This is disgusting.

I still have the exact same look.

Nope. Beautiful dress thought, right?

I went wedding dress shopping with my friend yesterday (who is getting married) and she asked me to try on a dress I really liked because she thinks that she will lose enough weight over the coming months to be my size. I am not often gobsmacked, but I thought the dress was incredibly beautiful.

No, not really. When I say:

the only problem here is you both - as men - trying to rationale hasty generalisations of approaching and eventually soliciting sexual intercourse or intimacy — TimeLine

And you say:

Women generally don't want weak partners. They aren't really different from men in that regard, a lot of us would also very much dislike overly meek partners. Asking for permission can be seen as submissive, especially when it is done over and over again. — Akanthinos

I think I am justified to question whether you understood what hasty generalisations are.

He was the big boss in the coal gas company it was made for, so the named it after him. I only found out about it just before my dad died so there is not much I know about it except what is on line. When I get rich I might go take a ride on it. — Sir2u

Do you know much else about him, about the coal gas company itself, his role, influence or was everything thrown on you when your father was unwell? And why do you need to be rich?

Do you have trouble reading English?

You do have those Dan Quayle moments: "I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn’t study Latin harder in school so I could converse with them." I'll let it pass as a moment of inarticustupilackafecacleansia.

Can you explain how that happened?

That doesn't sound any less romantic. Maybe the culture is just different where I grew up, but I have it on good authority from multiple women I've had relationships with that women do not want you to ask, they want you to act. — JustSomeGuy

You say women expect men to do the first move, and that they also expect this first move to be physical, and that these incompatible expectations are at the source of the negative dynamics between the sexes. You then lay an icing of "women are emotional and not rational" with the cherry of "women don't have more problems than man". — Akanthinos

You both are wrong.

I am unsure whether you are aware of this, but all women are different and the only problem here is you both - as men - trying to rationale hasty generalisations of approaching and eventually soliciting sexual intercourse or intimacy. The problem of the OP is this solicitation, this subjective intent. Would you like it if you were approached only because of the value you have as an object to the person approaching you? That my history, my thoughts and opinions, my skills in the workplace and talent are all irrelevant as long as I have a vagina?

Perhaps you should change your attitude and have a discussion about how to solicit friendship. That may alleviate your problem.

So, Mr. Politically Correct, how many Congoians would you want coming to the UK versus how many Dutch would you want? — Hanover

It's Congolese.

What this misses is the personality type that feels crowded by others. A person can get beyond the need for that abstract audience. I suppose most of us will still want at least a single lover or a single friend. But a few of us could probably be pretty happy alone on a space station for years even, as long as the cultural stain of others was accessible. (Books, movies, etc.) — dog

What is intolerable is the inability to connect with others; you can have a partner, family, friends and still feel unbearably alone because there is no genuine love but rather a behavioural programme that promises eventual happiness if you conform to an ideal. You do what you are told by society and you are told to distrust yourself, to become alienated from yourself as though consciousness is your enemy, that the danger of losing this eventual happiness is you and so you must go. It is like dominating parents that if you do not do what they tell you, you will experience something bad or wrong and they will raise you from birth using guilt and fear until you reach a point where you become automaton; you do not know how to think for yourself.

Capitalism and our societal norms are like farmers fattening their cows with hormones and rearing them ready for slaughter; you are only worth something if you do what you are told.

When one experiences anxiety or depression, it is the inner you, the real you trying to call out but it doesn't have a language and so all you have is the feeling that something is wrong. Your identity is not your own and so you will need to form a new language to articulate who you are and that is incredibly difficult because everything that you have been trained to believe is reality is shaken. It is easier to put an end to it either by suicide/shutting down or by conformism than to face the pits of hell trying to begin anew.

What we fail to understand is that love is a faculty or a state of mind, like reason and it is not something spontaneous or independent of our sensibilities. The moment that you stop expecting or working hard to try and be loved by impressing this system through power or attractiveness or having popular traits, and instead start using the faculty or the inherent mental capacity to give love - charity, kindness, affection to all things and not selectively - that social system breaks down and you start to learn this new language, this very 'you' that never had a chance to know. If everybody wants love and no one gives it, what exactly happens to love? Once you take that responsibility, the gloom disappears, the isolation, because you become a conscious part of this world and not just some automaton.

But (from my perspective) you are ignoring the gloom of the confident, articulate, and popular personality type. — dog

How one represents themselves is irrelevant; anxiety and depression are both different symptoms to the exact same pathology. One can disassociate as a coping mechanism, another can eat excessively, others can form habits in drink and drugs, and finally the confident and popular personality or the perfect conformist.

Even if he gets his time in the woods with ideal companions (hard work or a risky crime footing the bill), that time is finite and ends in accident or decay. — dog

You cannot help who you fall in love with (I know that from experience) and all is vanity, but it is about the memories we share and make with one another while it lasts that matters (you should read Darkness Visible).

I do see love as eternal, but not in the way most people do. For me, a genuine friendship is the basis of real love, because the union is about solidarity and our differences are negligible and where we relate with our core values - "I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself."
When I fell in love, I loved the real 'him' that I could see but no one else - neither him - could see, but he was all over the place and so I kept my distance intentionally (I never showed him the real me either and so he has no idea how compatible we actually are). I improved as a person, though, because of this love that I felt but I could never share. Improvement never decays.

So, two people can unite and share in romance and even marriage and those experience can end, but the friendship will never end which is why friendship is a type of love that is eternal. There is nothing greater than finding a true friend to alleviate the emptiness.

I have noticed two types of love, the first being a neediness, a possessiveness, something filled with expectation and obligation, something that is measured, scored, and constantly being tested and evaluated. It's critical, demanding, and corrected by retaliation, manipulation, and withholding of affection. It is a type of love that seems to me to bring nothing but misery to both parties, yet I see people cling tightly to such relationships, I guess for fear that they might have to eat their lunch all by themselves. — Hanover

(Y) Perfectly said. The individual self disappears and such people can often be controlled without ever knowing why, as though there is some sort of a terminal danger to non-conformity. Yet an unconscious frustration can build to a point that they may even take pleasure in misbehaving behind the scenes while advertising a completely different person, pretending to independence when their thoughts and ideas just so happens to be what everyone else thinks. Existence is merely a set of rules that they follow.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. — Thoreau

The exact opposite to this is not correct either, this self-sacrificial, so-called 'unselfish' attitude that is favourably looked upon by dogmatic influences as a redeeming character trait that nevertheless also contains a hidden resentment. But this attitude still desires others since they apparently live for others at the expense of themselves.

It is about striking that balance because there is love and it can correctly be expressed; to be altruistic without being self-sacrificial, to have empathy and be righteous. It is responsibility that does not deteriorate into possessiveness, respect without domination, to want someone to be happy not for my sake or at my expense, to not serve me because I care or expect anything in return for my concern, this is love in the absence of any type of exploitation. It is the authenticity of my motivation that matters; I do not act because I am needy, I do not love you only because I am lonely or anxious, but I want you to be in my life because I love you, the person that you are, the choices that you make.

I stated in another post that I believe a significant amount of unhappiness is caused by bad parenting, and I really believe that. I think we have kids out there who really don't know what real love is, having never experienced it, but instead being bounced between mom and dad and watching and hearing their hatred towards one another. — Hanover

I actually do to; a dominating mother can make a young man do what he is told even as an adult so that he does not displease her and this can spread to others. The only way one can ever recover is to realise that parents are just people and that wisdom can be sourced from other places.

Should I feel my contributions were significantly greater than my spouse's, it wouldn't be anger that I felt in having the excessive workload, but it would be concern of her lack of concern over me and our child, which would be a signal of her lack of love, or perhaps worse, that she is of the former type I described that does not know what love is. — Hanover

There is no love in such a scenario (I take it you are pretending here), and it becomes nothing but consumption or exchange where each adapt by learning to treat one another with tolerance, counselled to ignore the unhappiness by promising happiness will eventually result.

"The commodity market determines the conditions under which commodities are exchanged, the labour market regulates the acquisition and sale of labour... What is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions. Human relations are essential those of alienated automatons."

I do think it's a lack of love. A person in love with a another person or a cause has pep in their step and purpose. That's why it's hard to empathize with someone in this state. They are gloomy and self-absorbed. Nothing fascinates or deeply pleases them. Maybe half-consciously they are fascinated by death. I remember feeling torn between life and death. — dog

You cannot correctly love others neither find any purpose without first learning to love yourself, only what we understand of love is problematic. We attempt to achieve unity in others, fuse with the group, silence consciousness by inducing a mindless state and sometimes through the help of drugs or alcohol, but these rituals eventually fall short as the anxiety only engenders further isolation until we grow anxious for more as a refuge to avoid the feelings reality produces. Conformity and obedience, this active indulgence to make oneself physically attractive, or successful and powerful, or to be popular only objectifies a desire to be loved under the illusion that one has their own ideas or that they have independent opinions. It fosters a faux unity in the hope that it will relieve the anxiety, but automatons cannot love and so we work so hard at selling ourselves to an audience that is never satisfied.

"Modern capitalism needs men who co-operate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardised and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience - yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim."

This self-destructiveness is an unconscious frustration against this reality, a desire to destroy or end the bullshit but turned in on itself because the way that we have been trained, the way that the world functions is distinct from this actual reality that we are unable to confront consciously. We somehow think that we have the problem. For example, if you are raised in a culture entrenched with the idea that your parents are absolutely and unequivocally right in everything that they say or do and if you think otherwise you are a bad person, whenever you are confronted with the possibility that this reality may not be true, you feel bad, you feel like there is something wrong with you, and the self-destructiveness is really your anger at this confusion; what you really want to destroy is the lie, but you don't know how to because you don't realise that it is a lie. Your feelings are really the voice of your unconscious that you are unable to articulate and so all you are left with are the feelings and these feelings hurt, they are a form of pain that you want to end.

You cannot genuinely love or enjoy anything until you respect yourself enough to confront the actuality of your situation rather than attempt to save yourself with self-sacrifical illusions.

I am authentically inauthentic :D — Agustino

Are you saying you are untrustworthy?

The young man version involves a disgust at what life requires. The old man version (and I'm not that old) involves jadedness. — dog

Both lack any authentic relationship with the external world, that bond formed through genuine love. Most of what people form is really an infantile dependency that superficially attempts to covert this alienation by keeping them preoccupied, following and trying to be close to others and yet no matter how close they try to get, they always feel this sense of insecurity and a deep sense of anxiety because they feel - which is a form of knowing - that this alienation is not overcome. They become jaded, mechanical, and the continuity of their existence is almost entirely based on routine amusements as they passively consume to pass the time.

This brings to mind a quote from M. Eckhart: "If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you will not really succeed in loving yourself, but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person and that person is both God and man. Thus he is a great and righteous person who, loving himself, loves all others equally."

What guys do to get the girl :D

Changing one shit-hole job for another one, for instance, won't help. We might not know what kind of work will make us happy. Dumping one hopeless relationship and then starting another hopeless affair will not make one feel better. Maybe we need to learn about what a good relationship looks like, and learn how to build one. — Bitter Crank

Depression is like experiencing an intense form of selfishness, so it was tough deciding between the final two in your poll because of this; while I agree that social and environmental conditions initiate the onset of depression, is it because of self-defeating ideas and delusional thinking? I think that a good, mature relationship first needs to begin with yourself and I remembered reading Erich Fromm' books the following (thanks to this thread I picked it up again from my bookshelf);

Selfishness and self-love, far from being identical, are actually opposites. The selfish person does not love himself too much but too little; in fact he hates himself. This lack of fondness and care for himself, which is only one expression of his lack of productiveness, leaves him empty and frustrated. He is necessarily unhappy and anxiously concerned to snatch from life the satisfactions which he blocks himself from attaining. He seems to care too much for himself, but actually he only makes an unsuccessful attempt to cover up and compensate for his failure to care for his real self. Freud holds that the selfish person is narcissistic, as if he had withdrawn his love from others and turned it towards his own person. It is true that selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either. — Fromm

Several years ago I experienced a number of difficulties by a number of different people around me including colleagues in my job at the time that I was humiliated to a point I almost came to believe that I was worthless, which caused me to stop eating and becoming very sick. The hollow feeling was intense, I can assure you. I recovered because I started to take care of myself and understand what it meant to love both myself and others, particularly through forgiveness and a brutal honesty about what it is that I want, which required an entire structural change in my environment. I was delusional prior to this and thus allowed toxic people to influence me. I studied law, but I changed my career to youth work and have never been happier working with children. Yes, we need to learn what a good relationship looks like and that ultimately starts with the relationship we have with ourselves.

Your photos of Italy made me think about the trip to Europe I made with my brother in 2014. On the trip, after 10 days together, sharing rooms most nights, I found out that, after 67 years of being brothers, it turns out we are also friends. Whoda thunkit. — T Clark

It also took me 10 days in Italy to become friends with me. It is those memorable stories, the relationship between you and the experience that makes something beautiful. The rug you liked, the orange bowl, these are fragments of your existence that I am thankful you are sharing, an image with an essence. I find that abovementioned statement beautiful.

When I was younger, I went on a school excursion to the rainforest and the smell of the wet ferns remains pierced into my senses that till this day I love trekking through rainforest. I loved going on school excursions as a child (and excursions as an adult!); I remember going on one and seeing a giant opal encased in a stone. Till this day, I am entranced by opal gemstones.

When I had a serious car accident several years ago, my situation worsened physically and mentally months after I actually had it and by lucky chance through the transport commission, I was given the opportunity to fly out to Italy. It was after visiting Cafe Florian, the Dolomite mountains, Florence and San Gimignano that I slowly started healing again and it has taken me a good two years to really bring myself together again. Seeing Caravaggio (in particular St. Jerome writing) who is one of my favourite artists at the Villa Borghese (also Bernini and Titian) and everything about my time in Italy is beautiful to me for that reason.

That was before Tolkien, right?

And bringing us full circle, it was a woman who brought about the fall of man by having him eat the apple. The woman, like Satan, is often portrayed as one who tempts, or a temptress. — Hanover

No, he made the choice and then blamed the woman for his own decision; he was equally punished for that reason. That is the warning. Eve was tempted by the devil and Adam was tempted by Eve. It is the reason why women have been subjected to strict regulations by men.

Where do you think they got their ideas from?

So, they didn't teach the New Testament in the school I attended, and so I never took that rag seriously. It is likely the Greek pronouns work the same way with Greek being a masculine/feminine language like Hebrew, but I don't know. I agree with the basic notion that womanly qualities relate to maternalistic nurturing and manly qualities can relate to paternalistic disciplining and control. But that's not to say that the bible has only positive qualities to say about women: "It is better to live in a desert land than with a contentious and vexing woman." Proverbs 21:19. . וַיֹּאמְרוּ כָל-הַקָּהָל אָמֵן — Hanover

I was never taught anything religion and growing up alone, my enthusiasm for biblical exegesis is completely independent, but I usually avoid discussions of such a kind because lacking such bias, it is difficult for those who did grow up with a religion to understand how I interpret the parables and symbols within them; their interpretations are usually legitimised by either dogmatic values or the lack thereof and thus it is more about the institutional practice and less about the subjective quality in the meaning. This would enable more violent aspects to the scriptures to be considered justifiable to practice. I am also not naive to view the bible literally, but I see most of what is in there as stories that attempt to illustrate and reveal moral or political values.

Kant is much easier to understand and why I have my concessions of Divine Command Theory because for most, it is not the scriptures that guide people' behaviour but the cultural and religious institutions that do and it is them that interpret what the scriptures mean, not the individual. If, on the other hand, we are discussing God from a Kantian angle, ultimately our will or our subjective intent matters and that requires autonomy, particularly from such dogmatic influence. While we may have the duty to adhere to moral laws in similar vein, it is ultimately us that need to do this and not a system. I agree, however, that reaching this transcendence is not a simple endeavour and as such these institutions are a necessary evil, and I say evil because it is static and does not provide the manoeuvrability that will allow people to find their own way and instead enforce the contrary. It brings me to mind of the island escape in Brave New World.

As for the latter part of your idea, there is a schism of this feminine in both Proverbs and the Book of Revelations, which I think serves as a warning for the desire that compels one to become wayward from moral virtue. Proverbs is about avoiding this immorality: "My son, give attention to my wisdom, incline your ear to my understanding; that you may observe discretion and your lips may reserve knowledge. For the lips of an adulteress drip honey, and smoother than oil is her speech; but in the end she is bitter as wormwood" and "Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies." The whore of Babylon, for instance, is such a woman (drinking the blood of prophets which is figurative of rejecting the wisdom that the prophets died for) and controls the 'beast' just like how Jezebel controls the King; this Jezebel type woman is one such woman that causes the 'lamb' (symbolic of a good man) to go astray and become a beast. The success of her destruction and the lamb' marriage to the Bride is symbolic of the triumph of virtue: "Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints," to say she is a righteous woman, i.e. Jerusalem is a righteous city.

I thought we were trying to determine why God planted the tree, which would require a textual analysis, as opposed to asserting the views of a philosopher not terribly receptive to the divine command theory of the bible. — Hanover

As you correctly pointed out to others, I was referring to Nietzsche who denied any universal morality due to the limitations of our capacity, unless we are able to transcend those in power who drive beliefs. It is the strong who are the drivers of change, including any understanding of morality or of good and evil. This is looking at the psychology of religious belief and so textual interpretation itself is problematic. I also did not mean why God planted the tree, but what the other trees in the Garden of Eden were (other than life and knowledge of good and evil) and why we could eat freely from them.

I grant that you are correct in pointing out my sloppy writing, but perhaps you can enlighten me as to why divine command theory requires any merit in the first place, especially considering the difficulties of interpretation. Kant would likely agree.

What other support do you have other than Proverb 3:18 that the tree is a woman? In reading that proverb, the pronoun "she" references wisdom and then refers to wisdom as a tree. Wisdom (חָכְמָה) referred to in 3:13 (http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt2803.htm) is a feminine noun, which might explain the feminine pronoun, due simply to the lack of the neuter in Hebrew. Where does it explicitely say the tree is a woman? At most, it says it's female. — Hanover

I realised that it was going to be an issue, hence the reason why I decided to edit it (clearly not fast enough) and I agree that there is no real specificity other than in proverbs (and I more accurately agree with you overall) but I do believe that there are symbolic references that need to be afforded some flexibility in any hermeneutic interpretation. When one is fruitful and multiplies it is symbolic of sexual reproduction, for instance. In the Book of Revelations, the 'New Jerusalem' is symbolic of a woman who is a newly married bride, but she is based on a location (Ezekiel describes this) and it is there that the Tree of Life is referred to as a her. "In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations." Rev 22, and when you read it, the "twelve" is the same woman with twelve stars as a crown on her head, the twelve precious stones that is also referred in Isaiah 54 (where the New Jerusalem is weeping but eventually grows strong) and in 2Esdras 9:38 (crying woman who turns into the city of New Jerusalem). The feminine qualities are a language of peace, of producing fruits of righteousness and healing from the hunger of oppression. I think that is quite clear in Proverbs 3:18.

That some beliefs may occur in science, does not suddenly remove the reality that belief mostly permits ignorance of evidence.
Non-beliefism underlines, that "one may rank his/her presentations as incomplete expressions (susceptible to future analysis/correction), where one shall aim to hold those expressions to be likely true, especially given evidence, rather than believe, i.e. typically accept them as merely true especially absent evidence". — ProgrammingGodJordan

I have only just been prompted to this thread and as I attempted to read it in order to ascertain what the concern may be, unfortunately I stumbled upon this and I am afraid that this is complete nonsense. Is that link to a page you have created?

There is an opportunity to correctly discuss fallibilism or even when beliefs can qualify as knowledge, but you need to exhibit a degree of coherency in your position. Plato famously remarked "justified true belief" so perhaps you can focal an argument toward the Gettier problem. Otherwise, the last several pages of nonsense only qualifies the thread' closure.

I'm pretty sure it was an apple tree, on account of it later producing an apple. — Pseudonym

Not in the Book of Genesis.

I'm more intrigued by the type of tree he had - the tree of knowledge - and his command not to eat from it (presumably meaning to gain insight into good, bad and other things). — TheMadFool

I am interested in what the other trees are other than that; what is it that we can eat? What is the tree of life? There is no inherent meaning in good and evil except for what we create. A belief is imagined; we believe in a nation despite nationalism being imagined and this belief enables us to mobilise and strengthen a network or community because 'knowledge' or our identity is formed by way of mirroring what we desire and othering what we don't. We create evil and then contrast this very creation with good. What would we have if we never created it in the first place?

I think we create evil, but that we are not inherently evil. Love is not borne out of knowledge, neither is it instinctual desire, but it ceases to have any type of characterisation when one no longer measures it to a standard. We assign definitions to intent, label it with moral content that we have created but love is a phenomenon that cannot actually be explained.

That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

*shakes head*... — Agustino

The liberals in Tel Aviv are beautiful to me in what would otherwise be an intense demographic.

I find so many things beautiful. I have a lot of little personal ones, like the way a friend of mine stiffens up before laughing at his own joke. There are so many visuals captured in my mind.

The Australian sky at night when there is no light pollution.



Sunrise at Wadi Rum in Jordan. Blew my mind away.



Evie Hammond from V for Vendetta.



Street art in Tel Aviv

It depends on how fast the ship is travelling. But, say we get all crazy one day and are able to move mass using a warp drive bubble, we could effectively negate time dilation. A nice vacuum for thought.

What sometimes bewilders me about this view of determinism is that 'the causal web', the way that determinism is supposed to actually work, is largely unknown. — mcdoodle

We all have intelligent guesses, I guess, but many people assume free-will as a separation from this determined landscape of causal connectivity and therefore exempt from the natural laws that give experience. I think the biggest difficulty is the randomness problem, namely how synthetic a priori judgments are even possible and where the spontaneity of Kant' causality in reason is difficult to explain, but our choices still remain restricted by nature' causal rules. It is not independent, but all causality starts from somewhere and we have the capacity to throw the stone into the lake and cause a ripple. We impose onto the causal web. I don't see that as any hubristic belief in our own rationality, as shown below:

It is impossible ever to comprehend through reason how something could be a cause or have a force, rather these relations must be taken solely from experience. For the rule of our reason extends only to comparison in accordance with identity and contradiction. But, in so far as something is a cause, then, through something, something else is posited, and there is thus no connection in virtue of agreement to be found—just as no contradiction will ever arise if I wish to view the former not as a cause, because there is no contradiction [in the supposition that] if something is posited, something else is cancelled. Therefore, if they are not derived from experience, the fundamental concepts of things as causes, of forces and activities, are completely arbitrary and can neither be proved nor refuted. — Kant

So, Kantian causality is really the conceptual model of schema that is fundamental to the possession of all knowledge and so we are making sense of the causal web itself and therefore a unity between our understanding of causality and freedom. There is no real empirical randomness, it is reason working in unison with understanding; so spatial or temporal or causal are not actual objects per se that we experience, but are conditions that enable us to understand experience and pure information.

I'm not quarrelling with where your later words explain you end up, seeking a balance etc.; I just don't seem to find in myself an understanding of this intermediate step. But I often feel I must be missing something, as other people seem to find it so obvious :) — mcdoodle

I would much prefer a quarrel. But, we don't get what we want sometimes.

First off, what exactly is "reason"? — JustSomeGuy

This is a biggie. Kant divided reason into two - pure and practical - and he distinguished pure reason from understanding, the latter is sensual experience or sense-data and the information we get from actual experience. In addition, we are divided by two types of consciousness; consciousness of our own empirical inner state and so psychological (a unity of self - that you are) as well as what he referred to as transcendental apperception. Pure reason does not partake in this sensual experience but rather it allows us the capacity to think about concepts that are beyond the physical - such as thinking about God, the universe, what might happen to you tomorrow etc. Further still, there is practical reason that enables as to think of moral issues - a type of moral consciousness - where we consider things as being either right or wrong. We are capable of regulating pure reason by using practical reason - to judge our judgements according to right or wrong - so it is somewhat cyclic so to speak. If we think about ghosts, for instance, practical reason should tell us that there is no moral rightness about it and so it is in the domain of the nonsensical or unreasonable.

Descartes stated that we contain properties that are material - i.e. the brain, the body etc - or what he called corporeal or extended substances, as well as thinking substances that give us this consciousness, the capacity to think hence the cogito. Kant thought that thinking substance was codswallop, because there is no unity in this; does having multiple personality disorder mean that the person is actually two or three separate forms of consciousness? There is no longer any meaning in our identity, nothing that separates us in order to actually be conscious of an 'I'. Thus returning back to reason where possibilities need to be restricted to be aligned with experience that is likely and where the transcendental unity of apperception is the very restriction of what is or is not possible. We need to draw the line and say that there is a spatial reality that we experience through Kantian intuition, otherwise it is not actually a real experience. So you actually exist and this existence is meaningful because you become aware of your identity as a part of this spatial world full of objects. You are a part of that 'determinism' but aware that you are.

Our brains just process information in a certain way based on many factors--some that we understand, but likely more that we don't. Your ability to reason is not the same as mine because our brains are different, thanks to things like our DNA, our environment in which our brains developed, even our nutrition, and many other factors. — JustSomeGuy

I absolutely agree, but I see this capacity as somewhat epistemic and what I mean by that is that there needs to be the right conditions for free will to be fully functional. A baby does not have the capacity to act freely because they do not yet have the cognitive capacity; it may exist in their brain like a switch or a device that is dormant as it waits for the right conditions to be activated. The problem here is that when and if this is activated, when a person reaches a certain level of cognitive maturity, they are still capable of irrational or unreasonable judgements and why we become responsible - hence pure and practical reason - to filter out the nonsense and indeed this is where things get complicated. It is also the reason why humanity is destructive.

I personally believe that some people are exempt from this responsibility, such as persons with an intellectual disability, brain damage and other factors including illness etc, because they do not have the cognitive capacity to become aware of how their actions or choices can effect causality. I also believe any species aside from humanity are also exempt because - whilst they share the same biological or physical relationship to us and also instinctual impulses - they do not have the consciousness to become aware of themselves or their environment. A cat may look at a person, but it does not see a person, not like how we do despite us projecting that somehow they are aware. Epistemic freedom takes into account the limitations of the human mind and because we are able to say that we do not know what the future holds is enough to prove in this freedom, this ability to stand in front of the mirror of determinism and see the causal matrix in the reflection behind you.

But if consciousness is simply a product of the physical brain, there is no separation--our consciousness is part of "the external world" just like everything else, and so we have no free will. This is something I've been struggling with ever since I started studying Taoism a few years back. There was about a year where I was very satisfied with things and the Taoist philosophy brought me so much peace, but eventually I could no longer ignore the dissonance between my newfound philosophy and my previously-held beliefs about the nature of consciousness. — JustSomeGuy

There is no real definitive answer as to what consciousness exactly is and whether the mind is material or non-physical and even if there is a dualism or not, free-will can still be exercised either way i.e., agent-causal libertarianism. While randomness is an issue, if we picture the world from a Kantian lens, are we perceiving something physical (noumenal) or is experience only in our mind (phenomenal)? While accessibility to the external world is reliant on the phenomenal, the latter is really about how we process information between the two as we regulate and filter this information. So, how we perceive the world is caused by this interaction - this 'determinism' so to speak - without which it would be impossible for our minds to understand the noumenal world or pure information. What you need to remember is that we organise this information conceptually, through spatial and temporal concepts. The problem here is that if we order information that way, does that mean that the external world has no time or space? Do we create causality in the brain, an arrow of time only to make sense of all this information?

Kant never really went that far, but his point was that we have reason or the ability to reason and this enables us to exercise a type of manoeuvrability of these perceptions, to challenge them, to filter them willingly rather than the number of schema in our brain that does it for us. So, while the brain determines much of what we understand of the external world, there is still one small part in that where there is autonomy in our ability to alter our perceptions of the external world. This is the 'free-will' that I am discussing; free-will and determinism are not mutually exclusive, but rather free-will is a natural extension of determinism.

So, you are struggling just like the OP because you assume a free-will Vs. determinism scenario. There is no Vs between them.

I truly love Taoist philosophy and wish I could embrace it fully, but my lack of belief in free will won't allow me. Can you offer any sort of help with this issue? — JustSomeGuy

I have never embraced any belief fully, because I trust myself enough to take what I find in anything as part of my study of the world. Nothing is ever entirely right and so to follow something completely is to limit your capacity, which only breeds weakness. I only believe in God - a non-anthropomorphic, non-dogmatic, non-religious - as an unknowable reality, and my own moral trajectory, to perfect virtue as a practice in order to enable it primacy over my understanding of the external world that I experience. All you need to embrace is a willingness to better yourself, basically.

1. Free agents: people, like us, who have free will (controversial but widely believed to be true). We can, sort of, insert ourselves in the causal web and make changes.

2. Non-free agents: non-human factors like animals, the weather, etc. These have no free will and so can't be said to insert themselves into the causal web. — TheMadFool

There is no escaping determinism except through consciousness (transcendence) where we have the capacity to become aware of ourselves, our person-hood as separate to the external world and it is what we do with this capacity that enables us to exercise free-will as autonomous agents. Consciousness is like the algorithm that sets the universe in motion.

Taoists see nature as a harmony between destructive (death) and peaceful (life) and consciousness mirrors the same process we see in nature, only we have the capacity to use it effectively. So, whilst we are a part of the causal web in every other way, moral responsibility (life) is the necessary balance against the destructive qualities we possess (violence, hatred, ignorance, evil) and once we go beyond good and evil, we become one with 'nature' or the ebb and flow of this monism. If the trajectory of your will is attuned to this moral outlook, you are taking those necessary steps towards enlightenment.

So, to be fair to consequentialism, we're responsible for only type 1 effects, where we, as free agents, insert ourselves in the causal web. How does that sound? — TheMadFool

I actually practised this, not always successfully but as an example, several weeks ago my place got flooded after a storm raged through my city and I was not at all phased by it, no stress or anxiety. My landlord then told us that we all had to leave and because of the emergency situation my housemates and I decided to share elsewhere, so I moved in with a friend. This friend has a housemate who is related to one of my favourite writers and she put me in touch with him; he has offered to mentor me during my writing. It has also given me the opportunity to save more money because the rent is exponentially cheaper and it is only for six months so I can adequately prepare to find my own place during that period. It turned out for the way better.

I am steadily learning this process and it quite literally why I often feel happy and at peace. There is a balance between bad and good that almost cancels itself out, leaving only peace.

Can I not be a gentleman hedonist? — Michael

This is oddly logical.

And that is why I struggled with understanding how Robert Kane could describe Frankfurt-style cases as an ongoing problem...Since 1969! — thecone137

Because there are so many factors to consider. I would think that while responsibility remains, it could be transferred over to the 'device' and imagine how that would render all sorts of issues; does this device need to have a soul for it to be morally blameworthy and if so, what is this 'soul' - is it value, consciousness, or love (and why I mentioned the difference between responsibility and moral responsibility because the focal is morality)? To be either directly or indirectly accountable vis-a-vis the causal chain leading to the agents' choice. It brings to mind the very properties of choice, the actual information and so where epistemic causality comes to life and whether, ontologically, such information even exists. This is where the device would need to block that information in order to prevent the agent from being capable of ascertaining the very possibilities.

Having Jones' hands resting on each button severely reduces the time between the beginning of the act and the end of the act, which almost completely removes the possibility of an objection like "well, Black waits for Jones hand to begin moving towards a particular box and THEN he intervenes". — thecone137

I think it is essential that we answer how time relates to determinism and it brings to mind what I mentioned above about information. How does time relate to our experience of the past, present and future and is it merely an illusion? Or is time an organic, energetic and active system of cause and effect not fixed in a spatial knot but where past choices and experiences can shape our responses and decisions in the present, including the likelihood of which button to press? You are making a presupposition here that time exists in a classical framework and this will make it real or objective.

The reactive approach is also about probabilities and not possibilities. There are algorithms where past decisions can be used to ascertain possible or likely choices made in the present (like voting a presidential candidate) and whilst not absolutely accurate, relies both on time (the past) and information. I think it is very complex that only the proactive approach really enables us to discuss the subject in question without it leading to a slippery slope. What do you think?

Probabilities and what follows from an act are the same thing, just with a different count of repetitions. A 1% chance of something happening is identical to saying the frequency of occurrence is roughly once per hundred iterations. — AngleWyrm

This leads to defining the difference between probabilities and possibilities, the former aligned with this direct course that you speak of and unfortunately distorts the arguments against Frankfurt cases; we then assume that if we have two unlocked doors at the end of the corridor, there is equal probability or a 50/50 chance that you will select one to open first. How possibilities here differ is that it is simply just possibilities and the probability is irrelevant, what could lead to an action and where free-will vs. determinism problem is raised to the fore. Is the behaviour randomised that will lead to either door 1 or door 2, is it determined by the persons subjective intent etc.

Further blockage developments involve implanting a device into the neural pathways of Jones' decision making process so that only one conclusion can be made. If Jones' independent deliberation arrives at A, the implant will override the decision, but isn't Jones still responsible for the decision he independently arrived at, whether that decision is interrupted? — thecone137

Jones could have done something otherwise and so while the decision may have been changed by this device, it does not challenge in any way the possibilities in advance of the outcome that was determined by an earlier event - implanting this device. Moral responsibility cannot be abandoned because free will and alternate possibilities still exist. This leads back to the problem between responsibility and moral responsibility. I would be keen to see your examples and maybe we can flesh them out together.

I utterly disagree. On the contrary. A determinist knows that all things are the result of causes. If you want to effect a change in a person then you have contribute to that by introducing causal factors and by understanding how that person acts in morally irresponsible ways. — charleton

The issue here is that determinism contains no 'before' that leads to a choice, no prior chain or contingent possibilities and so by abandoning this chain, the possibilities and the outcome are one and the same. The questions prior to this decision become irrelevant, no probabilistic measurement to assess in advance of that 'choice' or any antecedent conditions and so causality and determinism here become irreconcilable. While your psychological take on deterministic causality has merit, there is a conflict it has with probabilistic causation.

The real problem is with proponents of free will who assert that a person can act IN SPITE of causal factors. For them locking up a wilful person and throwing away the key is the only sure solution. If a person has ultimate choice then you can never trust them that they will not re-offend. — charleton

From a psychologically deterministic point of view, I think you may be confusing the argument with fatalism, but that is not the problem the OP is attempting to ascertain.

Moral responsibility, crime and punishment and all that goes with it in a deterministic world is not different in outcome than a hypothetical world in which free-will is supposed to reign. It just leave us to assess what are the implications of a moral world of deterrence, punishment, shame, and blame in a deterministic world.. — charleton

I am not sure what you are trying to say here. Can you please explain this a bit further? You should also consider the difference between responsibility and moral responsibility.

In a deterministic world this SHOULD suggest that the punishment is "correctional"; that it ought o be able to cause a person to change. You are directing the punishment at the person's innate causalities which led them to transgress. This should indicate assessment followed by further sanctions or rehabilitation. — charleton

I like this suggestion, however determinism implies that the actions we commit cannot be other than what it is and therefore the OP is discussing the probabilities and not what follows from this said act. I agree insofar as there is a chance to rehabilitate and thus improve, but hard determinists would not believe that reform is possible because they are not responsible morally for their actions. Determinism here differs from causation.