You did. My bad.I think I said in the OP that essential and accidental are two types of efficient causality. — Dfpolis
It kicks in as soon as one commits to a line of action.... [and]
It means that we can make rational commitments. — Dfpolis
So, we should not reify the will. — Dfpolis
When you take one sentence out of context, you can twist its meaning. — Dfpolis
"Random" has many meanings, one of which is mindless. It should be evident to anyone who read the title ("Mind or Randomness in Evolution") that the meaning of "purely random" in the abstract is totally mindless — Dfpolis
This is not saying that evolution is purely random as you claim I did. — Dfpolis
I explicitly quote Dawkins discussing the non-random aspect of evolution: — Dfpolis
By contrast, if I buy some dynamite to blast a stump out of the ground and having accomplished my goal then ask what caused the explosion, I will find that the Greek will not yield a modern answer. — tim wood
On the other hand, the modern account tends to freeze the moment to when the burning fuse touches the explosive material, at that moment starting the rapid reaction that just (statically) is the explosion. — tim wood
And so I find the essential cause as the building of the house being built by the builder building the house not directly translatable — tim wood
He, Aristotle, imo was making a simple grammatical point about the identity of passive and active description while retaining the dynamism, the process(es) and agency. — tim wood
The question, then, if essential causality is the cause of moral agency, is it in the Greek temporal sense of an agent-performed process that produces a result? Or in a modern and static sense, wherein responsibility is extracted and regarded in a frozen moment prior to which it isn't, and at which moment it is. It seems to me that you cannot extract from the Greek sense, without losing it completely and creating a different meaning. — tim wood
Philosophical naturalists claim macroevolution shows order emerging by pure chance. ...Evolution is not random, but fully intentional, evidencing mind in nature
I believe you think too little of Greek comprehension. Yes, there is a process of building, but it is not interminable. — Dfpolis
Indeed, but poetic. Perhaps determinism is just the small gaps between the wheels of randomness. Except that I'm pretty sure this randomness, large or small, calls for a more rigorous explication. I'll read if you care to write - but I'm not asking. Or if you want a smaller, lesser challenge; if you can explain in layman's terms the inner workings of Chaitin's Omega, I'd be pleased to read that!I see randomness as the universe's "play", the little gap between the wheels of determinism, that allows the whole thing to get some degree of freedom and move ahead, instead of gripping. — Olivier5
writing style reeks of fundamentalist Christianity, — Banno
Your style is not unusual at all - there have been a half-dozen similar in the last year alone. — Banno
Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again". Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing". The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again; and, this time, finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion, but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says: "No true Scotsman would do such a thing".
You appear to want both process and a stopping of process. — tim wood
you want it to be the essential cause of something that it cannot be the essential cause of. — tim wood
If you wish to say that the commitment to choose an action - these broadly defined - is the genesis of moral agency, — tim wood
But as caused essentially, not so. Either you have process yielding a result not the process - an accidental cause, or you have instantaneous result from an incomplete process. — tim wood
All of which argues that what cause is, is what someone says it is — tim wood
Momentary essential cause as producing per process a finished product isn't consistent. — tim wood
Or another way: building is the essential cause of building, that which links builder and built. But the linking is itself not constitutive of the building. — tim wood
But by itself, no building was ever built by building by- and in-itself — tim wood
Your moral agency, then, is from accidental causes, but no less caused for that. — tim wood
Indeed, but poetic. Perhaps determinism is just the small gaps between the wheels of randomness. Except that I'm pretty sure this randomness, large or small, calls for a more rigorous explication. I'll read if you care to write - but I'm not asking. — tim wood
The Open Universe by Karl Popper, is a a series of arguments in favor of an indeterminist outlook in (of course) quantum mechanics but also in classical physics. It's a serious, thick, argumentative and as always crystal clear book that pretty much disposes of determinism. — Olivier5
There is no such thing. QM are generally interpreted as indeterministic.the widespread acceptance of deterministic interpretations of QM. — Kenosha Kid
How would you go about falsifying determinism, then? Please propose an experiment that could prove it false.determinism is falsifiable — Kenosha Kid
There is no such thing. QM are generally interpreted as indeterministic. — Olivier5
How would you go about falsifying determinism, then? — Olivier5
If it undergoes some collapse mechanism (Copenhagen) or other probabilistic means if producing singular measurement outcomes (e.g. transactional QM), it is non-deterministic, specifically it is probabilistic. — Kenosha Kid
But you said it yourself: unpredictable is different from undetermined. Something could be fully determined but unpredictable. For example the three bodies problem in classic physics is I think deterministic in the sense that it can be proven (I think) that there is only one solution to the equation. However we cannot compute the solution, we don't know how to do it, and therefore the behavior of three bodies interacting through Newtonian gravity cannot be successfully predicted with the tools at our disposal. It doesn't mean it's not deterministic.Do you understand what falsifiability is? That nature is deterministic can be falsified by the discovery of a phenomenon which is knowable, tractable, but at any scale unpredictable. — Kenosha Kid
For example the three bodies problem in classic physics is I think deterministic in the sense that it can be proven (I think) that there is only one solution to the equation. However we cannot compute the solution, we don't know how to do it, and therefore the behavior of three bodies interacting through Newtonian gravity cannot be successfully predicted with the tools at our disposal. It doesn't mean it's not deterministic. — Olivier5
The point remains that unpredictable is not an exact synonym of undetermined, and that testing the former is not testing the latter... — Olivier5
Nothing cuts it. You cannot fathom an experiment that would help conclude one way or another on the philosophical idea of determinism. — Olivier5
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