I like how sources are 'whiny rhetoric'. While I suppose your completely baseless claims in which free-will is both logical and something innate and unaruged for and altogether incoherent is.. non-whiney? OK.

This discussion was merged into I don't think there's free will

If not being ignorant is contentious then I'll concede it. Until then, I've cited my sources in previous posts here. I'm not convinced in the meantime that ignorance ought to be an index of contentiousness.

It's not contentious. It's what any minimally competent understanding of philosophical and etymological history would provide. Free-will had to be invented. If you don't like the fact, maybe you can move to a different Earth with different facts.

Funny how an 'innate understanding' had to be invented by theologians a couple of hundred years ago before which it was nowhere to be found.

Of course, feelings in general are themselves all bio-social inventions too, but that's another story.

Those who believe in free-will be like

My point is simply that the entire point of protests - or at least certain ones, and especially the ones taking place in HK right now - is to challenge the current state of things. Ergo, those who think protest ought to take place within the boundaries and according to the dictates of that state are nothing but state apologists. My 'fellow humans' in HK happen to be family who escaped China a long time ago, precisely to avoid the sort of shit that happens there now, and threatens to bully it's way into HK. As far as I'm concerned it's happening to 'us'. Not that it matters one bit. Those who want protest without any actual protest - a bit of kum ba yah with colourful umbrellas that Western liberals can feel 'sympathy' for - can go hang themselves.

One last thing: for all those peddling the PRC-approved line that if the protestors go 'too far', China will be 'forced' to step in and tsk-tsk, 'game over', let's not forget that such a move would be one that China and China alone would be responsible for, and not the protestors. While it's all very tempting to the blame revealing clothing of a woman for her own assault on the part of misogynist pieces of shit, the political field is no less exempt from such miserable failures of thought.

Protests are a means by which law - and what motivates law - is challanged. Those who would prefer that protests are carnivals may as well join the circus. There they can be party to the ineffectual transgessions of the clowns they'd like democracic citizens to be modelled after.

Lucretian swerves?

This discussion was merged into What is the difference between actual infinity and potential infinity?

This discussion was merged into What is the difference between actual infinity and potential infinity?

I hope they riot until Carrie Lam's head is on a stick.

Or more probably, until she flees to the mainland licking the boots of her autocratic overlords.

Gas can't form a membrane. No membrane, no life.

A quick and dirty way to understand determination and freedom together is freedom as self-determination. They'd be a bit to unpack here but one upshot is a reversal of the usual free-will conceptual gambit: extracting the self from a causal network (network, not chain, mind you) is the only sure-fire way to deny self-determination and destroy freedom entirely. The complication is the need to understand both 'self' and 'determination' in a way freed from both Cartesian notions of the self as some zero-point of immaterial effervesence, and Newtonian notions of 'determination' as some linear fatalism where causality ironically plays no role whatsoever.

The need to revamp and demolish almost all of our 'spontaneous' modern philosophical intuitions, in other words. Putting religion in the ground once and for all would be helpful too, but these are two sides of the same miserable, rotten coin anyway.

That an alternative course of action under the control of the actor was actually, and not merely logically, possible prior to the act. — Janus

There's an interesting short-circuit here isn't there? An actual possibility. A possibility whose status is - actual. A possibility which is not merely "possibly possible" but actually possible. A transcendental question in other words, a question regarding the modal status of possibility itself. And I agree that this is precisely where moral considerations play out. But note the specificity of this: it's an issue not merely about the sheer 'existence-or-not' of possibility (possible vs. not possible), but the status or 'kind' of possibility (actually possible/not actually possible) at work. Morality deals with the "real conditions of possibility", as it were.

But this is precisely what vulgar thought experiments like the garden of forking paths do not deal with. The possibility involved with such thought experiments are always 'possible possibles'. This is reflected in the very metaphor in which the (possible) paths are laid out in advance, and the question of 'choice' turns upon the possibility on taking one (possible) path over another (possible) path. 'Possiblity' here is ramified to the second degree. This is how it has to be in order to be coherent at all: otherwise the whole problem falls into the stupidity of asking if the actual could be otherwise: but the very definition of the actual is that "it is as it is" (and not otherwise). "We can only do what we do, because that is what we do".

So it's only by de-realizing the actual and treating it in the mode of the possible (one among others, this possible path rather than that possible path) that the question gets off the ground in the first place. But this vitiates any analysis of what you rightly referred to as 'actual possibility'. Understanding the 'actuality of possibility' - which possibilities are open for the taking in the here and now - requires what one might call 'material analysis' (and not mere logic chopping): what are the concrete, 'on the ground' conditions which enable, influence, or prevent choices? What factors are operative in self and environment, and how and in what manner are they apprehended and practised and modified in various contexts? All of this informs choice, informs what we even count as a choice (informs who and what we are), and makes choices meaningful and evaluable.

Yet for Augustine and a bunch of shitbrains in his wake, all of this is condensed into a single, utterly emaciated question over whether we have some pseudo-psychological faculty of 'will', over which a single, snivelling, binary question is meant to answer whether or not we are free: 'do we have it?' (herp derp). The 'thinness' of this question merely reflects the thinness of the concern it was formulated to alleviate: how can God be Good when there is evil in the world? That's it, that's all that 'free will' is meant to secure, the innocence of God - at the price of the guilt of man. It only incidentally has anything to even do with humanity, let alone freedom, and one of the biggest philosophical swindles of our time is that anyone thinks it does.

@Isaac is entirely right that 'free will' is destructive of responsibility, and not in any sense an enabling condition.

Sure we can. There's lots out there that has. But humans are stupid for the most part and like sticking to the tried and tired ways. It would be nice to abolish 'nature' too while we're at it.

You might enjoy this:

Were philosophy able to do away once and for all with the dualisms of form and matter, substance and accident, essence and existence, it would for once be able to claim a result. Until then it'll remain the history of a sad failure.

And? Again, the relavence is?

You tell me. If you think these distinctions, drawn by Augustine in different contexts, have any relevance to our discussion, you can explain their relevance yourself. Here's some quotes to help you:

"What you take vengeance on is what men inflict on themselves, for even when they sin against you, they do evil to their own souls. Man's iniquity lies to itself, whether by corrupting and perverting their own nature, which you have made and set in order, or by immoderate use of things permitted to men, or ... by a burning lust for that use which is contrary to nature .... Such things are done, when you are forsaken, O fountain of life, who are the sole and true creator and ruler of the universe .... Therefore by humble devotion return is made to you, and you cleanse us from evil ways, and are merciful to those who confess to you and graciously hear the groans of those shackled by sin, and you free them from the chains that we have made for ourselves." (Confessions)

"The soul, in fact, rejoiced in its own freedom to act perversely and disdained to be God's servant; and so it was deprived of obedient service which its body had first rendered. At its own pleasure the soul deserted its superior and master; and so it no longer retained its inferior and servant obedient to its will. It did not keep its own flesh subject to it in all respects as it could have kept it forever if it had itself continued in Subjection to God." (City of God)

"Every man is separated from God, except those who are reconciled to God through Christ the Mediator; and that no one can be separated from God, except by sins, which alone cause separation; that there is, therefore, no reconciliation except by the remission of sins, through the one grace of the most merciful Saviour, — through the one sacrifice of the most veritable Priest; and that none who are born of the woman, that trusted the serpent and so was corrupted through desire, Genesis 3:6 are delivered from the body of this death, except by the Son of the virgin who believed the angel and so conceived without desire." (On The Merit and Forgiveness of Sins)

I mean, there's no way your question is entirely irrelevant, is it?

Point is: Christianity is pervasively self-contradictory. That's why it's impossible to trace any particular historic trend back to it. — frank

Wrong. You can trace plenty of conceptual innovations back to Christian philosophy, and as lots of authors agree, free will is precisely one of them. Those ignorant of this history still continue to argue over 'free will' and 'free choice' as though these concepts were in any way exhaustive or even remotely adequate to thinking freedom. The irony being that such concepts were invented to all the better subjugate people to the idea of an all powerful, forgiving God. Free will as a tool of extreme unfreedom.

What was Augustine rejecting? It's not an ancient Greek conception of responsibility. — frank

Whether or not he meant to reject it or not, that's what he effectively did, and that's what we were addressing. William Connolly's The Augustinian Imperative is probably the work that explores the concequences of Augustine's renewed conception of responsibility best, if you were ever to bother to look it up. The rest of your post is irrelavent.

Or to quote from another source:

"By attributing to the human mind (and hence the human person) the character of voluntary self-control and self-origination, Augustine turned away from a Greek classical conception of the mind (and hence human nature) as characterized by its cognitive capacities of critical thinking and insight, theoretical contemplation, natural discovery, and logical deduction and argument. Augustine’s fateful turn reoriented Western Latin culture away from the Platonic intellectualist conception of human moral nature as either clear-sighted or confused and benighted (and in either case within the natural order) and toward the idea of a human person as fundamentally moral or immoral, responsible or irresponsible, obedient or sinful through choice of action rather than through understanding and character.

In the Platonic tradition, by contrast, the body’s corruption was responsible for the mind being morally clouded; hence moral ignorance—not active sin but the Greek hamartia, “missing the mark”—was the result of the problems inherent in embodiment. Aristotle’s view was a nuance on the Platonic: his was an account of moral action as stemming from moral character. In this theory, early socialization shaped desire, enabling a person to have the capacity for moral discernment and understanding, as well as deliberative reasoning. Augustine, in contrast, explicitly rejected the body as the source of ignorance or error, neither of which, in any case, could in his view ever account for sin. He regarded that view as pagan and said, “Those who suppose the ills of the soul derive from the body are in error.”

...The upshot of Augustine’s reduction of all internal mental operations—thoughts, emotions, feelings, judgments, learning—to acts of will is a new theory of moral psychology. This new theory amounted to nothing less than a shift in worldview—in the conception of the human person and of the universe that human beings inhabit and, hence, in the conception of moral agency—initiating a decisive break with the past by focusing on the freedom of the will and a concomitant demotion of nature. It is this worldview that we have inherited" (Heidi Ravven, The Self Beyond Itself).

Compare Agamben: "Hence the intellectualistic character of ancient ethics, which seems so abstract to modern moralists. According to the Socratic maxim, every evil action is actually ignorance, because no one “does evil voluntarily” (ouden hēkon hamartanei; Protagoras 358b). We are so accustomed to refer the problem of action to the will that it is not easy for us to accept that the classical world thought it, by contrast, almost exclusively in terms of knowledge. As has been effectively observed, one could say that for the Greek person “as soon as the good is known, freedom of action, which is for us in the last analysis the decisive thing, is abolished” ([Julius] Stenzel, p. 173)."

This is an attractive and pastoral (Nietzscheian) just-so story, but it is also has the distinct disadvantage of being wrong, or at least wholly misleading. The transformation went far beyond simply shifting the mere locus of responsibility from God to man. Such a story neglects the transformation undergone by the very concept of responsibility itself, which did not emerge from the other side of the shift unchanged.

Specifically, where for the ancients responsibility was action oriented and objective, Christian philosophy reoriented responsibility by interiorizing it within a subject. That is, responsibility was once was a matter of sanctioning a penalty for an action and not a fault to a subject: guilt was objective (proportional to a punishment) and not subjective (proportional to one's intention or 'will'). The difference is roughly between 'you have done a wrong thing' and 'you are in the wrong for having done the thing'. To reuse and expand a quote above:

[The Greek volitional terms] do not have a moral origin and therefore do not refer to subjective conditions that make agents the ethically responsible cause of their actions. Instead we are dealing with juridical categories, by means of which the Greek city sought to regulate the exercise of private vengeance by distinguishing, according to the passionate reactions that they aroused in the citizens, diverse levels of punishability. ...It is not a matter of founding responsibility in the subject’s will, but of ascertaining it objectively, according to the various levels of possibility of the subject’s actions. [In Christian philosophy] the connection between action and agent, which was originally defined in an exclusively factual way, is now founded in a principle inherent in the subject, which constitutes the subject as culpable. That means that fault has been displaced from the action to the subject who, if he or she has acted sciente et volente, bears the whole responsibility for it." (Karman)

It is in fact precisely this reconceptualization of responsibility that allows Christian philosophy to link freedom and the will: by displacing responsibility from an objective to subjective category, it opens the door to a subject mired in sin: delinked from action, responsibility becomes a category unto itself such that only a Christian can say that one is born in sin from the very beginning. 'Free will', in turn, helps explain sin. This is another reason why Hairy's insistence that 'free will' was 'already there' and just needed a bit of a reorganization of terms is so laughably and historically tin-eared: the introduction of 'free will' required an entire conceptual upheaval that could only have been theologically motivated. So yeah, the pop-Nietzschean story you've relayed needs a great deal more to it to adequately reflect the changes wrought by the misery of Christian philosophy.

You're right I need to attribute it to hysteric Christians and hysteric late (unnamed, uncited) Platonists, each about a 100 or so years apart from each other. Thank you for your trivial contribution.

So no free will until the late Platonists and Christians, cool, gotchya, thanks for playing, come again, Wiki in hand.

Not at all. It follows freely from her explicit arguments that those who read either as employing a notion of 'free will' are imposing anarchronisms foisted from without, that is, externally, no doubt due to a complete lack of either historical or philosophical sense. Probably because they source their information from Wikipedia articles.

If neither Alexander nor the Stoics faced a free will problem 'within' their respective systems, where else were they meant to face it exactly? In a Christian theological system? Lo and behold, that's just where free will as a problem was invented.

"If Alexander wasn't Alexander, he would have invented free will! If the Stoics weren't Stoics they would have also invented free will!". Well done, A+ for creative thinking. You can go back to Wiki class now, don't forget your packed lunch.

What would you call this clockwork imbalancing? — Shamshir

Probs not.

So overdosing is actually a good thing, is it? — Shamshir

Overdosing is the end of productive imbalance: death puts a stop to the controlled disequilibrium that is a living body, and puts an end to the asymmetric distinction of life from the inanimate that surrounds it.

Hail to the right-handed neutrino! It tipped all the balances. — PoeticUniverse

Hell yeah.

Forget 'balance'. The only reason nature exists in the first place is because of imbalance, asymmetry, and the destruction of equality. Had the balance not been tipped in favour of matter over antimatter at the beginning of the universe, each would have cancelled each other out and there would be no universe. In turn, if there weren't such things as what physicists call 'charge-parity violations' of space-time symmetry, there wouldn't have been more matter to begin with. Time itself is an asymmetric phenomenon. That certain molecules exhibit 'handedness' or chirality such that there is bias in how they bond (one direction, and not another), is crucial to the very existence of life (standard DNA, for instance, is entirely 'right-handed' - it spirals right only).

Balance is the harbinger of death, and it's only in breaking balance, throwing it out of whack, that anything at all exists.

Matthew Warren - Balckout: How Is Energy-Rich Australia Running Out of Electricity?
Patchen Markell - Bound By Recognition

You forgot to quote her when she says that the concept of the will and therefore the problem of free will and of the compatibility of causal determinism and freedom to do otherwise can be found, besides Christians, in Platonists in the second century. — hairy belly

Sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of you totally abandoning the authors you initially quoted in favour of some last minute updates because you thought a Wiki article was in any way an adequate source of anything.

As for Bobzien's unnamed and uncited 2nd century Platonists, I'm more than happy to concede that, insofar we're still talking more than 100 years after the birth of Christ, with Lactantius himself writing in the 3rd century AD. And insofar as these unnamed and uncited Platonists were themselves wrangling with the problem of evil, that's precisely the context in which I originally said the so-called 'problem of free will' stems from anyway. Happy to amend: "Free will is a thoroughly theological problem, and did not exist as a 'problem' prior to Christian theologians and super late Platonists who invented it to solve the problem of evil". That free will is a late historical invention is by far the point I'm most interested in making. As for Bobzien herself, I quote from her aptly titled The Inadvertent Conception and Late Birth of the Free-Will Problem:

"It is then presumably only a slight overstatement when I conclude with saying: the problem of physical causal determinism and freedom of decision entered the scene in the 2nd century A.D., by a chance encounter of Stoic physics and the fruits of early Aristotle exegesis, with the contemporary focus on the culpability of mental events and the introduction of a power of decision making as catalysts - and it was not part of the philosophical repertoire for long."

The crypto-theologians in this thread can continue their Christian apologetics by pretending that free will is anything but a religious issue, and that those 'rich intuitions' that people think they have of free will are more than just historico-cultural memes ratiocinated onto ambigious feelings after the fact. In any case I'd wager that the preponderence of this obscure theological problematic in our time has alot more to do with the modern market economy than any apprarent 'perennial' metaphysical problem.

In fact, since your 'research' cites Bobzien, whose book on the Sotics is a widely acknowledged masterpiece of historical philosophy, let's see what she has to say:

"None of the Peripatetic and Middle-Platonist authors is concerned with free-will, with that which depends on us, or with moral responsibility, when they discuss contingency, or two-sided possibility. True, that which depends on us is included in the contingent, but so are other things. Accordingly, neither in Plutarch nor in Boethius nor in Alexander does that which depends on us enter the discussion..." "...There is no evidence at all that Chrysippus or any other early Stoic grappled with the problem of character determination and moral responsibility, let alone the problem of character determination and free will."

"...The Stoics did not require a concept of freedom to do otherwise, since they did not connect moral responsibility with such freedom. As a consequence, they had no reason to concern themselves with any free-will problem. Theirs is the problem of the compatibility of autonomous agency and causal determinism. On the Peripatetic side, Alexander [of Aphrodisias] faced no free-will problem either. ...A problem of determinism and freedom to do otherwise thus arises only in the confrontation of the two philosophical systems, when later Stoic causal determinism meets late Peripatetic freedom to do otherwise—with such freedom understood as a necessary condition for moral responsibility". (Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy).

And since you cited Epicurus so prominently, lets hear what she has to say about him too:

"There is no compelling textual evidence for the assumption that Epicurus was concerned with freedom of decision or choice or with a problem of free will. There is no evidence that he discussed, or even had a conception of, freedom of decision or freedom of choice. There is no evidence that he had a concept of moral responsibility that is grounded on freedom of choice, or on freedom of decision. There is not even any direct evidence that he thought freedom to do otherwise was jeopardized by atomistic determinism. There is further no compelling evidence that the swerve played a role in the formation of volitional acts of decision processes.

I hence suggest that the whole idea that Epicurus was concerned with the free will problem is anachronistic, and that - at least as long as no positive evidence comes to light - the view that Epicurus thought there was such a problem, and that he endeavoured to solve it, should be dropped". (Did Epicurus Discover the Free Will Problem?).

I would quote her on Lucretius too, but whipping the dead is mean. Guess things are pretty easy to miss when the depth of one's 'reading' goes as far - or rather as near - as a Wiki page.

If we were even half as advanced as the ancients were about freedom, we'd probably have dropped the stupid notion of free will and free choice a long time ago.

Given that the book I cited is largely a genealogy of the will in which all the primary sources of your 2 second wiki search are quoted from and engaged with, the pertinent question is just how delicious the irony is about 'missing reading'. I quote selectively and without commentary:

"One of the few questions on which historians of ancient thought seem to be in perfect agreement is in fact the lack of a notion corresponding to that of the will in classical culture ([Eric] Dodds, p. 6; cf. [Albrecht] Dihle, p. 20). ... Precisely because the will “is not a datum of human nature,” but “a complex construction whose history appears to be as difficult, multiple, and incomplete as that of the self, of which it is to a great extent an integral part” (ibid., p. 50) [citation from Jean-Pierre Vernant], it is necessary to keep up our guard against anachronistically projecting onto ancient people our way of conceiving of the behaviors, free choices, and responsibilities of the subject.

It is significant from this perspective that the Greeks, to express what we designate with the single term “will,” would have had recourse to a plurality of words: boulēsis (and the corresponding verb boulomai), “desire, intention”; boulē, “decision, project, counsel”; thelēsis (and thelō), which means being ready or disposed to do something (also in a purely objective sense: thelei gignesthai, “it wants to happen,” as Tuscan peasants used to say: non vuol piovere, “it doesn’t want to rain”); orexis, which indicates appetite in general, the faculty of desiring. None of these terms correspond to our notion of will, understood as the foundation of free and responsible action.

[These terms] do not have a moral origin and therefore do not refer to subjective conditions that make agents the ethically responsible cause of their actions. Instead we are dealing with juridical categories, by means of which the Greek city sought to regulate the exercise of private vengeance by distinguishing, according to the passionate reactions that they aroused in the citizens, diverse levels of punishability. ...It is not a matter of founding responsibility in the subject’s will, but of ascertaining it objectively, according to the various levels of possibility of the subject’s actions. To the preeminence accorded by modern people to the will, there corresponds in the ancient world a primacy of potential: human beings are not responsible for their actions because they have willed them; they answer for them because they were able to carry them out."

"The term “free will” (liberum arbitrium) is used by Christian authors to translate the Greek expressions autexousion (literally “what has power over itself”) and to eph’ēmin (literally “what depends on us”), which in Neoplatonic treatises and Aristotle’s commentators designate the capacity to decide on one’s own actions. The modern translation of the term as “freedom,” which is frequently encountered, is equivocal, because the context in which it is used is not that of political freedom (which is called eleuthēria in Greek) but the moral and juridical one, which is by now familiar to us, of the imputability of actions. The origin of the term is, after all, juridical: arbitrium is the decision or faculty of judging of the arbiter, of the judge in a lawsuit (arbiter dicitur iudex, quod totius rei habet arbitrium et facultatum) and, by extension, the subject’s faculty of deciding.

...In the general convergence of late-ancient culture toward the same insistent problematic nuclei, the question of the autonomy of human actions was posed by philosophers in relation to fate. Exemplary from this point of view is the treatise Peri heimarmenē (On Fate) of Alexander of Aphrodisias, the “exegete” par excellence of Aristotle’s thought. Against the Stoics, who seemed to accord a preponderant part to fate, for him it was a question of “preserving what depends on us [ to eph’ēmin sozesthai ]” (Alexander, p. 38/60). ...

The strategy within which the free will of the Fathers functions, while showing some obvious analogies with those of the philosophers, is essentially different. For Alexander, the problem is in fact still the Aristotelian one of the ambiguity of human potential, and the eph’ēmin consists essentially in “being able to do opposites” (dynasthai ta antikeimena, ibid. p. 24/58; dynasthai hairesthai to antikeimenon, p. 25/58); for Christian theologians it is instead a matter of singling out in the will the principle of imputability of human actions, and to this end, they must first of all translate the problem of potential into that of will (de libera voluntate quaestio est, “it is a question of free will”; Augustine, On Free Will, 2.19.51)."

"Ancient human beings were people who “can,” who conceive their thought and their action in the dimension of potential; Christian human beings are beings that will."

I omit the specific engagements with Lucretius and the Stoics for the sake of space. There is of course, the rest of the book which continues much in this vein as well. In the meantime, I wish you well on your future Wikipedia research and citations of works you have not read.

A great deal would be disentangled if one starts from a couple of select points; namely:

(1) Free will is a thoroughly theological problem, and did not exist as a 'problem' prior to Christian theologians who invented it to solve the problem of evil.

(2) Freedom can and ought to be decoupled from the mystifying notion of 'will', which is no less theological and also had to be invented by a bunch of hysteric Christians grappling with the problem of the biblical devil ("beginning in the third century, the Fathers and apologists use it [will] as a technical term to express the mastery of the will over actions in a particularly delicate sphere: that of the origin of evil and responsibility for sin. In this sense it is found for the first time in Lactantius (Divine Institutes 2.9.49), referring significantly to the devil", Giorgio Agamben, Karman).

(3) The connection between freedom and choice also ought to be completely abolished insofar as freedom to create the very conditions of choice, to establish new possibilities, and not simply 'choose' between pre-existing ready-mades is the only manner in which freedom has any significance whatsoever.

(4) The idea that freedom is some pseudo-psychological 'inner' concept needs to be abolished once and for all in favour of an understanding of freedom as at once biological, social and political: a centrifugal rather than centripetal understanding of freedom, one that finds its roots in places far beyond our bodies rather than in some indefinable, inexplicable vanishing point in some mysterious locus in the brain. Freedom must be understood ecologically or not at all.

Every time someone talks about freedom in terms of 'free will' and 'free choice', they are in no way talking about freedom, but theology. A heuristic: if you cannot talk about freedom without talking about choice and will at the same time, you're not talking about freedom. As if science needs 'free will'. Christianity completely fucked our intuitions regarding freedom, and science would do well to be rid of the theological trash that is 'free will' to all the better understand what freedom consists in.

Bo Burnham, of all people, made a good point (somewhere) about how, in converting all aspects of life into different apps you see on the same phone, flipping from one app to another as we like - we've created this flattening effect where everything is seen as part of the same basic thing, on the same level. — csalisbury

That's a really neat way to put it. My only concern would be if such flattening effects were treated as cause rather than effect: I'd wager that such flattening is the result of exactly what happens when the political field is ceded - absent any substantial mechanisms for civic or democratic engagement, all we have left is the flattened field of circulating media and its attendant affects. By now this is old hat ('clicktivism'), but the key is to see it as symptom, not disease (otherwise, you get entangled in the liberal game of meta-shame: 'look at you, all you can do is try and 'like' your way to revolution, tsk tsk, back in my day...'. It's hellish, pure hell, and its why so many boomerish critiques of social media come off as, well, viscerally digusting to me).

The Vampire's Castle. As in when you say 'we' and 'us' who is that? I feel like it has to be the group of people who feels this internet shaming thing in their bones and its really hard to know how representative that culture is of the nation as a whole. Whoever they/we are, its a group that believes in the power of shame, and, at a certain point, all that matters is that the shame hits its target, so we lob a desultory shame-rock at those outside our reach, and laser-shame those who are enough like us to feel the effects. — csalisbury

I like to think I'm using these terms performatively. I speak of 'us' and 'we' as both an invitation and a claim to community; an invitation to to find common cause, and a claim to belong to those causes already operative 'out there'. Without making too much hay out of it, one of the points is to risk rebuff and renegotiation ('who are you to speak of us?'). The obverse is acknowledgement, a 'yes, we share in this'. The danger is when those terms congeal into solidified 'identities', nouns: 'we' are such and such, and 'they' are otherwise. Alot of this is ratiocination for a rhetorical quirk I picked up a long time ago, but only recently found a way to articulate why I find it attractive.

At the very least the first-person plural tries to mitigate, to whatever degree, the 'game of liberal meta-shame' I spoke of above.

This is the salient distinction I was trying to tease out with fdrake. Putting it another way is to say that randomness is indeterminability. Ontological randomness would be ontological indeterminism, which is defined as microphysical events being not merely epistemically random, meaning they are not determined by anything at all, they simply happen without cause. — Janus

Without wading too much into this, I deliberately avoided questions of 'in/determination' - indeed avoided the word(s) altogether - insofar as I think one can treat randomness - in the sense I outlined - without at all engaging in questions of determination and cause. I'll only say that I'm not convinced that one can make sense of the idea of indetermination or randomness ('ontological randomness'), and that what we need instead is a far richer conception of 'determination' than is usually presented, which is usually just fatalism evacuated of any causality whatsoever.

I agree that something has to be 'fixed' in the background for 'randomness' to make sense, but this 'fixing' isn't necessarily epistemic (though it can also be that as well). — fdrake

Mm, I was not entirely comfortable with my use of the ontological/epistemic distinction. I suppose what I wanted to emphazise was the necessity of an intervention by an agent, or at least another system, the interaction between which would alone give sense to any measure of randomness. Any 'epistemic' investigation would of course, be a subclass of this type of intervention, but you're right that the former would not exhaust what fixes the background against which randomness would appear.

I guess that one could put it in terms you've been using recently too: you need a system with sensitivities to the potential distribution of events in order for randomness to make itself 'show'. When we investigate randomness, we set up such systems - we are, or make ourselves sensitive to such situations. Or in a non-epistemic manner, one example that springs to mind is using radioactive decay to generate cryptographic keys: such a process harnesses the randomness of atomic decay to generate unique, hard-to-hack keys for encryption purposes. Would this kind of thing jibe with what you had in mind?

Oh that's right this is why I don't respond to you, ever. My mistake.