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Cogito ergo sum

Here in the Philosophy forum we will talk about all the "why" questions. We'll have conversations about the way in which philosophy and theology and religion interact with each other. Metaphysics, ontology, origins, truth? They're all fair game so jump right in and have some fun! But remember...play nice!

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Determinism And Rationality.

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  • Originally posted by Chrawnus View Post
    Well, to me it just seems much more reasonable to posit that the physical is temporal, but not necessarily the other way around. At least for me it seems logically possible for temporal things that are not physical to exist.
    What we've been discussing so far on this thread, namely conscious experiences, if their ontology is essentially subjective and first-person in nature, would be an example of a non-physical thing with temporal duration. There may or may not be such things, but it is certainly logically possible, as you point out.

    Comment


    • Yes, determinism leads to your beliefs being ungrounded. Non-rational cause/effect relation is different from the rational ground/consequent relation. Mental causation is at the heart of the argument from reason against naturalism, and, of course, naturalism and determinism go hand in hand.
      Last edited by mattbballman31; 08-26-2020, 11:14 AM.
      Many and painful are the researches sometimes necessary to be made, for settling points of [this] kind. Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject.
      George Horne

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      • Originally posted by Boxing Pythagoras View Post
        It certainly made my justification for the B-Theory easier! Rather than needing to get into physics and Relativity (which was still a large part of the reason I was convinced of the B-Theory when I was a theist) I could frame the notion around God's omniscience.

        Alack and alas, now I gotta trudge through the harder stuff to explain my views.
        The reality of the nature of our physical existence and time is indifferent to the philosophical 'beliefs' such as A Theory nor B Theory, or any other theory of time.
        Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
        Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
        But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

        go with the flow the river knows . . .

        Frank

        I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

        Comment


        • Originally posted by shunyadragon View Post
          The reality of the nature of our physical existence and time is indifferent to the philosophical 'beliefs' such as A Theory nor B Theory, or any other theory of time.
          Why do you selectively cite philosophy only when (you think!) it suits your purposes, such as your references to Popper's and Aristotle's philosophy of science? And why do you keep posting your philosophical pronouncements on these very threads that are obviously meant to be taken as true and meaningful, the majority of which are dismissive of philosophy itself as merely subjective and not to be taken seriously? (Therefore, I assume, we should not take your philosophical posts seriously either.) You're deeply muddled.

          Comment


          • Originally posted by Jim B. View Post
            Why do you selectively cite philosophy only when (you think!) it suits your purposes, such as your references to Popper's and Aristotle's philosophy of science? And why do you keep posting your philosophical pronouncements on these very threads that are obviously meant to be taken as true and meaningful, the majority of which are dismissive of philosophy itself as merely subjective and not to be taken seriously? (Therefore, I assume, we should not take your philosophical posts seriously either.) You're deeply muddled.
            ALL the subjective schools of philosophy are open to 'what we think,' and that is the nature and definition of philosophy.

            Are you going to be windy again and not respond coherently. Your outburst indicates to me I hit a nerve. I do not negate philosophy at all, but also realize a great deal of philosophy is subjective views as differnt views of 'thinking' about the nature of our existence. In terms of time, such as A Thory and B Theory, which are based on different philosophical/theological world views and not the actual observable nature of time, which I prefer. Actually A Theory and B Theory of time are not theories from the objective perspective.

            Challenge: It would be interesting if anyone could present any objective perspective of whether Theory A or Theory B is any more than a philosophical/theological difference in the nature of time.

            Popper's work is a land mark achievement in the Philosophy of Science, and was specifically how science can best deal with the development of theories and hypothesis that cannot be 'proven.' His proposals lead to Methodological Naturalism and today's context of objective scientific Methods.
            Last edited by shunyadragon; 08-28-2020, 08:42 PM.
            Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
            Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
            But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

            go with the flow the river knows . . .

            Frank

            I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

            Comment


            • Originally posted by mattbballman31 View Post
              Yes, determinism leads to your beliefs being ungrounded.
              I'm curious as to what you mean by "beliefs being ungrounded". If you mean simply that there are ultimately some beliefs that we have to accept without proof, I doubt that this is any less true without determinism.

              Non-rational cause/effect relation is different from the rational ground/consequent relation.
              Computers, governed by the non-rational cause/effect relation, seem to be pretty good at representing the rational ground/consequent relation. So the fact that the two are not identical may not be particularly significant.

              Mental causation is at the heart of the argument from reason against naturalism, and, of course, naturalism and determinism go hand in hand.
              Naturalism doesn't necessarily imply determinism, and determinism doesn't necessarily imply naturalism. But it is probably true that one who is willing to accept one of them is more likely to accept the other.

              Comment


              • Originally posted by Stoic View Post
                Computers, governed by the non-rational cause/effect relation, seem to be pretty good at representing the rational ground/consequent relation. So the fact that the two are not identical may not be particularly significant.
                Except computers are designed and programmed by rational beings.
                Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

                Comment


                • Originally posted by seer View Post
                  Except computers are designed and programmed by rational beings.
                  And?

                  Comment


                  • Originally posted by Stoic View Post
                    And?
                    Computers are not governed by the non-rational cause/effect relation. They are governed by the rational, since the rational created them.
                    Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

                    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

                    Comment


                    • Originally posted by seer View Post
                      Computers are not governed by the non-rational cause/effect relation. They are governed by the rational, since the rational created them.
                      Nonsense. They are pure cause/effect, regardless of how they were created.

                      Comment


                      • Originally posted by Stoic View Post
                        Nonsense. They are pure cause/effect, regardless of how they were created.
                        No, they were created by the rational to be rational. How on earth do you get non-rational cause & effect is beyond me.
                        Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

                        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

                        Comment


                        • Originally posted by seer View Post
                          No, they were created by the rational to be rational. How on earth do you get non-rational cause & effect is beyond me.
                          Okay...

                          But argument from incredulity won't gain you many converts.

                          Comment


                          • Originally posted by Stoic View Post
                            Okay...

                            But argument from incredulity won't gain you many converts.
                            What - I'm stating a fact - computers are created by the rational to be rational. Where in non-rational cause & effect in that?
                            Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

                            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

                            Comment


                            • Originally posted by mattbballman31 View Post
                              Yes, determinism leads to your beliefs being ungrounded. Non-rational cause/effect relation is different from the rational ground/consequent relation. Mental causation is at the heart of the argument from reason against naturalism, and, of course, naturalism and determinism go hand in hand.
                              The different concepts of determinism cannot be generalized.


                              There are different types of 'Determinism.' You are describing what I call it Hard Philosophical Determinism described as follows:

                              Source: https://www.google.com/search?q=determinism+definition&oq=Determinism&aqs=chrome.1.0l8.10953j1j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8



                              the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions.

                              © Copyright Original Source



                              I prefer Karl Poppers view of determinism:

                              Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/


                              In this century, Karl Popper (1982) defined determinism in terms of predictability also, in his book The Open Universe.

                              Laplace probably had God in mind as the powerful intelligence to whose gaze the whole future is open. If not, he should have: 19th and 20th century mathematical studies showed convincingly that neither a finite, nor an infinite but embedded-in-the-world intelligence can have the computing power necessary to predict the actual future, in any world remotely like ours. But even if our aim is only to predict a well-defined subsystem of the world, for a limited period of time, this may be impossible for any reasonable finite agent embedded in the world, as many studies of chaos (sensitive dependence on initial conditions) show. Conversely, certain parts of the world could be highly predictable, in some senses, without the world being deterministic. When it comes to predictability of future events by humans or other finite agents in the world, then, predictability and determinism are simply not logically connected at all.

                              The equation of “determinism”with “predictability” is therefore a façon de parler that at best makes vivid what is at stake in determinism: our fears about our own status as free agents in the world. In Laplace's story, a sufficiently bright demon who knew how things stood in the world 100 years before my birth could predict every action, every emotion, every belief in the course of my life. Were she then to watch me live through it, she might smile condescendingly, as one who watches a marionette dance to the tugs of strings that it knows nothing about. We can't stand the thought that we are (in some sense) marionettes. Nor does it matter whether any demon (or even God) can, or cares to, actually predict what we will do: the existence of the strings of physical necessity, linked to far-past states of the world and determining our current every move, is what alarms us. Whether such alarm is actually warranted is a question well outside the scope of this article (see Hoefer (2002a), Ismael (2016) and the entries on free will and incompatibilist theories of freedom). But a clear understanding of what determinism is, and how we might be able to decide its truth or falsity, is surely a useful starting point for any attempt to grapple with this issue.

                              Also . . .

                              2.4 Laws of nature

                              In the loose statement of determinism we are working from, metaphors such as “govern” and “under the sway of” are used to indicate the strong force being attributed to the laws of nature. Part of understanding determinism—and especially, whether and why it is metaphysically important—is getting clear about the status of the presumed laws of nature.

                              In the physical sciences, the assumption that there are fundamental, exceptionless laws of nature, and that they have some strong sort of modal force, usually goes unquestioned. Indeed, talk of laws “governing” and so on is so commonplace that it takes an effort of will to see it as metaphorical. We can characterize the usual assumptions about laws in this way: the laws of nature are assumed to be pushy explainers. They make things happen in certain ways , and by having this power, their existence lets us explain why things happen in certain ways. (For a defense of this perspective on laws, see Maudlin (2007)). Laws, we might say, are implicitly thought of as the cause of everything that happens. If the laws governing our world are deterministic, then in principle everything that happens can be explained as following from states of the world at earlier times. (Again, we note that even though the entailment typically works in the future→past direction also, we have trouble thinking of this as a legitimate explanatory entailment. In this respect also, we see that laws of nature are being implicitly treated as the causes of what happens: causation, intuitively, can only go past→future.)

                              © Copyright Original Source



                              There are other views of Determinism which are described here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
                              Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
                              Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
                              But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

                              go with the flow the river knows . . .

                              Frank

                              I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

                              Comment


                              • Originally posted by seer View Post
                                What - I'm stating a fact - computers are created by the rational to be rational. Where in non-rational cause & effect in that?
                                Why would there be any distinction between "rational cause and effect" and "non-rational cause and effect?"

                                It's all just cause and effect.

                                Comment

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