Ow, my head

@TickTockMan,

I agree with you. I have a liking for the existentialist way of looking at experience - 'throwingness' as Heidegger puts it - though perhaps that is strictly rather phenomenology, not existentialism. The thing is, I see that experience itself as being clearly determined; all the stuff about being 'condemned to be free' means nothing to me. I am obviously (to me) at one level a product (and victim) of my chemical messengers and neural impulses. I would have given up in despair long ago had I not discovered that there is something greater than myself which, paradoxical as it may sound, takes me beyond my determined nature and leads me to real freedom. Don't ask me to explain it logically though.

(Excuse me for not using smilies; I hate 'em!)

@Martin phil,

I don't believe it can be explained logically. I believe the Buddhists who teach that it (whatever "it" is) can only be directly experienced. Or, as the Taoists say, "The Tao that can be explained is not the Tao."

So no worries. I won't ask you to explain it logically. I know exactly what you mean.

I know what you mean about smilies too. I always regret it when I've used one. It's as if I was unable to convey my meaning clearly with my writing and had to resort to a little face to help clarify things.

@Martin phil,

Hi Martin,

Martin wrote:

I would have given up in despair long ago had I not discovered that there is something greater than myself which, paradoxical as it may sound, takes me beyond my determined nature and leads me to real freedom. Don't ask me to explain it logically though.

Ok, so let's suspend logic then and just talk. Would you mind sharing what this is?

Martin wrote:

(Excuse me for not using smilies; I hate 'em!)

Aww come on. I use 'em, although I must admit to some measure of a silly feeling when I do - but it adds variety and a hint of the emotion one's trying to portray. <pleads with the anti-smilie coalition>

Be good

(no smilie here)

@Khethil,

Khethil wrote:

Hi Martin,

Ok, so let's suspend logic then and just talk. Would you mind sharing what this is?

Yes, Certainly I will, though you must surely have had your suspicions! Tick Tock Man may have different words for it, but I am talking about what I like to call (depending usually on my company) the Higher Power, God, or Jesus Christ, or The Supreme Personality of Godhead. Any of those will do.

Aww come on. I use 'em, although I must admit to some measure of a silly feeling when I do - but it adds variety and a hint of the emotion one's trying to portray. <pleads with the anti-smilie coalition>

Be good

(no smilie here)

Sorry, I'm sticking with the ASC. I think I can sufficiently express my emot(c)ions using the written language.

Kind regards

Martin

@Martin phil,

Hi Martin,

Martin wrote:

I am obviously (to me) at one level a product (and victim) of my chemical messengers and neural impulses. I would have given up in despair long ago had I not discovered that there is something greater than myself which, paradoxical as it may sound, takes me beyond my determined nature and leads me to real freedom. Don't ask me to explain it logically though.

I think which must be capable of all my presentations,' thereby giving them synthetic unity, and the empirical, introspective, self which is itself a presentation. To be truly a priori rational psychology must have for its subject the former, i.e. the self of pure self-consciousness. This however is not, according to Kant, an object of experience and so of the applicability of the Categories. It is not an instance of any Category.

It would be because it is not an instance of a Category that ordinary logic and natural language is incapable of characterizing this pre-conceptual self. Hence the statement that the Tao that is eternal cannot be spoken. Gregory of Nyssa says much the same when he describes God, or whatever he encountered in his vision, as lying 'beyond the coincidence of contradictories.' Hegel's spiritual unity has the same location. This difficulty would explain the ubiquitous use of contradiction in the literature of mysticism. Bradley also argues that the selfs of everyday life (the distinct centres of experience) are underlain by a phenomenon which is beyond the categories. This would not be a God but what is Absolute.

What you seem to say is that your everyday self has no freedom of will except in that it is capable of carrying out the will of a deeper and more metaphysically significant or universal self, and that for freewill the everyday self must not act but must be abandoned. To me this seems the only viable solution for the freewill problem. From an analysis of this problem Erwin Schroedinger reached the same conclusion, which is why he claimed 'I am God' and was a fan of the Upanishads. If this is your view, as your post seems to suggest, I think it can be explained logically. Which is, of course, not to say that I could do it.

Regards
Whoever

@Whoever,

Whoever;28961 wrote:

This would not be a God but what is Absolute.

I may be massively misinterpreting my (admittedly limited) understanding of Taoism and Buddhism/Zen Buddhism, but don't they tend to teach that there is no such thing as "Absolute?"

@TickTockMan,

On another note, what I'd be interested in hearing are anyone's personal anecdotes of how they came to consider the idea of a Deterministic universe.

Was it just something that randomly occurred to them "out of the blue," as it were, or did "something happen" that led them down this path?

@TickTockMan,

^ you first. I still have a hard time understanding why anybody accepts determinism.

I always thought smilies made up for lack of intonation in text rather than lack of lucidity?

ps - I <3 smilies Smile

@TickTockMan,

TickTockMan wrote:

I may be massively misinterpreting my (admittedly limited) understanding of Taoism and Buddhism/Zen Buddhism, but don't they tend to teach that there is no such thing as "Absolute?"

Good point. This is also my understanding, (not that I actually understand), but I was giving Bradley's view. Whatever the meaning of 'Absolute' as a noun it seems right to say that for the mystics in general God is less than absolute. (I recently read an article by a Sufi scholar arguing on this basis that 'Al-Lah' is not God). Perhaps the idea is not so much that there is no Absolute phenomenon but that 'it' is not a thing, being unconditioned, which is to say, beyond the categories, even those of some-thing and no-thing. I'm out of my depths on this one.

@Aphoric,

Aphoric;29138 wrote:

^ you first. I still have a hard time understanding why anybody accepts determinism.

I always thought smilies made up for lack of intonation in text rather than lack of lucidity?

ps - I <3 smilies

I'll try to write something out about the Deterministic Moment I had. It might be interesting to see how badly it gets shot down on the forum. I can almost hear it now . . . "You're a moron, TickTockMan! That's not Determinism! It's Jungian Synchronicity! Ha Ha! You've been living under a completely wrong interpretation of the events you experienced for more than 20 years!"

-----
p.s. Smilies Bad. Words Good.

@TickTockMan,

TickTockMan wrote:

Was it just something that randomly occurred to them "out of the blue," as it were, or did "something happen" that led them down this path?

... college happened (EE) ... also destroyed my ability to suspend disbelief - I haven't been able to read a science fantasy novel since ...

@TickTockMan,

TickTockMan;29284 wrote:

I'll try to write something out about the Deterministic Moment I had. It might be interesting to see how badly it gets shot down on the forum. I can almost hear it now . . . "You're a moron, TickTockMan! That's not Determinism! It's Jungian Synchronicity! Ha Ha! You've been living under a completely wrong interpretation of the events you experienced for more than 20 years!"

-----
p.s. Smilies Bad. Words Good.

ahh, but it wouldn't be so bad, since you were already determined to live under false pretenses for 20 years, and had no real say in it.

I'd also appreciate a few links or names of arguments other than personal testimony that makes determinism so concrete.

I love how you wish you could comprehend free will in a rational sense but are just so entrenched in your belief in determinism that it makes your head hurt, whereas I wish I could comprehend determinism in a rational sense but am so entrenched in my belief in free will that I sometimes wrongly judge people as idiots.

------

p.s. Smile

:Not-Impressed::nonooo::a-ok::thats-enough: Very Happy

:brickwall::poke-eye: Laughing

:devilish:

@Aphoric,

Aphoric;29410 wrote:

I wish I could comprehend determinism in a rational sense but am so entrenched in my belief in free will that I sometimes wrongly judge people as idiots.

Ah, but in my case your judgement would be correct. I make no apologies for my idiocy. I revel in it. My hat made of a cabbage leaf, my wooden shirt . . . they suit me well.

@Whoever,

Whoever wrote:

Hi Martin,

What you seem to say is that your everyday self has no freedom of will except in that it is capable of carrying out the will of a deeper and more metaphysically significant or universal self, and that for freewill the everyday self must not act but must be abandoned. To me this seems the only viable solution for the freewill problem. From an analysis of this problem Erwin Schroedinger reached the same conclusion, which is why he claimed 'I am God' and was a fan of the Upanishads. If this is your view, as your post seems to suggest, I think it can be explained logically. Which is, of course, not to say that I could do it.

Regards
Whoever

This is actually about as close as one could come to describing my view, or more accurately, my experience. I don't believe logic, which is a creation of the human mind, can explain something which is ipso facto beyond the mind, so it isn't necessary. That doesn't stop people from trying, nevertheless, and I would think it would have to be, in the western tradition, a Hegelian or Neo-Hegelian perspective. Definitely not rationalist, for sure. I've been interested recently in exploring such avenues, and would like to look into Bradley, McTaggart, Bosenquet and other such 'discredited' thinkers, since I have a hint there might be a lot in them I could identify with.

@TickTockMan,

TickTockMan wrote:

On another note, what I'd be interested in hearing are anyone's personal anecdotes of how they came to consider the idea of a Deterministic universe.

Was it just something that randomly occurred to them "out of the blue," as it were, or did "something happen" that led them down this path?

The universe, however big it may be, is a closed system. It's sheer scale can often give the impression of chaos to the limited observer, but chaos is just order that is harder to understand. The causa prima (and such clean slates are possible) of the universe is the lynch-pin of it all, it determines all that will come, all that will ever be, and all that will ever be thought. It determined our arrival, our individual lives, our perceptions.

Consider an electron, launched into an otherwise empty box. The electron's path will seem random and chaotic, but if you watch long enough the path will repeat itself, and you'll realize that the initial trajectory and force at which the electron was launched determined the course it followed.

@franc,

franc;31007 wrote:

The causa prima (and such clean slates are possible) of the universe is the lynch-pin of it all, it determines all that will come, all that will ever be, and all that will ever be thought. It determined our arrival, our individual lives, our perceptions.

Yeah, but what happened before that?

@franc,

franc wrote:

Consider an electron, launched into an otherwise empty box. The electron's path will seem random and chaotic, but if you watch long enough the path will repeat itself, and you'll realize that the initial trajectory and force at which the electron was launched determined the course it followed.

That's not an electron, it's a tennis ball. Big things act in an approximately deterministic manner, small things do not.
The electron is not simply a moving point obeying the laws of Newton. The very act of observing the electron at a given point in time gives rise to the collapse of a probability wave which describes the probability of finding the electron in a given location in the first place.
Should you be able to repeat the same measurement you would probably find the electron at a different location every time.
The sequence of measurements you describe will therefore be different every time, just like the sequence of the decimals in pi will never become regular.

@sarek,

TickTockMan wrote:

Yeah, but what happened before that?

We cannot know, that is the definition of a clean slate.

sarek wrote:

That's not an electron, it's a tennis ball. Big things act in an approximately deterministic manner, small things do not.
The electron is not simply a moving point obeying the laws of Newton. The very act of observing the electron at a given point in time gives rise to the collapse of a probability wave which describes the probability of finding the electron in a given location in the first place.
Should you be able to repeat the same measurement you would probably find the electron at a different location every time.
The sequence of measurements you describe will therefore be different every time, just like the sequence of the decimals in pi will never become regular.

Even if the behavior of a thing is dependent on our observation of something, is not what we observe (or what we 'want to observe' in the parlance of quantum mystics) dependent on other factors, which are dependent on other factors, and so on and so on? If the whole of the universe is dependent on the whole of the universe, in what sense can it be said not to be deterministic?

@TickTockMan,

Dependent is not the same as deterministic. There may be relations between all things in the universe, but these relations are not necessarily one-on-one relations.
They are not like a simple mathematical relation where for every value of X there is only one outcome.
They can better be likened to RND(X) function in a programming language(yes, I am a dinosaur). Every time you invoke it the outcome is a different number 0<1.

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