• NOS4A2
    9.3k


    I don’t care whether you’re interested or not. I note only that you have not provide any counter. Your objection, as far as it was legible, I could not understand. Maybe you can clarify.

    An agent is something with the capacity to act. I’m not sure what a collection of causes and effects is, nor do I understand what bullet you want me to bite. Not a single ounce of discomfort involved here.
  • AmadeusD
    2.6k
    It's hard to deal with this level of sheer prevarication.

    Do you hold a further fact view about agents/identities/persons?
  • NOS4A2
    9.3k


    I don’t really care about your fee-fees. So maybe we can dispense with them.

    I do not hold a further fact view about identities.
  • AmadeusD
    2.6k
    Then your position is entirely incoherent. Unless you hold a further fact view, your position rests on denying what is required for it's coherence viz. if a further fact does not obtain, then necessarily identity consists in a bundle of vague, blurry sets of intensions/intentions and memories.

    I have provided adequate counter in each of my replies. It is not that interesting to see you deny them, and it is an out-right red flag that you would introduce a line like this:

    I don’t really care about your fee-fees.NOS4A2

    Neither my feelings being in play, or your misapprehension of their presence bears here. My objection goes through, currently as you have not even attempted to address it. Please refrain from random underhanded Twitter insults. When you prevaricate, it is hard to converse. This has nothing to do with my feelings, and i'd appreciate you rising to the level of a decent interlocutor, if you're going to respond.
  • NOS4A2
    9.3k


    I’m talking about human beings, which are not vague, blurry sets of whatever. I happen to identify as one. What further facts do you require?

    I thought it should be easy to name one thing in the universe besides yourself that determines your choices or actions.
  • AmadeusD
    2.6k
    I’m talking about human beings, which are not vague, blurry sets of whatever. I happen to identify as one. What further facts do you require?NOS4A2

    You have essentially stated the 'further fact' (in the conceptual sense, anyhow) in this: ||
    I’m talking about human beings, which are not vague, blurry sets of whatever.NOS4A2

    (A couple of examples of what some posit as the 'further fact' are immaterial souls, Descartes res cogitans (though, that's disputed I believe, as I'm positing it anyhow) or the identity of say a base-code having been input to a simulation (as unlikley as that theory is)).

    Hmm, fair enough. If that is your view, then you do not think you can accept that "human being" reduces to the lower-level facts about ourselves such asbiology, mentation, cognition, environment, memory, (adapt)ability, (ir)rationality etc.. etc.. In this sense, you must hold (for your stated position to hold) that there is something other than these things in which "NOS4A2" consists(the conceptual further fact)).
    What is that in which you feel you consist? You "identity" as a human being, which is merely to say you are emotionally comfortable with using that label based on your own terminology and, most likely, something akin to my above approximation in italics. Sure. We can, in that sense, allow for a human to identify as a cat, if we like the description. To be clear, what I am saying (and seems self-evident) is that the notion of human being i've italicised in my reply here is in fact, a vague bundle of seemingly weakly-connected attributes that have only a relational property and not a further coherence into some objective identity. They don't really establish any stable, temporally-relevant 'identity' without some further discussion of what identity consists in.

    I should probably note that it's occurred you may be doing something I've run into a few times (and that's not wrong or bad or anything negative). If you are speaking on how one identifies then we're at cross-purposes. I am speaking on the debate around how it is that one could be the same person three years part, say. In what does identity per se exist for a human? If you're not, wonderful, that is helpful :)
  • NOS4A2
    9.3k


    I am aware humans grow and age, and that I am not identical to myself as I was three years ago. The physical facts and properties change but I do not require any further metaphysical facts beyond them. For the sake of an enduring identity and a further fact for your concept a proper name suffices enough for me.

    However you want to identify yourself, there are an infinite amount of other things one cannot identify as. Which one of them would you say determines your actions?
  • Barkon
    163
    Yes.

    Otherwise your body would run off, hypothetically speaking, and in trying to take you for a ride that's infinitely painful, you would probably float up into space in some ethereal form and exist somewhere in-between this universe and your previous form, and somewhere else, but more somewhere else. There is an element of freedom to will, the part of your life to cause expression, petty imagination, and so on, but most of this universes type of life is predetermined and regularly re-determined(as per sleep and dreaming). There are constraints, you have physical form - meaning that you can only perform within the constraints of physique. The universe's form is physical, meaning a lot of things were determined since the beginning, such as house building and monkeys. However, however small it may be, free will is necessary to prevent fatalism.
  • Barkon
    163
    It's possible some of your bodies have already run off - and I'm not joking.
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