I practically woke up one morning this week not depressed or suicidal any more

[null123]

but lbr NASA is just an arm of the US military so we can go ahead and axe it

[Luke de Spa]

Originally Posted by vixnix

Who or what have you read on the subject

lol

i'm not going to give you a list. but like half the board i'm a philosophy dropout so i've wasted plenty of time on this navel-gazing bullshit

i think the most coherent account of consciousness i've read is daniel dennett's "consciousness explained" but i've just soured on it totally in recent years. most of the stuff i studied at university seems, in hindsight, to have been mostly motivated by intuition and/or the desire for a certain _____ to be true. i want facts, not self-aggrandising anthropocentric fantasy

[null123]

Originally Posted by Luke de Spa

i've wasted plenty of time on this navel-gazing bullshit

and here i thought i was being harsh

[Luke de Spa]

Originally Posted by Charmbag

my brain kind of breaks when you say "there is no such thing as practical application". so there was no such thing as practical application when penicillin was invented or the Communist Manifesto was written either. it's always been set in stone but we don't know what the outcome is going to be so we just do our thing.

honey badger universe don't care

here's a thing about a spider that spins decoys of itself: http://richarddawkins.net/news_artic...d#.UNIKjIM8DTo

[null123]

i don't care if the universe cares. you feel me?

[null123]

Originally Posted by vixnix

Yeah I remember overhearing my tutor say to my metaphysics lecturer "and how do the determinists get around that...?" and thinking oh you poor deluded person. I'm only in first year and I already have a head start on you because of your wishful thinking.

i had the stupidest conversations with people about this subject. my dad tried to use quantum randomness as a reason why determinism is wrong and we have free will like really now

[Luke de Spa]

Originally Posted by Charmbag

i don't care if the universe cares. you feel me?

neither do i.

[Luke de Spa]

Originally Posted by Charmbag

i had the stupidest conversations with people about this subject. my dad tried to use quantum randomness as a reason why determinism is wrong and we have free will like really now

sounds like i work with a few of your dads

[vixnix]

Originally Posted by Luke de Spa

lol

i'm not going to give you a list. but like half the board i'm a philosophy dropout so i've wasted plenty of time on this navel-gazing bullshit

i think the most coherent account of consciousness i've read is daniel dennett's "consciousness explained" but i've just soured on it totally in recent years. most of the stuff i studied at university seems, in hindsight, to have been mostly motivated by intuition and/or the desire for a certain _____ to be true. i want facts, not self-aggrandising anthropocentric fantasy

How far did you get with philosophy? Dan Dennett's account of free will comes more from an evolutionary perspective doesn't it? I mean most of his stuff does.

[vixnix]

Yeah that's kind of disturbing about trying to connect quantum randomness to free will. Interestingly though I think that's the thing that makes most people not hard determinists. I mean you can't believe that every event is caused by the events preceding it. But that is the hard determinist line isn't it?

[null123]

humans don't have control over causation or randomness so it doesn't change much

[vixnix]

what do you mean by causation

[null123]

that we don't have control over the events that precede us and therefore don't have control over the events that we "enact"

[Luke de Spa]

Originally Posted by vixnix

How far did you get with philosophy? Dan Dennett's account of free will comes more from an evolutionary perspective doesn't it? I mean most of his stuff does.

two and a bit years. and yes. i have a hard time taking much else seriously, particularly in where ontology is concerned

[vixnix]

we're not talking about ontology though, with free will. Not if we're trying to establish whether or not we have it.

Why do you assume that we need control over the events that precede us to have control over things that we enact?

What did you end up continuing with Luke? Did you study at Vic? We might have been in the same classes. I was there 2005, 2007, 2008 on and off. Doing one paper at a time.

[vixnix]

Vic had a big focus on Dennett's work, I think because of Kim Sterelny being the Professor. I started at Otago, and there was a much bigger focus on empiricism and philosophy of science there, partly because of the background of Alan Musgrave, and partly because it's a more scientific university so more of the phil students came to philosophy through science.

[null123]

because our minds are subject to the same laws as the rest of the universe and 2 doesn't have any control over the fact that 1 + 1 came first

[vixnix]

I was hoping for a little more detail...

[null123]

i can try but you said you were already a hard determinist so i figured i didn't need to say much more. how did you make the jump between hard determinist and compatibilist? i mean i agree that there are other ways to view the issue of choice (being able to act on your own motives etc) but if you define choice as having total control over what choice you make, you really don't because your brain makes decisions based on an immutable (yet almost infinitely large) set of things including your preceding thoughts, the physical conditions of your environment, the structure of your brain etc. and these are all the falling dominos that follow a trail leading back to the beginning of time, if such a thing exists.

[Luke de Spa]

Originally Posted by vixnix

What did you end up continuing with Luke? Did you study at Vic? We might have been in the same classes. I was there 2005, 2007, 2008 on and off. Doing one paper at a time.

i did a few papers at otago (uh, i forget the numbers, a couple of the broad 100-level papers, a couple of 200-level ones. philosophy and history of science, iirc), then picked it up again at vic. again just 100- and 200-level papers, and only two or three. i mostly did economics and politics at vic

i defected back to full-time design work in 2008 so i never finished

[vixnix]

well they don't follow a trail that far, I mean the trail goes only as far as the last randomly occurring event, right?

I'm a tentative compatibilist only because I'm a sceptic. I became sceptical that we possess the requisite understanding of causation to make deterministic claims about free will. I say I'm a tentative compatibilist because it seems like a more interesting position but really I'm equally sceptical about everything. I choose a position more based on interest than belief these days.

[null123]

but we don't have control over the last randomly occurring event either.

[vixnix]

yeah that was a red herring anyway.

Why do you think that we need to have had control over past events to have control over future ones?

[vixnix]

Are you from Dunedin Luke? Did you have Mushen for econ..

[Luke de Spa]

i'm not from dunedin but i lived there for four years

i don't actually remember any of my economics lecturers' names. there was one older guy whose lectures were these incomprehensible flurries of chalk on blackboard

one younger guy from some think tank who looked like christian bale crossed with an oiled snake

uh drawing a blank now

[null123]

Originally Posted by vixnix

yeah that was a red herring anyway.

Why do you think that we need to have had control over past events to have control over future ones?

one way of explaining it is to remember that our brains are made up of physical and chemical reactions just the same as anything else. while we can't calculate every factor that influences the unfolding of such reactions/sequences, if we could know every factor that influences them, we would be able to predict the future perfectly. it's just an extrapolation of the way we look at the rest of the world scientifically. heat increases reaction time blah blah blah

[vixnix]

Yeah this is a question for neuroscientists more than philosophers though. Until they answer it I figure the jury is out.

[Trotskilicious]

Originally Posted by Order 66

anybody able to still get ahold of acid? i remember in highschool people were giving it out like candy now i don't see it anywhere save for a few oddball occaisions

i'm sure if i worked at it a little bit i could find some yes

[Trotskilicious]

Originally Posted by Charmbag

anything that leads to people devaluing life or their relationship to other people basically sucks and is worthless

hahaha sorry if i find this to be disingenuous considering everything else you've ever posted

do you frequently radically shift your mindset or were you just trolling the entire time

[mpp]

Originally Posted by reprise85

my therapist now i've been seeing since mid 2011, she's amazing, like really really good at her job

first, thanks for the post

second, doesn't this help quite a bit? for years, my wife counseled veterans (from recent and not so recent wars) -- talk about a tough job. but she did it and she helped dozens of these guys to feel okay even after they'd done, in their minds, unspeakable horrors. that's an important job.