Rolling Philosophy

well, if you believe in free choice you can believe that a person chose to do good or evil and is accountable for that choice. if you believe in determinism, there are causal explanations for the act, but there's really no accountability.

in the first one he is accountable and deserves to get tortured in prison. in the second one he doesn't but the torturers aren't accountable for their actions. everyone wins.

yeah, determinism doesn't undermine existing legal or ethical systems because they're also determined. in fact even your belief or non-belief in determinism is determined so

btw fuck yes

FREE WILL

mordy & the tune is space both seem OTM but I will have to synthesise their arguments

it would seem the very Act of Choosing, the Moment of Self-Nomination above the logical clack-clack of single-strand cause & effect, is the Adoption of Task, the Instant of Divine Clarity - and I do agree that a partially-accessible Transcendent is necessary for the overcoming of Inevitability - call it God, call it Conscience, call it Time in which to Think - but it is a multiplicity of Effect, a Branching-Point whose System can be echoed in the quantum chaos of atomic movement - of which the neural space of the Human Brain is microcosm -

I will add that Task is very specific & not everyday - it takes a great deal of Clarity & Effort to transcend or even consider one's Expected Reflections of the Cosmos - this is the Woolly bit, and requires Faith in a Higher State of Consideration - call it Gnosis, call it Free Will, call it Enlightenment

or indeed Epiphany

Determinism is true, compatibilism is a liberal fairy tale, free will is incoherent, good and evil are phantoms, we can have laws anyway because none of it has any bearing on how we live

Oh fuck, unintended revive, pretend I asked something interesting instead, like uh, who is everybody's favorite non-infinitarian mathematician?

What was the optimum year for sleeping with Bertrand Russel?

I agree w ur conclusions which is why I've embraced gnostic insanity: makes me feel better

Oh silby, my child

I suspect that moral culpability can be salvaged with minor tweaks even if we accept determinism. However, much more troubling to me is how to reconcile determinism with my own sense that I do have free will. I certainly seem to experience the act of exercising my own free will on a regular basis, and it would be difficult to demonstrate that it is all an illusion.

i don't think that's an ish. pretty often i seem to experience the act of being sober and it's fairly demonstrably false.

Could be worse could be the opposite

"it looks like x is the case therefore" is so weak tho

"so why did people think the sun moves round the earth?" etc

imo the problem with the question of free will as it's often approached is that it's founded on a conflation of the distinct temporalities of physics and subjectivity - sure we can't go busting open physics, but there are so many planes of operation between physics and us as human subjects that ultimately what we're talking about are two rly rly different things that have different principles underpinning them. to what extent we have free will in a social or political sense though, that's where we're fucked.

yes to that, basically

Was gonna post reply, didnt

*world spins off axis*

i don't think that's an ish. pretty often i seem to experience the act of being sober and it's fairly demonstrably false

Sure, illusions can happen on occasion, but if free will is an illusion it's an extremely persistent one.

"so why did people think the sun moves round the earth?" etc

Sure, people have been wrong about lots of things, but to be wrong about such an intimate part of my own inner experience is a bit different. It's kind of like if I'm feeling angry and someone told me I wasn't really angry, would I credit it?

but your experience of feeling as if you have free will isn't in question

which is what i shd've said last night, duh. your sense of having free will is absolutely reconcilable with yr not actually having free will in the sense in which you feel like you do.

real problem: i'm using a dualist "you" in there aren't i? a you that has the experience and a sub-you that is emanating the will. lemme get back to that later.

your sense of having free will is absolutely reconcilable with yr not actually having free will in the sense in which you feel like you do

This is possible since I'm not sure I can precisely define what free will is. But I do think that it is a very real thing, though perhaps hard to define precisely.

Important philosophical question. http://www.newappsblog.com/2013/12/should-i-try-to-fly-just-on-the-off-chance-that-this-might-be-a-dreambody.html

Interesting to see how philosophers have been trying to reconcile determinism and free will since at least classical times. In those days it was framed more as free will vs. fate or divine foreknowledge, but the issues were quite similar. See e.g. St. Augustine's criticism of Cicero: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf102.iv.V.9.html

http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2014/01/my-faith-a-progress-report.html

This observation is childish, obvious, but no less true for that. It is important for me in particular to appreciate it, for over the past year one thing that has become clear to me is that both before and after my confession I was, and remain, an asshole. Many of the people who have encountered me, particularly those I do not know and with whom I have fleeting exchanges, would find it hilarious, absurd, and supremely hypocritical to learn that I have been carrying on in this space about my faith.

What do I mean by 'asshole'? I mean I am brutally unkind to people. I am capable of displaying a sort of indignation in my interactions with ticket agents, telemarketers, strangers, that must be simply terrifying to experience. I am haughty, condescending, stubborn, awful. I am lucky I have never been taken away in handcuffs from my many scenes of protest.

this dude can really bring it

don't know who that is, but my views have a lot in common with his (& ilx seems not a place to get into it)

haha ok no I do know who that is

that's good stuff.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/jamiebartlett/100012093/meet-the-dark-enlightenment-sophisticated-neo-fascism-thats-spreading-fast-on-the-net/

This may not be entirely accurate but the gist seems to be right, didn't realise that Nick Land had gone so outrageously off the deep (deep deeper) end.

I got momentarily interested when I read the bit about rejecting democracy, liberty, and equality bc I figured there'd be something clever located in it but it turns out to just be more racist conspiracy theorists who i guess only happen to be interested in philosophy? zizek could do a better job wrt provocative "neo-reactionary" fascism.

been reading old unread analytics

findings:

1. norman malcolm: tin-eared and tactless

2. moore: like if descartes was burning one 24-7

man. genuine contrition from b. l31ter. never would have expected that.

it's been a fucked up week

this is more of an economics thing i guess, but whatever: i think i'm gonna order that piketty book tonight

on a whim I got a new book called Derrida/Searle on my kindle. pretty good. nice refresher.

hadn't seen that before. did you ever end up continuing w/ yr laruelle reading?

no I had to put it down for some compulsory reading and then shiny new books caught my eye. I will pick it up again soon though.

still haven't touched him since 2011, really, but there's new stuff out there now and am thinking of getting the one that anthony paul smith translated iirc. philosophy and non-philosophy?

lol this isn't on 77 oops. hi anthony if you see this.

principles of non-philosophy is the name of the book according to amazon

that's the one I was reading. got about 1/3 of way through it.

ey markers that one's a co-translation you jerk.

you're right.

don't know who the other person is

i have a slight feeling you may though.

the dude (and in this case there is only one) who translated whichever book continuum (it was continuum back then) put out of laruelle's in 2011 works at a college not too far from my house

he and i should kick it sometime

there's just some tone that makes you sure way beforehand that you're going to be reading about speculative realism sooner or later in an essay

http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/ordinaryism-alternative-accelerationism-part-1-thanks-nothing

perhaps it's that combination of coining ever new silly slogans and neo-neo-romanticism.