Were you under illusion that that's some sort of clever, knockdown argument? Because an obvious alternative answer which you haven't accounted for would be that it seemed to be voluntary, leaving open the possibility that it might not have been so.

And besides, it isn't necessarily true that they can't be persuaded otherwise if they deny that they post here voluntarily.

No I don’t believe I can consciously control all the processes of my body, but I do control them in the sense that all “automatic responses” are governed and regulated by me, my biology. — NOS4A2

No one talks like that. You are not your immune system, for example. Doctors do not inform patients with an autoimmune disease, such as rheumatoid arthritis, that they are attacking the cells that line their joints, they inform them that their immune system is doing so. You've gone to the ridiculous extent of inventing your own peculiar semantics, just so that you don't have to concede to any counterpoints. You are not an intellectually honest interlocutor.

What is any evidence at all of a correlation between anyone saying "Gas the Jews" and an increase in violence? — Terrapin Station

There are books on that sort of thing, you know. I own one. Part 1 of 3 is about the rise of antisemitism in Germany as a background to events leading up to the holocaust. And no, I'm not sifting through it just for you. But if you really are as ignorant as you're coming across, then I really think that you should educate yourself.

And your evidence for your perfectly rational and not at all fundamental belief that our beliefs are generated somehow without causal antecedents from our environment is...? For the fifth time now. — Isaac

He's got nothing.

I think I get it. Like the month October, “personality” is an abstract noun. So not only are you a body, but more, you are an abstract noun, or at least fit the definition of the abstract noun “personality”. — NOS4A2

So your personality is not a part of you, then? You're just a body with no personality? Lol.

Maybe that's the status quo in Australia, where people seem to be much more amenable to censorship, speech control, etc. In the U.S., the status quo is to think that it's ridiculous that people suggest that video games, films, etc. cause violence, and it's the fringe moral majority-type wackos who want to ban stuff. — Terrapin Station

We were talking about the regulation of video games and films. They're regulated in the U.S., as they are in the U.K., and as they are in Australia and elsewhere. And it's clear that that's supported by the majority of citizens in these nations, because that has been the case for a number of years, and there's no large enough movement or campaign against it for anyone in a position of power to give a flying fuck about your fringe opinion. It hasn't got the support, because no one finds it convincing, because it's unreasonable.

You said you were more than your body, and as an example you said your personality. I just want to know where this personality exists in space and time, where it begins and ends, what it is and what it looks like. I suspect these are questions you will not answer. — NOS4A2

I will answer once you've answered the question of what October tastes like.

Answered earlier on. A cost-benefit analysis.

Yikes. Okay, at least that's consistent. Ridiculous, but consistent. — Terrapin Station

Oh sure, sure. It's the status quo that's ridiculous, and not your fringe view.

If it is not your body, and not itself a body, where is this personality? It sounds like there is some reification going on here, giving solidity to pure wind. — NOS4A2

That makes no sense. It's like asking, if October is not your foot, and is not itself a foot, then what does it taste like?

Do you have a question which makes sense?

In philosophy we use "proof" in the stricter sense standardly. This is supposed to be a philosophy board. — Terrapin Station

In the world outside of autism and pedantry, it is standard to try to understand one and other, rather than to talk over the top of people.

Anyway, if you think that hate speech is sometimes a causal factor for violence, and it should be regulated because of that, why don't you think that video games, movies, etc. are sometimes are causal factor for violence that should be regulated because of that? — Terrapin Station

They are, and I agree with that.

C'mon, man--just how many Aspies are on this board anyway. — Terrapin Station

Says the guy who never seems to get that not everyone uses "proof" in the most strict of senses.

"Hate speech causes violence" isn't saying anything different. No one would think that we're saying that it always causes violence or that it's the only cause or anything like that. — Terrapin Station

I wouldn't put it past you. Anyway, whatever. I don't know why you're complaining. We ended up here because you apparently thought that it would be clever to change the context to something that everyone knows is a giant can of worms. I think that you deliberately phrased your question in that overly simplistic way, and now you're annoyed because I didn't play along as expected.

Sure, you’re not saying it and do not mean it, but no less you want to go the the cinema, you are your body, therefor your body wants to go to the cinema. — NOS4A2

Obviously I reject the false premise of yours that I am my body, so any conclusions you draw from it are completely irrelevant as far as I'm concerned.

Anything else presupposes a sort of dualism, a homunculus, a Cartesian theater. — NOS4A2

No, it doesn't, it just means that I think that I'm more than my body, which is a very widespread view which makes a lot of sense. My personality is not my body, for example.

What is the qualified version? — Terrapin Station

Sigh. Something like: hate speech can be a causal factor leading to acts of violence.

I am my body, I can prove this by pointing to myself. — NOS4A2

That's not proof at all. That's open to interpretation. I certainly do not mean that I am my body when I point to myself.

You cannot point to yourself, or whatever it is you identity yourself as. — NOS4A2

I can point at myself. In common parlance, pointing at my body counts as pointing at myself.

When I say that I want to go to the cinema, I'm not saying that my body wants to go to the cinema.

Why are you comfortable making a blanket statement like "Hate speech causes violence?" — Terrapin Station

I'm not, but the qualified version is more of a mouthful.

Thats a pretty pertinent question, you seriously going to dodge it like that? — DingoJones

No, the topic is pertinent, but the question was stupid. It could be put more intelligently.

I am my body. — NOS4A2

I don't agree with that at all. That sounds absurd to me. You're not your body, you're yourself. You have a body.

Were you being serious? — Terrapin Station

Yes.

Same question for you, by the way--do you also think that video games, movies, etc. cause violence? — Terrapin Station

I wouldn't make a blanket statement like that.

Nothing plausible about it in my view if we don't have empirical evidence to support it.

So that's why I care. I guess I'm more skeptical than you. — Terrapin Station

Yeah, you are more skeptical than me on this one. If you remove the cause and effect relationship from the explanation, then it makes less sense, and you're left with a problematic gap. I am more convinced by explanations that make sense.

Simply because they are my responses and no one else’s. — NOS4A2

Your withdrawal reflex is just a response of your body. It's entirely out of your control.

Letting posts on this board sway you on something is a scary idea. — Terrapin Station

It's not a matter of "letting". Either I'm swayed or I'm not. That's out of my hands. It's not like I can decide what I do or don't find convincing.

I didn't say that it's impossible for speech to be a cause of violent action. I said that we can't show that it is. — Terrapin Station

Why do you care so much about "showing"? It's the most plausible explanation.

You're a determinist. I'm not. Obviously I don't believe that free will is "wishful thinking" I think that determinism is thinking that hasn't moved past about 1840. — Terrapin Station

Well, the funny thing is that I was more on the fence when I entered this discussion, but now I find the notion of free will much less convincing than the alternatives.

Free will can't be part of the equation if we're trying to claim that something prior to it caused something. That's contradictory. Free will isn't deterministic. — Terrapin Station

But free will doesn't exist. I haven't seen a single good reason from you or anyone else in this discussion to believe in such a thing as free will. Every mental act is determined. Why would I believe otherwise, when that makes perfect sense?

Well, originally it was about whether or not hate speech should be allowed, and it kind of still is, but that lead to a discussion about cause and effect, with some people being unreasonable enough to deny the known effects that hate speech can have.

I don’t think that’s what he’s doing, I think it’s more that he thinks that as long as the information processing and deciding happened within one’s own body that it’s his responsibility, automatic or not. — khaled

But that's off topic. It doesn't matter whether or not he thinks that that's his responsibility. It matters whether or not it is his free will or whether it's something else. The automatic part can't be his free will, regardless of whether or not he wants to be irrational and claim responsibility for it.

It's similar to something like learning how to drive. At first, you need to consciously think about everything you're doing, and you need to figure out how to do it. After you've done it a bit, though, you no longer need to think about it to do it. That doesn't imply that it's not something you're doing. — Terrapin Station

Okay, but clearly that's not free will. It's not will, and it's not free. It's an unconscious automatic response.

I suppose the issue I have is the so-called effect of the words, when clearly the effect—hearing, constructing meaning, decoding sounds—has only me as it’s cause. Once the sound or word enters my domain, so to speak, it is under the control of my processes whether automatic or not. — NOS4A2

I wonder if there's some kind of psychological reason why you want to claim full ownership of your response to things...

Ah, so you don't have me on ignore then? :lol:

You had me lulled into believing that I could say whatever I liked to you, because you wouldn't see it anyway.

So you don't think that it's bloody obvious that Trump wouldn't spin himself as racist? You think that there's a serious possibility that he would try to spin himself as racist?

"Vote for me in 2020! I'm a racist!".

The media is spinning the yarn that Trump is racist, not Trump himself. It is the media spinning the yarn that Trump is racist, not Trump. — NOS4A2

That might just be the most stupid thing that you've said so far, and you even repeated yourself, just like Trump does. Not stupid because it is so wrong, but rather stupid because it is so bloody obvious that Trump wouldn't spin himself as racist, regardless of whether he is actually racist or not.

What racist rhetoric? — NOS4A2

You're not going to be able to see it if you're wilfully blind.

Yet particular members of the human species have been engaged in what has been conventionally established as the doing of science from at least the early 1600’s. So either the human species hasn’t really been doing science at all, or your argument is junk because it’s conclusion is catastrophically false.

......Eenie meanie minee moe...... — Mww

It's supposed to turn out catastrophically false. It's a reductio ad absurdum. :roll:

Suppose someone tells you your house is on fire. Let's call that evidence (A). Now you have to update your belief in the hypothesis "my house isn't on fire". How can you do that if you can't even choose whether to believe the person is reliable or not? Is lying or not? Is in a position to know about your house or not? Those are all choices you have to make before you can even begin to assess (A)'s impact on the hypothesis. — RogueAI

That is nonsense. Why would you needlessly insert "choice" into that scenario, when it isn't necessary, and when it actually makes the explanation worse?

They are conclusions that would need to be reached. And people do not "choose" to believe anything at all, because beliefs are not chosen, they are acquired.

1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of evidence. — RogueAI

False.

How can you evaluate evidence if you can't freely determine whether it's good evidence or not? — RogueAI

That's a loaded question, the unwarranted assumption being that freedom is required.

If you're simply compelled into believing a particular piece of evidence supports a hypothesis, you don't know if it actually does support the hypothesis. You just have to hope that what you were compelled to believe is right, but how would you ever know? — RogueAI

That's a non sequitur, and makes no sense whether you make it about free will or determinism.

"If you simply freely will yourself into believing that a particular piece of evidence supports a hypothesis, you don't know if it actually does support the hypothesis. You just have to hope that what you freely willed yourself to believe is right, but how would you ever know?"

Bad arguments like yours are a good case against free will, at least from my perspective, because I cannot freely will myself to find them convincing enough to believe or accept over more convincing alternatives. If I cannot, then how is that free will? It isn't free, and it doesn't seem like a matter of will. It's a matter of what I find convincing based on my ability to asses the evidence.

That is a very broad sense of individual. I see an individual as something that operates entirely independently. Something like a car part. True, independently these things do exist, but without the car they functionally have far less value and have very little justification for their existence. This is why I see the individual human as something akin to a car part, yes, an individual car part, but the car is what is providing value here, the car is what legitimizes the existence of the car part. Without the car, that individual part is not comparable to functional car part, the carburetor that functions inside of a car provides far more value to the owner and to society than the carburetor that sits in the junkyard.

As the car part cannot be divided from the car and retain the same degree of functionality and value, it cannot provide this value without the existence of a car to exist within, that is why I argue that the person, so inherently co-dependent upon the society it exists within, cannot be respected as an individual. The society is what gives the person such a high degree of value, as without this society the value of a modern person plummets significantly. Without the car, the car-part is just scrap metal, but within the car, the part is able to provide legitimizing and competitive value that justifies its existence.

In a world where the independent individual has become functionally irrelevant in the face of society, this is why I argue that no human can be an individual, because existing within this car, providing value to the society, has become a definitive trait of the modern human. — Marzipanmaddox

Look, you can come up with some lengthy and elaborate explanation for why you said what you did, but none of it matters. If you end up concluding that I'm not an individual, when I clearly am, then you've obviously gone wrong somewhere, whether that's due to bad logic or due to defining words in unusual ways.

It's fair that you don't accept the definition, but I lack a better word for this concept. Morality has always been the fabric of individuals banding together and cooperate. Morality is easily the only thing that produces this result, and this is why I equate morality to this process, and this is why I equate anything that accomplishes this to morality. — Marzipanmaddox

Why don't you just say something along the lines that you value collectives and cooperation, that you think they're a good thing, and that you think that an ideal society could be founded on that basis?

That would be fine. It would just be your opinion, and it would be up for debate. But you keep overstepping your bounds by saying things like that's morality itself. No, it's just your opinion.

None of that science will ever be logically relevant in ethics because of the is-ought problem. You can't derive an "ought" from an "is".

Pick one and we can talk about it. — NOS4A2

Translation: pick one, and I can deny it and think up some basis to explain it away.