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Every Event has a Cause as Metaphysics
On 6/17/2012 8:03 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: Collingwood has shown that what we find nowadays as self-evident has started with Kant only (just a bit more than 200 years ago). p. 328 "(a) That every event has a cause, (b) That the cause of an event is a previous event, (c) That (a) and (b) are known to us a priori." We not only don't think it's self-evident, we suspect it's not true. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Every Event has a Cause as Metaphysics
On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 07:42:08PM +0200, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: > > By the way, I believe that in Grand Design, Hawkins is talking about > cause and effect. > 5 points on Baez's crackpot index for quoting Hawking's mispelt name: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html (item 8). (Couldn't resist :). Well, it only brings you to zero... Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
