What I had in mind was the sort of responses you hear from people unsympathetic to the mentally ill -- a sort of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" which often people with mental illnesses will adopt, as well, to their detriment.

Yes, having reread some of what I was saying, it could seem as if I was suggesting that the mentally ill can just "snap out of it". But I'm not that hard of heart :wink: Point taken, also, about the need to say more about what counts as rational. As for the analogy with diabetes, provided that it is recognised that the analogy gives way at an important point, I can see that it could be useful. For many with OCD, the OCD itself is just a symptom of depression, and the OCD rituals can be helpful in keeping the depression from manifesting in more harmful ways. Getting the rituals under control may always be possible (as I am suggesting) but it clearly might not always be the best thing to do - it's complicated, and just dealing with the symptoms without concern for the underlying reasons for their existence does not make sense.

@Metaphysician Undercover

therefore the will is free.

Even if you are correct about the connection between decision and action not being logical, I don't see how freedom of the will follows. But in any case I'm still not convinced that the connection is not a logical one. Obviously, one can decide to do something and then when the time comes to do it, you do not, but where that happens there must be a reason why, it cannot simply be that the will did not "get in on the act". That is to say that the following kind of statement is something I regard as necessarily true:
If X decided to do A at time t and if at t there are no intervening factors preventing X from doing A, then X will do A.
Intervening factors are things such as physical impediments (e.g. being tied up), forgetfulness, clumsiness, changes of mind...
If I understand you correctly you, on the other hand, are inclined to think that that this kind of proposition is always going to be contingent, no matter how broadly "intervening factors" is filled out, since at time t the will, as some kind of separate faculty, has to "muscle in" and initiate the act, and since the will is free, that needn't happen. (Of course, even if the will did initiate the act, there is probably still room for clumsiness and perhaps other factors to intervene and prevent the act from happening.) Is that a fair summary of our principal disagreement, or am I riding roughshod over some more subtle difference?

Do you just mean that all actions are potentially within our control?

Yes, I should have been more precise. I mean that I'm trying to work with the idea that actions are such that they are in principle things within the rational control of the agent. At the same time I obviously need to allow that the practice of aligning actions with that principle (i.e. bringing them under control) can be more or less difficult - perhaps very difficult in extreme cases. However, what I want to insist on is that it is never impossible. Those who would fall back to type-4 explanations seem to me to be driving at the idea that there are actions which are in principle beyond rational control, but - if my arguments concerning consistency of reasoning in giving explanations are sound - that comes at the cost of putting all actions as in principle beyond rational control (which means that there are no such things as actions at all).

If the truth behind the claims that "its out of my control" is along the lines "its very difficult to bring under control and I need support and help to do it", that's fine, because then discussions can begin about what sort of support is required and why.

Making a conscious decision and acting on a decision are not the same thing. This is evident from the fact that we decide all sorts of future actions, often thinking ahead. Action only sometimes follows immediately from a conscious decision, it doesn't necessarily follow from a decision, because much of conscious thought concerns things other than one's current activity.

I think here we might have some disagreement, since whilst I agree that making a decision and acting on one are not one and the same thing, I'm inclined to think that the connection between them is logical and not just causal. Perhaps I'm thinking of a decision as something extended over time, with a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning may well be something along the lines of saying something to yourself, with the end being the corresponding action. My worry is that in disconnecting decision making from action in principle is that it would then make sense to say something like: John decided to vote "Yes" but John voted "No", but without giving some story in which in becomes clear that John changed his mind.

Human beings can proceed with actions without having to consciously decide to make that action. This is evident in habitual, instinctual, and reflex actions. If you are walking, for example, you do not need to consciously decide to lift one foot and move it ahead of the next.

Agreed, and here is a curious thing: an action which is intentional and conscious (such as walking to the bank to cash a check) can, when broken down into parts in the way sketched in your comment, look like it has parts all of which are entirely non-intentional/non-conscious. I think perhaps that this kind of breaking things down into parts is to give an action a description in non-rational terms, whereas human actions are - by definition - things that also have descriptions that locate them in the rational realm of reasons/decisions/intentions and so on. The difficulty (for me at least) is to account for the connection between these descriptions without falling into the position that the rational description is illusion (eliminative materialism) or just some kind of "stance" (cf Dennett).

That's why I asked if we were in agreement on whether or not some things are in our control and some not. It seemed to me that was the crux of our disagreement. If one were to believe that either one of these propositions is true of the mind tout court, rather than both being true contingently, then what @MetaphysicsNow says makes sense to me. But I'd say that they are both contingently true -- and as such not only do we have the ability to vary which kind of explanation we might give for human action depending on the action and the person and the time, but we should do so because these things vary with action, person, and time.

I suppose my position is that all or our actions are within our control, although I do agree that in some cases bringing them under control can be immensely challenging and benefit from support and encouragement. What I also believe is that if one tries to put OCD rituals into that group of actions that are "out of control" by means of giving type-4 explanations (and I agree, they are "hand-wavy" explanations for the most part) then the consequence is (through the consistency of reasoning argument) that all human behaviour falls outside of agents' control, and so the very idea of agency/action and so on makes no sense at all. So, I'm denying that one can simply pick and choose when type-4 explanations can be appealed to - either that type of explanation accounts for all human behaviour, or it is irrelevant in accounting for human action.

Perhaps there is a way of placing OCD ritualistic behaviour out of the control of the sufferers of mental illness, without falling back onto type-4 explanations, e.g. an explanation that operates within the context of concepts such as agency and action? But I'm not sure how one would go about that.

When we observe that an individual may consciously decide to do one thing, but actually proceed to do a contrary thing

I suppose I'm a little reticent just to accept that someone can consciously decide to do one thing but proceed to do the contrary (short of mundance cases where people simply forget about promises etc). After all, what is it to decide to do something? Sure, I can tell myself "I won't eat any M&Ms tonight" in the morning, and then in the evening I go ahead and eat a whole packet (perhaps telling myself, one more evening on the M&Ms won't hurt, and tomorrow I really will forego the pleasure) but does my simply having told myself that in the morning really consitute a decision not to eat M&Ms, or does the fact that I eat M&Ms in the evening really undermine the very idea that I even made such a decision in the first place? ( I do get the contrary problem as well - i.e. that it looks like I might be saying that nobody makes a decision until they actually act on it ). There is presumably some difference between making a decision and simply saying something to yourself. If that presumption is correct, then what is that difference, and is it compatible with deciding to do X and then proceding to do not-X?

That's an interesting comparison - I'll have to work it through to see where the differences between the cases lie and what significance those differences might have.

Do you agree with or disagree with these statements?

To some extent yes - is it in my control to blink when someone throws a dummy punch at my face? Probably not. However, you home in on the point that those kinds of instinctive reactions are things that I want to rule out of the domain of discourse. I get the feeling you might still suspect that there is no non-question begging way to do that.

I think where I want to head with this ultimately is an argument along the following lines:
1) If there is a coherent way that actions involved with mental illness can be argued to be beyond the control of the patient, that way could only be found by falling back from explanations of type (3) to explanations of type (4).
2) Giving explanations of type (4) has as a consequence the removal of all agency from all human behaviour.
3) Removing all agency from human behaviour renders incoherent even the notion of giving any kind of argument for any kind of claim.
Therefore there is no coherent way that actions involved with mental illness can be argued to be beyond the control of the patient.

Now, even if the argument is sound, it might be thrown back at me that all I've done is to establish an epistemological point that one cannot coherently argue that actions are beyond the control of agents, I have not actually established the metaphysical claim that actions cannot be beyond the control of agents. That's certainly something I need to address. All this reminds me of the Donald Davidson stance on these issues. His view (if I remember correctly) is that any human action is at root an event that can be described in two sorts of ways - one which subsumes it under the deterministic laws of nature, one which positions it in the rational realm of agency, and he kind of left things at that. I suppose I want to try to push things further, but maybe they cannot be. Anyway, thanks (and thanks also to @Metaphysician Undercover) for engaging in this - it's helping to clarify my thoughts and reveal the weaknesses in them.

QM indeterminacy, whatever else it does, neither affirms nor denies free will. QM is in general entirely irrelevant to most fundamental metaphysical questions. Interpretations of QM themselves rest on assumptions about answers to those questions. I'm not sure how the principle of sufficient reason is undermined by QM either, unless you equate "reason" with "determinate cause", which there is no sufficient reason for doing :wink:

On another point, although no doubt related:

That's the problem which I referred to, which creates the need for a division between the intellect and the will. If the will is what motivates the act to begin, and the intellect is what decides the act, we need this separation because even after deciding I will do such and such, I might for some reason or another, proceed in a contrary way. It doesn't matter if the decision concerns next week, tomorrow, next hour, or even the next moment, sometimes we make decisions which we are incapable of following through with.

The problem with separating the intellect and the will, though, is that it then becomes a problem to establish how they ever get to work together, other than by mere accident.

Part of the problem with X's ritualistic behaviour, and I think this is the case for a number of sufferers from OCD, is that it precisely does have a deletirious effect on X's life.

There is no reason to believe that the reason for the repetitive behaviour is neurophysiological at all.

Well, someone might propose that one reason for doing so is that OCD activity cannot be explained rationally. In fact the whole "mental illness is physical illness" brigade presumably will propose this. They might be wrong about that, but they do have reasons. Perhaps one could try motivating the idea thus: any action can be described, at least from a third person perspective, as just so much bodily interaction with the environment. The bodily motions involved in the action can then be described in neurophysiological terms. Any neurophysiological event that occcurs within the body has either another neurophysiological event within the body as its cause, or is caused by some environmental stimuli external to the body. Given all this, repetitive behavioiur must have neurophysiological reasons. Sure, there are assumptions being made here - at some point we all make assumptions of some kind or another - and there is some conflation between what is a reason and what is a cause, but those assumptions and conflations certainly do provide reasons for believing that repetive behaviour (indeed all behaviour) has a neurophysiologial explanation.

So unless it can be demonstrated that there is a specific "neurophysiological cause" for the behaviour, to assume that there is, is a mistaken assumption.

This seems wrong. The proposal that mental illness has physiological causes is presumably to be taken as a hypothesis for scientific and philosophical investigation. If your suggestion is that no proposal should be investigated unless it has already been established as true, then scientific and philosophical investigation serve no purpose at all.

Please do not misunderstand me, I am certainly not saying that I agree that OCD behaviour has a neurophysiological cause. What I do believe, and what I am trying to work out in this thread, is that if you do believe that, then there are consequences that follow for how we should understand notions such as "will power", "free will", "decisions" and even "action". It may be that the consequences are that those notions are ultimately empty, that there really is no such thing as "will power" or "free will".

@jkg20

↪unenlightened

X is not saying 'that the entire element of choice is nullified by physiological abnormality'.

I think Metaphysics now is trying to suggest that even if X is not explicitly saying this, what X is saying does entail this.

That's right - although @Moliere is on the mark insofar as I'm not being clear enough about what it is that I think X is saying:

Where action is defined as something within his control. You're sort of begging the question there, — Moliere

In the first place, then, I need to define action in such a way that it distinguishes what I am talking about from "involuntary" physiological behaviour, like heart beating, whilst at the same time including OCD ritualistic behaviour, along with so-called "normal" behaviour, and avoiding the confounding of will power and control that @Metaphysician Undercover talks about in his reply to @unenlightened - (although I'm not certain that in the end there will be any real distinction there, at least to begin with it will be useful to assume that there is).

Perhaps one neutral way to begin would be to say that actions are behaviours that lend themselves to rationalizations in terms of reasons. X gives reasons to himself and to others for his behaviour, even if the superficial reasons he gives ("a catastrophe will occur if I do not do it, and I want not to be the cause a catastrophe") are unfounded or conceal deeper motivations. The fact that X's heart is beating doesn't lend itself to that kind of rationalization at all. This definition of action doesn't seem to beg any questions about control/will power.

Now that action is defined generally in terms of rationalizations, let's take some imaginary case, where the action is a specific instance of some person, A, closing and opening the door 10 times before leaving his house. Here are some possible rationalizations:
1) A did this because he wanted to win a bet, and the bet was that he would not open and close the door 10 times before leaving (a stupid bet, perhaps, but not all bets are sensible, and if necessary some background context could make it sound more sensible).
2) A did this because he believes he can avert a catastrophe by doing so, and there are independent reasons for thinking that he is right about this (some crazed killer is holding a gun to the head of his child, for instance, and has told him that he will shoot if A does not open and close the door 10 times before leaving).
3) A did this because he believes he can avert a catastrophe by doing so, but there are no independent reasons for thinking that he is right about this - the catastrophe to be avoided is not even well defined.
4) A did this because electromagnetic impulses in his nervous and muscular system entered into a repetitive loop that was broken only after the 10th closing of the door.

Explanations (1) and (2) seem to make sense - A's rationality/powers of control/will power are not called into question, and there is no need to subject the explanations to any further rational scrutiny which would negate the rationalization.
Explanation (3) is analogous to X's initial explanations of X's OCD rituals. These are the kinds of explanations that invite further rational scrutiny and which, after the process of reasoning terminates, would negate the initial reasons proposed. It is simply not rational to believe that unspecified catastrophes can be avoided by opening and closing a door 10 times (well, you could invent a context in which it would, but then you would be describing either an instance of case 1 or 2). Pushing the rational scrutiny further would reveal that were A to invoke his "will power" he ought to have been able to have abstained from opening and closing the door 10 times (even if the effort involved in doing so is non-neglible).
Explanation (4) is the kind of response that A might fall back to when the rational scrutiny applied to (3) reaches the point at which it looks as if A is giving up on the effort required to abstain from opening and closing the door 10 times. Explanation (4) is to me what X's claim about his ritualistic activity being caused by abnormal physiology basically amounts to. In accepting explanation (4), though, we are regarding action (neutrally defined) quite generally as caused by electromagnetic impulses of the muscular/nervous system. Why "quite generally"? Well, as jkg20 points out, it has to do with consistency of reasoning, plus the fact that actions (neutrally defined) can also be described neutrally as bodily motions of such and such a sort. If opening and closing a door 10 times, qua bodily motion, has its ultimate explanation in terms of (4) when the rationalization in (3) is initially given, why not also in cases (1) and (2)? After all, in all three cases precisely the same bodily motions are occuring, and if those bodily motions have their ultimate explanation in terms of neural/muscular occurences for case (3), then the same neural/muscular occurences will also be available for explaining the bodily motions in (2) and (1).
Now the point about control/will power disappearing completely from all human action comes into play, because if (4) does ultimately provide explanations for all actions, and is what takes away any element of will power or self-control being available for the action described in (3), it presumably also takes away any element of will power or self-control being available for the actions described in (2) and (1).

I hope that goes some way to making a little clearer what I'm getting at with the first conditional of my sketched out argument. This is still a work in progress, I hasten to add, and it is not my intention to pull the wool over anybody's eyes by equivocating between the use of terminology, or to move goal posts in order to score points.

I get that, but at the cost of there being many worlds.

True, but then for some people that is more palatable than idealism. Incidently, there was at least one recent philosopher (David Lewis, whose ideas are still quite influential in so-called analytic philosophy) who had a range of arguments independent of QM interpretation for the real existence of possible worlds. So even that issue is independent of the whole QM debate.

I haven’t heard of any such interpretations. The many worlds interpretation doesn’t say that, but it’s not worth debating, as it can’t be resolved one way or the other.

The many world's interpretation is, at root, just the idea that the wave function quantifies over all actual and possible states of affairs, where those actual and possible states of affairs are ultimately actual and possible arrangements of electrons and other elementary particles. Hence it is fully committed to the existence of particles before after and during any experimental measurements. It denies any interpretation of QM that involves the idea that the wave function collapses at any point. It has an ontology (at least in many of its forms) that commits it to possibilia as well as actualities, but that might be the price to pay for maintaining materialism.
Anyway, as you say, this is not really the thread in which to discuss interpretations of QM.

Regarding 1, granted it depends on how one argues for idealism, but simply to include other minds from the start smells of avoiding the difficult issues. Berkeley has a number of arguments, but if any of them are admitted as sound the metaphysical conclusion is at most that there is my mind and one other non-limited mind (to account for the fact that the world is recalcitrant to my will). Simply asserting that one's ontology includes other minds in that context is just to avoid the question, not to address it. A popular line of thought is the tu quoque response that materialist's have just as much of a problem as idealist's with establishing the existence of other minds.
With regard to 2, it is the apparent permanence of particulars (e.g. whenever I look into the clear night sky, I see the moon) that leads Berkeley to suppose that there must be a God that sustains the existence of the moon when no limited mind is looking at it. That may or may not work - God's perceptual relation to the moon probably has to be very different from ours when we look at it. More recent phenomenalists (some of the logical positivists for instance) tended to talk instead of "the moon" just being a term that ultimately unpacks as a set of conditional statements to the effect that "if person X were to look in direction y at time t, then person X would have an experience as of a moon being in the sky". The problem with this "moon as the permanent possibility of sensation" response is that it is natural to suppose that there is something that accounts for the truth of those conditional statements, and what is that something other than the continued existence of the moon when it is not being looked at?
As for (3), I think this is probably the most difficult issue for phenomenalistic idealism to address - I don't have much sensible to say about it at the moment, but it is something I am mulling over.

So if my use of a wheelchair is determined by my lack of legs, no one has any control over any of their actions?

Your use of a wheel chair is not determined by your lack of legs. Certainly the actions you can choose between for getting from one place to another might be delimited by your lack of legs, but as per my brief reply to Moliere, it is your action of using the wheelchair to get from A to B that is in question. All kinds of things determine what actions I can choose between, including the number of limbs I have at my disposal, but X's point is that the entire element of choice is nullified by physiological abnormality.

I will get back with a more detailed reply, but first of all I certainly acknowledge that the first premise of my argument need to be defended: it is not obviously true. Neither is the second premise for that matter. However, the heartbeat example you give is not a counterexample to my first premise, because my heart's beating is not an action of mine. X's claim - at least as I understand it - is that his actions are beyond his control because his actions are caused by physiological abnormalities. Now, what separates actions from other kinds of behaviour (such as my heart's beating)? Well, one thing it is tempting to think is that they are distinguished from other kinds of behaviour of mine by the simple fact that they are within my control. Anyway, that's just a gesture towards a response. Also, I need to fill out my second and third premises which concern the compatibilism/incompatibilism issue.

Why would you disbelieve him when he says it's not in his control?

Well, on empirical grounds he has already established that it is within his control.

But on more philosophical grounds the framework of the argument would be along the lines:

If OCD is beyond X's control because X's ritualistic behaviour is determined by physiologically abnormal conditions, then by consistency of reasoning all behaviour (not just X's) is determined by physiology.
If all behaviour is determined by physiology, no one has any control over any of their actions.
It is false that no one has any control over any of their actions.
Therefore, not all behaviour is determined by physiology.
Therefore it is not the case that OC is beyond X's control because X's ritualistic behaviour is determined by physiologically abnoral conditions.

The argument is logically valid. It's soundness, I grant you, is up for dispute - which is precisely what this forum is for.

OK, but bear in mind that many worlds interpretations effectively deny that there is any such thing as the collapse of the wave equation at all. Materialist interpretations of QM will take issue with your statement

prior to this act of measurement, there is no particle, but only the probability of there being one

Under materialist interpretations there is always a particle, prior to, during and after measurement.

The lie is that X's behaviour is not within his control. The bad reason he is giving himself for insisting on this is that his behaviour is caused by the physiological abnormalities in which (for him) his mental illness consists.

We definitely have posters who have argued for subjective idealism without utilizing God, even saying that God was the flaw in Berkley's philosophy.

As I see it, phenomenalistic/subjective idealism faces three challenges:
1) Avoid the collapse to solipsism
2) Account for the apparent permance of particulars
3) Account for the apparent fact that numerically distinct people can perceive one and the same thing in different ways (i.e. from different perspectives).

I'm not sure one can meet those challenges and remain an phenomenalist idealist without supposing there to be a God, but I'm also not sure you can even meet those challenges by supposing there to be a God.

Anyway, I'm interested in what you say about proving idealism by analysing perception - have you read John Foster? He attempts to argue for idealism entirely indepentently of the usual kind of arguments from illusion and hallucination.

I have heard of, but not read, Foster. As far as I am aware his basic argument is epistemological in nature, and the problem with that (at least insofar as analytic philosophy is concerned, a tradition to which he belongs) is that the standard position in analytic philosophy is that you cannot obtain a metaphysical conclusion from epistemological premises. In fact, that same principle is what causes the arguments from illusion and hallucination to be given pretty short shrift these days.

By the way, any relation between you and MetaphyicsNow.com, or is that just coincidence ?

Not a coincidence!

I don't think fundamental metaphysical disputes will ever be resolved :wink: Having said that, I share your opinion that you cannot even attempt to resolve them piecemeal - which is unfortunately the way that modern analytic philosophy tends to favour.

A materialist interpretation of quantum mechanics is possible, as is an idealist one. — MetaphysicsNow


Any examples?

For a materialist interpretation - Wheeler's "many worlds" comes to mind. The Von Neumann-Wigner interpretation is often cited as an idealistic one, but I've always suspected it of being more dualistic. For something more recent, you can take a look at
https://janszafranski.wordpress.com/2015/08/05/the-idealistic-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics/
I think there's some philsophical confusion going on in the paper (to be expected of a scientist) but there's a theoretical physicist doing their best to formulate an idealistic interpretation.

There are issues about freedom of will involved here aren't there?

I think this is spot on. Norman Malcolm's paper "The Conceivability of Mechanism" and Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment" come to mind as relevant here. Obviously, doing philosophy isn't going to cure X in and of itself, but my feeling is that X is being dishonest with himself and giving himself bad reasons for giving up the (no doubt, for him, difficult) struggle involved in simply being human and doing a little philosophy might help him see that, which may in turn motivate him to pick up the struggle again on his own terms.

Quantum mechanics is at best irrelevant to the idealism v materialism debate, and at worse just invites obscurantism and confusion. A materialist interpretation of quantum mechanics is possible, as is an idealist one. Einstein's question apparently was addressed to those early QM theorists who leaned towards an idealist interpretation, but interpretations of QM have moved on since the days when the so-called "Copenhagen" and "Hidden Variable" interpretations were the only games in town.

I think the kind of idealism that Berkeley propounded is best argued for by investigating the basic metaphysical assumptions behind the relational view of perception - @jkg20's post earlier in this discussion pinpoints the basic assumptions, but to develop a full blown argument out of them takes a lot of time (believe me, I've tried) and involves dealing with issues concerning nominalism v realism about properties , personal identity over time, adverbialism and representationalsim in the philosophy of mind, to name just a few. Whether you can have Berkelian idealism without also requiring God to be around in the quad is an interesting question.

Agreed. However X appears to be trying to exonerate himself for not engaging in those struggles by appealing to the fact that he has a disease which puts the symptoms beyond his control.

I'm interested that you say you are not patient X. I think most of us are all patient X in one way or another.

Do you mean that we all engage in OCD rituals, or do you mean that we all have psychological hang ups of one kind or another? If the former, I don' think you are right, if the latter, you probably are.

X's reasoning certainly led him to seek therapeutic help. Before therapy X had about a dozen distinct OCD rituals. The therapist regarded these rituals as symptoms of chronic depression. The rituals that could be replicated within the context of a therapy session were subjected to aversion therapy. For instance, one fairly minor ritual involved picking up and putting down a glass a certain number of times before drinking from it - the therapist simply "forced" X to drink from a glass of water having picked it up fewer times, and then eventually to drink from the glass having picked it up only once.
There was some success in management of the symptoms, roughly half of the rituals were no longer engaged in, including some which could not - for contextual reasons - themselves be subjected to aversion therapy during sessions. So, X was clearly capable of applying the techniques used during the sessions outside of those sessions and was capable of managing at least some of these rituals by bringing them under the control of reason.
However, the therapy stopped (for diverse reasons, including but not limited to financial). Some of the OCD behviours that had been under X's control returned, new rituals also started to be engaged in. When X is questioned why, since X clearly has the rational capacities to control OCD rituals, X no longer does so, it is at this point that the reply along the lines "I have a disease like diabetes, the symptoms of which I cannot control" is given. When it is pointed out that X certainly could control them with weekly "hand-holding" sessions, which makes it at least curious that X is unable to continue to do so in the absence of those sessions, the response is "I cannot control the fact that I need therapeutic support in order to control my OCD".

"Facing the fear" as you put it is to use one's reason to overcome a problem - you are basically reasoning yourself into acting in a way that you are initially aversed to, in order that (perhaps) by doing so, eventually you deal with the issue. I am well aware that aversion therapy is a technique used to treat OCD. My specific interest - perhaps I was not sufficiently clear about that - is in X's claim that X's problem is just like diabetes, insofar as no kind of application of reason (or passion for that matter) will help.

Incidently, I am not patient X - so do not worry about possibly offending me with your response.

Because it is a carefully reasoned, reasonably short article on nominalism that will, if you read it with care, help you understand what nominalism is and what problems it faces.
You appear to have a "humpty dumpty" view of language that allows you to pick and choose at will the meanings you give to words. It is impossible to reason with someone of that nature. Goodbye.

I leave you with the recommendation to read this article
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43154157?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

"P" is a pattern, patterns are not events, events are (amongst other things) things that conform to or break patterns. Let's say that pattern P is the following:
the force applied to a falling object is proportional to its gravitational mass.

Let's say event1 is me dropping a stone from a tall building at a given time. Let event2 be me dropping a banana from a bridge at some other given time. Event1 and event2 have similarities and differences, they are certainly not identical. If you like, even the me involved in event1 is not identical with the me involved in event2. None of that matters. The issue is that both event1 and event2 conform to the pattern P. Pattern P does not change in all of this, it does not alter.

I define "general regularity" as a consistent, recurring or reiterative pattern

"consistent, recurring or reiterative" are you supposing those terms are synonymous? Pick up a dictionary, they are not. Nevertheless, leaving your mastery of the English language aside, let's focus in on "recurring" shall we?

If a P pattern recurs, then P occurs at at least two distinct times, T1 and T2. Since P at T1 is the same pattern as P at T2 then P has not changed between the times T1 and T2, consequently P has not altered between T1 and T2. Hence a recurring pattern is an unaltering pattern, and despite your word play our definitions are ontologically equivalent.

Definition of the claim "Everything is in constant flux": Every single existent thing alters from one moment to the next.

Definition: "General regularity" = An unaltering pattern, such as a natural law (e.g the force felt by a falling object is proportional to its gravitational mass).

Are there such things as general regularities?
Response 1: "No" - then since there are no such things as general regularities, they cannot be appealed to in any way shape or form to explain anything at all.
Response 2: "Yes" - then the claim "Everything is in constant flux" is false, since there exists something, i.e. at least one general regularity, and possibly many more, which does not alter from one moment to the next.

Your responses are utter nonsense because you seem to think you can give both responses at one and the same time, which you cannot, since by doing so you would be violating the law of non-contradiction. Please don't respond "paraconsistent logic", because that really is utter nonsense.

@Metaphysician Undercover I've done the best I can, I wish you luck if you continue to struggle on with numberjohnny5.

So instead of
It's not that because everything is always in flux that there is no general stability to things.
You should have more accurately stated;
It's not that because everything is always in flux that there is no general regularities to how things occur/are.

I repeat; this is utter nonsense - to say that everything is always in flux is precisely to deny that there are general regularities to how things occur/are, since if there were such general regularities they would be things exonerated from being in flux.

Metaphysician Undercover has been too patient trying to help you understand your errors and as a result has allowed you another opportunity to become enthused by the verbosity of your own loquaciousness. @jkg20 was correct in his prediction - you are clearly incorrigible, but let me have one stab at this before I move on, as it upsets me to think that someone so wrong can believe they are so right.

It's not that because everything is always in flux that there is no general stability to things.

This is utter nonesense. To say that everything is always in flux is precisely to say that there is no general stability to things.

I echo a couple of others on here - you should ammend the typo in your discussion title :wink:
Top trumps philosophers will have to avoid a Zeno card - it could never be dealt out: before it lands on the table, it would have to travel half the distance between the pack and the table, and before it could reach that point it would have to travel half the distance between the pack and that point........;
The Hegel card will never accept defeat and just look for a synthesis instead.