What philosophical - as opposed to psychological - theses do you understand Stoicism to stand for?

Note: philosophy is not therapy and beliefs that make people happy and more successful are not thereby shown to be true. (Philosophy is the enterprise of using reason to try and find out what's true. It is not the enterprise of trying to make people happy or successful or psychologically robust).

So, what claims about the nature of reality - and what supporting arguments - do you understand Stoicism to denote? (Because I think they'll either be banal or obviously false).

Yes, that is the liberalistic argument. And I support it. — trogdor

I don't know what you mean by a 'liberalistic argument'. The point is that there is no reason to think that the psychopath has more free will than I do, or anyone else, other things being equal. You said otherwise. So you have agreed that the psychopath and I have the same free will, yet you previously said that the psychopath enjoyed more free will. I wanted to know why you thought that.

But again, you seem to be all over the place. The title is free will and manipulation. Now, what are you saying? What is your thesis? Let's not wander into a discussion of what makes a person a psychopath or not, or whether it has anything todo with empathy. Focus. What's your 'free will and manipulation' related thesis?

Why would psychopaths possess more free will?

Let's say the options I am considering are A and B, one of which is morally right and the other wrong. I have free will over which one I go for. I care to do the right thing, so the fact one of them is wrong counts against it. I am able to do it, but I am probably not going to.

Someone else is considering A and B. They too recognize that B is wrong. But they don't care that it's wrong.

Clearly, however, they have the same free will I do. Their choice is no more or less free than mine just because they do not happen to care about doing the right thing. We have the same abilities and we are both the ultimate sources of what we do.

There is no clear puzzle or question or argument in your OP. It's all over the place.

You have free will. That's in the bank. What's not in the bank is precisely what free will's ingredients are.

Philosophers often employ cases involving manipulation in order to try and gain insight into what free will's ingredients are.

So, for instance, some argue that there is no relevant difference between being subject to covert manipulation and being subject to deterministic causation. And as a person who is subject to covert manipulation is not morally responsible for the behaviour they were manipulated into doing, then covert manipulation - provided it is pervasive enough - annuls responsibility-grounding free will. And thus they conclude that determinism does too. It's a bad argument, I think, but I am just mentioning it to show that the real issue is over what free will ingredients are.

Cleary you don't have a clue what you're talking about.

You have said that you do not believe in God.

You have also said that you do not think that there could be any other explanation for the world apart from God.

So, you believe a contradiction. That's dumb. That is, you believe something - the world - exists and that it could only possibly exist if God exists, but you believe God does not exist. Jeez. Join. The. Dots.

I'm happy for you: you have a true belief.

What other explanation can there be? — Athena

You think the only possible explanation for the external world is God?!?

Why on earth would you think that?

And second, you also think - incoherently - that God does not exist.

So, er, you think the external world doesn't exist? Or do you not see the contradiction in your beliefs?

By ultlimate moral responsibility Strawson means being such that one can be deserving of harm. That is to say, it would be intrinsically good if you came to harm.

There are lots of weaker senses of the term 'moral responsibility'. 'Having moral obligations' would be one. That is, we sometimes say that we're 'morally responsible' and mean by this nothing more than that we have moral obligations.

But that's not what Strawson is talking about when he talks about 'ultimate' or 'true' moral responsibilty (so this would be an example of non-ultimate moral responsibility). He is talking about a kind of control or free will that makes one's behaviour capable of making one 'deserve' to be flung to hell (to use his example).

Sometimes it is morally justifiable to harm a person due to the benefits that may come from it, or due to the fact doing so will prevent greater harm in the future. But if harming Jim is morally justified on these grounds alone, then although it is morally permissible - perhaps even right - to harm Jim, Jim does not 'deserve' to come to that harm. It remains, for instance, 'regrettable' and 'bad' that Jim had to come to harm in order to secure those benefits or prevent those other harms. Whereas if Jim 'deserved' to come to harm in Strawson's 'ultimate responsibility' sense of the term, then it would not be regrettable at all or bad, but good.

So anyway, he doesn't mean anything wishy washy. He means 'capable of becoming deserving of hell and damnation depending on how one behaves'. And he thinks that to be capable of that, one would have to have created oneself.

But he's confused. A) you don't have to have created yourself, you just have not to have been created by anything other than yourself.
B) even if A is false, creating yourself is not impossible.
And finally C) even if A and B are false, it is more reasonable, given how powerfully our reason represents us to be morally responsible in the ultimate sense, to conclude that self-creation is not needed for it than to conclude that we are not morally responsible. To do the latter is to let less powerful intuitions trump more powerful ones.

I am not sure I quite follow your argument. Plantinga's argument is that if naturalism is true, then our faculties of awareness would be selected for on grounds of their adaptive value, rather than on whether they provide us with accurate information about the world. This, he thinks, undermines their reliability. It's not yet clear to me that it does. But let's put that aside.

You're saying that a parallel problem can be raised for the theist (understood as someone who believes in God - an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent person). This I did not follow. What stops God from making our faculties broadly reliable? Nothing.

So, our reason tells us to default trust a deliverance of a faculty. That is, our reason tells us that our faculties are fairly reliable (though by no means wholly reliable). The issue is whether that is consistent with theism. Plantinga has argued that it is not consistent with naturalism. But is it consistent with theism? Note, it does not have to be positively entailed by it. It's sufficient that the worldview in question - theism - does not positively imply its falsity. The answer is clearly 'yes', for nothing stops God - an omnipotent being - from equipping us with broadly reliable faculties.

When we judge that a proposition is 'probably' true, that is itself a judgement about what we have epistemic reason to believe. That is, it is to judge that there is an epistemic reason of some degree of strength to believe it.
It is not, then, that epistemic reasons raise a proposition's likelihood of being true, it is rather that judgements of epistemic probability just are judgements about what we have epistemic reason to believe.

Again, still no engagement. You're talking 'about' his argument, but not actually addressing it.

Here's what you should do, Identify Strawson's premises and then ask whether those premises are self-evidently true - that is, directly represented to be true by our reason - or whether they can be deduced from some that are.

There are three premises central to his case. First, that you are not morally responsible for what you do if everything you do traces to external factors that you had no hand in.

The second is that it is necessary to satisfy this condition that one create oneself.

The third is that it is impossible for a thing to create itself.

Now, are those premises true? That is, are they self-evident to reason?

The first is, I think. At least, it is self-evident to me, and self-evident to Strawson, and as he himself states and I can confirm, it is self-evident to most students when they are acquainted with it.

The second and third premises, however, are dubious. Indeed, I argued -and you ignored my argument entirely - that the second is false, for it seems sufficient for nothing external to oneself to be causally responsible for what one does that one has not been created. One does not need to have positively created oneself. So, the second premise seems false upon reflection.

And the third is dubious too (though less so than the second). Again, I presented a case against it that you ignored. The only reason to think self-creation is impossible is the assumption that a cause must precede its effect. However, that assumption is false - a cause does not have to precede its effect, but can exist simultaneous with it (indeed, arguably this is always the case). If causes do not have to precede their effects, then in principle self-creation is possible and thus premise 3 is false too.

See? That's engaging with an argument.

Again, how are you engaging with any argument?

You are neither engaging with his argument nor mine.

Premise 3 is false.

Strawson believes that to be morally responsible you need to have created yourself. And he believes that is impossible. That's his justification for 3.

But both claims are false, I think. First, literal self creation is possible. The only reason to think it isn't is because a cause must come before its effect. However, a cause does not have to come before its effect (and thus that to create yourself you would need to exist prior to your own existence). However, simultaneous causation is possible (indeed, arguable all effects are simultaneously with their causes). So, self creation is possible (or at least the burden of proof is now on its denier). But even if it wasn't, selfcreation is not necessary for moral responsibility. The only reason to think it is, is that if you have self created then nothing external to you is responsible for how you are. But that will also be the case if nothing created you. That is, it will be true if you exist uncreated.

Thus his argument is unsound. It might be objected that this hardly restores faith in our moral responsibility as surely we are not self created or uncreated things.

However, that is bad reasoning. As our reason represents us to be morally responsible we should assume we are and the burden of proof is on the denier. So, absent evidence to the contrary, we should conclude that we are morally responsible and that we satisfy whatever conditions on responsibility our reason tells us it has.

If you understood the OP and understood the article, you'd see I'm making the same point. But note, you don't.

You also do not understand what plagiarism involves, clearly. For regardless of whether the argument in the OP is original to me or is the one in that article, it would not be plagiarism.

So, you think your comments above are on topic because another one on something different was? Excellent reasoning.

As for the article I referenced, the point made in the op is made by him in that article. That you can't see this is to be expected, given you can't tell a good argument from a joke and given you still don't understand the op.

"There are no good objections to substance dualism"
JOSÉ GUSMÃO RODRIGUES
Philosophy
Vol. 89, No. 348 (April 2014), pp. 199-222

That well known joke journal, 'Philosophy', the oldest of the lot and published by the Royal Institute of Philosophy. It's such a laugh.

Have you peer reviewed anything, Banno? No. I do it all the bloody time. Now, the argument in the OP is published. Not by me, but it is out there in print. Indeed, the article in which the point was made was a prize winning article. So, hmmm, your ability to discern a good argument from a joke one is non-existent, isn't it?

According to Bartricks immaterial things don't need energy to function. However, ghosts and minds would still create physical energy when they move things in the physical world, contrary to the conservation of energy principle. — Down The Rabbit Hole

What on earth are you on about? Read the OP and address something in it. Don't just state things.

This thread is about whether the principle of conservation is compatible with duaiism. Is A compatible with B. I have argued that they are.

If you think it is about whether the principle of conservation is true, or whether dualism is true, then you're really bad at philosophy. Trust me: I assess how good people are at philosophy for a living. And you're shit at it if you think the issue here is whether A or B is true. It's whether they're compatible. If you can't understand the difference, then you belong on a production line or a frontline. Thinking isn't for you.

We have apparent direct experience of it all the time. By hypothesis, if dualism is true then your mind is an immaterial thing and your conscious states are states of an immaterial thing. And thus whenever you make a decision - a mental event - and that decision causes a material event - such as your arm raising or your fingers moving on a keyboard - then you have an example of an immaterial event causing a material event.

The immaterial event is not empirically detectable. If it was, it wouldn't be immaterial. Yet the existeence of such events is as clear as can be, indeed clearer than the occurrence of any material events.

But anyway, the issue here is not whether dualism is true. The issue is whether it is compatible with the principle of the conservaton of energy.

This is what this thread is about, you incredibly incompetent people.

It is often thought, by those who haven't done much of it, that dualism conflicts with the principle of the conservation of energy. It doesn't, as I will now explain.

A dualist is someone who believes that though there is a material world made of extended substances, there are also immaterial entities - our minds - that are not extended in space. And a plausible dualist view would include the view that there is causal interaction between our minds and some of the extended substances, namely those we call our bodies. After all, our minds clearly do causally interact with the material world. Events in the material world seem to be causally responsible for my mental events, but my mental events in turn seem to be causally responsible for some material events.

So, if dualism is true, then we have material event A causing immaterial event B, which causes material event C.

By the very nature of the matter, scientific instruments will only ever be able to register events A and C, for event B is, by hypothesis, not a material event and is thus not sensibly detectable. And so whenever one has a material event of type A, this will be followed by an empirically detectable material event of type C. The mental intermediary will not be detected. In this way note that nothing in the dualist thesis will ever conflict with any empirical data.

The supposed evidence that dualism is false is that there would be a violation of the principle of the conservation of energy if the A-B-C picture was correct.

But how? First, note that the evidence that the principle of the conservation of energy is true is empirical evidence and no empirical evidence will ever conflict with dualism.

Second, in order for the principle of the conservation of energy to be violated, some energy would need either to disappear or be introduced into the picture by the addition of event B. But event B does not do this. We have no more or less energy in the system than if one supposed A caused C directly. Thus, there is no violation of the principle.

Perhaps the thought instead is that in order for A to have caused B, then some energy would need to be transferred - for all causal transactions, it is now being supposed, involve a transfer of energy. But that is not part of the principle of the conservation of energy. That's a new and distinct claim about the nature of causation.

If dualism is true, then there are causal transactions that do not involve a transfer of energy. The energy is transferred from A to C 'by' B. But the causation of B by A did not involve any transfer of energy. So to insist that all causation involves a transfer of energy is just to have stipulated that dualism is false, not provided us with any evidence of its falsity. It is just to have begged the question against the dualist.

So it seems there is no non-question begging argument that shows dualism to violate the principle of the conservation of energy. — Bartricks

For each individual thought that one thinks, do they have options to choose from for what it will be prior to them thinking it? Where would they get these options from? They could only come from their own mind and thoughts, nowhere outside of themselves. If they don’t have options in the first place, then they cannot choose their thoughts by definition, as you’ve conceded. — Paul Michael

I do not follow your response.

I think two distinct issues are being conflated. There is what's needed to make a choice. There you have claimed (controversially - I'm not endorsing the view, just accepting it for the sake of argument) that you need to select from options.

Well, in order, then, to make a choice I simply need options. I do not need to have selected the options. I need only to select from them.

But the other issue that you are conflating with this one, is that of ultimate sourcehood. My choices will be a product of prior factors, and those of yet earlier factors and so on.

I take it that the real reason you think we lack free will is because we lack ultimate sourchood - that our choices are the causal product of events external to ourselves. My choices, whatever they may be, are all the product of my having a certain nature in a certain environment. And, ultimately, I did not choose my original nature or my environment. That's the threat to free will, is it not?

Get off the thread

Get off the thread.

Or, get off the thread.

Get. Off. The. Thread.

You are not addressing the op. You are derailing. Go away

Get. Off. The.Thread.

Get off this thread,

You have absolutely no philosophical ability. You don't know what this OP is about, yes? The grey cells won't let you know.

Now, address the op or go away.

Try and use that limited brain capacity of yours to write your own op and sod off.

it's my op, so do it elsewhere you rude twit.
You discuss the op in a thread,not anything that occurs to you.
Start a new thread on whatever you are discussing. Thos is massive derailment from you.
I took time to write an op. You owe it to discuss that op or go away.

Get off this thread.

You are not discussing the op.

Focus on the OP!! Jesus, you people are unbelievably bad at philosophy! This place never used to be this awful in terms of philosophical quality.

The question is whether dualism is compatible with the conservation of energy principle. So that is what you should be discussing . Not - note - any thought that enters your mind while reading the op regardless of its relevance to it.

Why the fuck even bother with an op? Focus! or start your own thread on whatever you think passes for a philosophical point worth discussing ("Are philosophy is progress free will consciousness bananas oo money the poor oppression" - some thought vomit like that). Don't derail this one with your inane thoughts.

Again: if you have nothing to say about the compatibility (look it up) of dualism with the conservation principle, then go away. Your thoughts are not being sought.

What about me? I showed how consciousness is made of states of pastry and that I am a croissant and that we have much to learn about consciousness from bakers.

Material event of consuming croissant causes conscious state of enjoyment. Conscious state of enjoyment therefore is the material event of consuming the croissant, or it emerges from - or strongly pastryvenes on it.

Therefore my mind itself is the croissant. Or mind pastryvenes on croissants.

See?

I can also show how I am a cup of coffee too.

This raises the well known coffee croissant problem. How can mind pastryvene on a croissant and a cup of coffee at different times?

Are zombie croissants possible, or do conscious states pastryvene on any relevantly arranged and baked lumps of pastry? We are learning more and more about different sorts of pastry and different ways in which croissants can be made, and I anticipate breakthroughs from bakery any day.

If I make something out of paper that nevertheless functions as a croissant, will that have consciousness too? The original function of the croissant was to give offence to muslims. So does that mean that anything designed to give offence to muslims will be conscious?

These are important questions.

You haven't described anything impossible.

You have said that to choose one must select from options. But then you have mistakenly supposed that one needs to have chosen the options.

No, at most you need options. You do not need to have chosen the options.

I have option a and option b. I didn't choose those options, but that doesn't mean I didn't choose a over b when I select a over b.

Because the op is about an argument for their compatibility.
Look, you just don't know how to argue or what the op is on. If you have nothing to say about the compatibility of the principle of c and dualism, no thoughts on the carefully laid out argument in the op, then go away. Stop blathering on about how it is false. Start a thread on that, even though it isn't remotely philosophical. Then I can join that one and say things irrelevant to your op.

Is this sufficient as a reply to your issue of compatibility? — Metaphysician Undercover

No, because you're just finding different ways of saying 'but the law of conservation isn't true".

Assume it is true. Is it compatible with dualism?

Oh, no one is interested in my bakery theory of consciousness.

Is that, perhaps, because it is incredibly stupid?

Bakers aren't studying consciousness. They're studying bread. And that's true even though there is undeniably a relationship between bread and conscious states, for we are often conscious of bread and often bread itself is responsible for that.

Yet my bakery theory remains mind-numbingly stupid. Indeed, someone who thought it was not mind-numbingly stupid would be someone who was so stupid they would be wholly incapable of discerning the clever from the stupid, as the clever would say things that sound so alien to their way of thinking that they would be fated to judge them mega stupid. So, they're a bit stuck, aren't they? There are, it seems, some theories that are so wrongheaded, anyone who subscribes to them is not going to be able to see them for what they are.

But, oh dear, all of that is true of a scientific theory of consciousness. Oops! For scientists are not studying consciousness. They're studying the sensible world.

If you want you can label something that scientists have evidence for a 'conscious state'. But then we can do that with bread states too. It does not mean bakers are studying consciousness and it does not mean scientists are. It just means that people are using labels to paper over the point at which they stopped doing science - or bakery - and started making unjustified philosophical assumptions.

Here's why you all like scientific theories. You can go on about them and put in lots of trainspottery detail and argue over that detail. C-fibres. Fields. And so on. And you can tell yourself you're doing important work, because look at all that detail.

Yet you're doing nothing more than detailing bread states after having called some of them conscious states. It's quite laughable. And it isn't philosophy. It's just a bit exercise in miss-labelling things so that you can talk science (or bakery).

What you need is some actually goddamn evidence that conscious states are states of sensible things. There isn't any of that. There's just a dumb argument: ooo, this brain state is associated with this conscious state....therefore they're the same! An argument by means of which I have arrived at the conclusion that I am a croissant. Eating croissant caused conscious state of enjoyment. So, event of croissant consumption was conscious state of enjoyment (maybe a bit of detail here - say 'bread field' or 'bread fibres' a bit). Therefore as the bearer of that conscious state, it turns out I am a croissant. Who'd have thought!

You used a definition of "philosopher" which is not consistent with anything printed that I've ever seen. — Metaphysician Undercover

What's that got to do with anything? Get out more.

It's definitely not clear in the op. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes it is, it is just that, like most, you don't read the OP carefully - you just see 'conservation of energy principle' and think 'I can say something about that' and then you say it, regardless of whether it is relevant to the argument.

Once more, the issue here is not whether the conservation principle is true. I know you think it is and you're now unable to accept that you're wrong and it's all feeling a little disorientating. But there it is. .

The issue is whether the principle of the conservation of energy is COMPATIBLE with dualism.

"But, but, but..."

No.