nothing wholly new emerges out of nothing like magic when things are just arranged in the right way. — Pfhorrest
1. A philosophical book is just an arrangement of words. If there is nothing new in philosophical books, why write them? Why read them? — Olivier5
2. A steam engine is just an arrangement of steel, water and fire. And yet when it was invented, it was pretty revolutionary. And if there's nothing new in a steam engine, how come the pharaohs of antiquity didn't think of building a Memphis-Thebes railroad? — Olivier5
3. A living organism is just (supposedly) an arrangement of atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen etc. And yet a living organism can reproduce, which an atom cannot do. To be precise, to reproduce an atom would mean very little, because what is reproduced in life is the (complex, biological) structure of the organism, the shapes the molecules make with atoms, not the atoms themselves. So the concept of reproduction has a clear meaning in biology but not in physics. — Olivier5
What you seem to be missing is the realization that the idea that human decision making is determined by natural forces is a groundless assumption. How would you ever set about testing it? — Janus
1. A philosophical book is just an arrangement of words. If there is nothing new in philosophical books, why write them? Why read them?
— Olivier5
For the same reason that we collect a variety of goods and organize them on shelves in the same building called a "store": — Pfhorrest
The possibility [of a steam engine] was always there, — Pfhorrest
human being is an absolutely insanely complicated thing, but when you analyze one sufficiently it turns out to be an aggregate of a (whole frickin') bunch of simple molecular reactions. — Pfhorrest
The point is that this thing can reproduce, while an atom cannot. It can decide to fight or flee. It can sleep. It can eat and drink. It can observe, and it can think. — Olivier5
What you seem to be missing is the realization that the idea that human decision making is determined by natural forces is a groundless assumption. How would you ever set about testing it? — Janus
I don't think human decisions are determined by physical forces but neither are they determined by psychic forces outside of nature (as they seemingly would need to be for the sort of 'rollback' libertarianism under discussion to be cogent). I rather think that human decisions are determined by human beings. The sort of causation at issue is a sort of agent causation, which is an exemplification both of substance causation and of rational causation, on my view. Embodied and encultured rational human beings can determine things to happen on rational (and ethical) grounds. — Pierre-Normand
It has no meaning at their level. — Olivier5
the temperature of the ensemble just is an aggregate of the kinetic energies of the individual particles. — Pfhorrest
The concept of emergence does not imply that magic things happen between elements when they arranged a certain way. — Olivier5
It's a question of whether the new behavior is an aggregate of the behavior of the constituents (weak emergence) or not (strong emergence). — Pfhorrest
OK, but where I have used "natural" you have substituted "physical". I'm not sure whether you draw a distinction between them, but as far as I understand, determinism is the thesis that all events are fully determined by antecedent physical events. This is often expressed in the thought experiment wherein it is claimed that if the evolution of the universe were to be played out again from the Big Bang everything would unfold again exactly as it has.
So, for me the kind of determinism which incorporates reductive physicalism is logically incompatible with the kind of freedom that could rationally be understood to justify the idea of moral responsibility.
So, I agree with what you've said above, but as I read it, what you've said does not support compatibilism, but rather rejects it. — Janus
when they are put together like that the properties of the house show up automatically. — Pfhorrest
Your language examples are a bit beside the point, because we make up the rules of language and so can make up strong emergence in them if we want. — Pfhorrest
That's like saying "but if magic can happen in stories, it can happen outside of them too". — Pfhorrest
People can choose to assign meaning to a word that is not a composite of the meanings of the letters, as we obviously do, but that doesn't mean that there's any actual strong emergence in the real world, — Pfhorrest
It's like saying: if consciousness happens in humans, it must have a precursor in the animal kingdom. It cannot stem from nothing. — Olivier5
But language is real. If strong emergence is a fundamental characteristic of all human language, where does it come from? How did strong emergence emerge? — Olivier5
Personally, I don't buy the distinction between weak and strong emergence. I see the latter as a sum of many small (weak) emergence events. — Olivier5
Stories are real, as in, people really to tell stories. Things happen in stories that can't happen in real life. If they can't happen in real life, how can they happen in stories? zomg big philosophical mystery? No. — Pfhorrest
But the argument is NOT about what language SAYS but about how it WORKS. — Olivier5
But indeterminism is not a threat to the metaphysical sense, since that sense just is freedom from determinism, which just is indeterminism. And then we circle back around to indeterminism not being a useful kind of freedom... which just goes to show that the metaphysical sense of the term "free will" is not a useful sense of the term. — Pfhorrest
And to the extent that determinism is not true, indeterminism is true, which then makes the argument for hard incompatibilism: one way or another free will is impossible. — Pfhorrest
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