How could it be?

There has been no rejection of such a claim but merely a motioning towards intuitions of such a position as absurd. Dualism is very much "out of style" but not because it's been refuted.

Here's where I'm going with this. Let's stick with the naive Descartes, the Descartes who gets taught in undergrad modern philosophy; the hyperbolic doubter who discovers clear and distinct certainty in the cogito, proves that God exists and is not a deceiver, distinguishes extended substance (body) from non-extended substance (mind), and then claims that the penial gland is where the two substances interact. Of course, this is far from the full story, (but who would ever expect you guys to teach us the serious stuff).

At this point, everybody laughs (including Princess Elizabeth) at the naive Descartes. How could an extended substance interact with a non-extended substance? Extended substances have surfaces; they come in contact with each other. There can be no point of contact between a substance with a surface and a substance without a surface, and therefore there can be no interaction. This seems like a pretty good a priori argument against (naive) substance dualism. I don't know if it's ultimately correct, but empirical underdetermination is not an issue here.

I think empirical underdetermination is similarly not an issue in the free will debate. The hard incompatibilist's argument against the libertarians is an a priori argument. It's an argument against the conceivability of a will that is radically free and non-random. My view is that saying something like "random is not the only kind of indeterminism" is a purely verbal gambit; it does not say anything about the mechanics or the metaphysics required to conceive how libertarian free will is possible.

That's NO argument against "naive" dualism. To say "how could that be the case?" and then laugh and point. That's not an argument. At most that looks a lot like the fallacy of ignorance.

Your claim that there's no logical space between indeterminate and random is similar: "I can't think of how that could work...therefore it can't." Not much of an argument. The only ever so slightly more sophisticated version would be "...and you can't tell me either...therefore it can't." Same fallacy, different words.

Props.

lol ok, I thought humbling you over and over again (repeatedly proving that you had no earthly clue about what pessimistic incompatibilism was and showing the pathetic depths you sank to to try and obfuscate your light-absorbing denseness) would have made it more likely that you'd approach my recent neutral and sincere comment by regulating your comically under-warranted narcissism (you struggle with subtlety, this means you are a loser) and psychotic delusions.

Right now on my screen I have open three summaries of what Descartes wrote about mind-body interaction (includes SEP) which I reviewed *before* I posted, to avoid mistakes. WHAT THE **** ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT when you say it's no argument? How many links will you require this time that all I've done was reconstruct a completely canonical objection to a certain (naive but standard undergrad) reading of Descartes' views on mind-body interaction? Do you know what the Princess Elizabeth allusion was?

Mods, quick question. I no longer think durka participates in good faith on this forum. Can I just make fun of him for being a massive twit for my and the community's amusement, or should I stop responding?

edit: had to add "massive" to "twit"

I am not a moderater here, but I believe that humor has worth, in and of itself.

As an relevant aside, it would be good if we could agree on rules of engagement (for the forum) and then have to live within these rules.

Just because people have said it doesn't make it an 'argument'. Just analyze it for ****'s sake!

What precisely is the criticism of dualism?

"How can non extended mind-stuff interact with extended body-stuff?! That's absurd!"

That's the criticism of dualism. Does that look like an argument to you?

From the IEP:

Do you see?!!?? "How is mind-body interaction possible?" THAT'S THE OBJECTION! It's a huge fallacy of ignorance! Where's the argument? Where's the demonstration that such a thing REALLY IS ABSURD?! No, it's just a big intuition pump.

Check out that section from the IEP because immediately following is basically the exact comment that I'm making: these are not really 'arguments' but questions that the dualist need not actually answer.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/dualism/#H7

Section 7c.

So perhaps you'd like to retract the 'massive twit' comment because what I've said is nothing new. But, perhaps you'd like to do a little better to give credit to someone who might know more about these things than you. Just because you read something on SEP doesn't mean you understand the implications or the intricacies of the arguments. News flash: famous philosophers commit fallacies! Famous philosophers can have bad arguments published. Whole groups of famous philosophers can be seduced by a bad argument.

Dualism has NOT been refuted: it's merely out of style.

To a degree. But perfect clarity is never necessary, nor is it sufficient. There is, I think, a point of diminishing returns in seeking greater clarity (especially with obscure subject matter).

If you haven't read Borges, now is a good time to start.

But no, what I mean is that interpretation of any statement is subjective to some degree.

Beside the point. You said (paraphrasing) that if a work of writing can be interpreted in more than one way, it is not clear and the writer hasn't done his or her job. But most of the classics have competing interpretations - even when one interpretation is "accepted," typically a number of academics disagree.

A common position in literature today is that the reader (not the author) constructs the meaning of a work. Some take it so far that they even claim author intent has no bearing on the accuracy or legitimacy of a particular interpretation (I don't go that far, in fact I'm pissed off at that whole faction, but it's still a common position).

Before it gets off track, more technical forms of writing are also open to multiple interpretations. Some people come away from Darwin's "The Origin of Species" with more misconceptions about evolution than they had before. Just look at how few people actually understand what "survival of the fittest" means. It's a beautiful phrase, I think, but I wish it had never been coined because essentially nobody "gets" it.

Or look at Nietzsche, the most verbally elegant philosopher I've ever read, at least. But he was frustrated even in his lifetime at how blatantly people misinterpreted him, and he's probably spinning in his grave now.

Look at the law of large numbers, and how it is sometimes used to defend the gambler's fallacy. No matter how clear it is, someone will find a way to misinterpret.

And all the way back on track with the thread, I'm writing in a special context of trying to create a concrete set of grounds for my position according to the terms of my opponents, to set the stage for their forthcoming (haha, not) formal refutation. The bulk of my posts here (the "chains" with durka and Aaron) are intended for that purpose and within that context, and only for that purpose and within that context. If you aren't reading with a mind to how my posts apply in that context, then you've misinterpreted before you have even started reading the damned posts!

If the best writers can't present works with single clear interpretations, then either this criterion is not a necessary condition for good writing or the best writers are still "not doing their jobs as writers."

If you want to talk specifics, then go to it, but for now you're making general statements that it is always (or at least, by default) the writer's fault when misinterpretation happens. I think the fact that even the very best writers are frequently misinterpreted is a strong counterexample against this general position.

Hegel was clear enough to impact the major philosophers of his day, and leave a mark on history. If you ask me, that makes him a good communicator. Even if the technical elements of his writing were lacking, he managed to communicate ideas that most people of his time were not even able to think up in the first place.

The waters get turbulent when the conceptual depth increases. Any author is going to seem either convoluted or coy in that territory. I'm willing to forgive almost anything if I can be navigated to a firm conclusion.

I doubt I'd agree with you about the common definitions. But the context here is an assault on my specific position. I need to do some commandeering of the definitions in order to express the concepts peculiar to my position, because there are no "common usages" that correspond to my way of looking at things. My choices (no pun intended) are to invent new terms, use hopelessly vague metaphors, or redefine. I've done the latter.

I think very few people are actually following the thread closely. Regardless, I think this is itself an over-generalization. I think the reasoning applies well in general, but not under the circumstances (particularly when I'm playing a purely defensive - and not an offensive or explanatory - role). When I'm actively explaining it to make it easier for people to understand, my style is obviously different. If you say that what I've written in those threads is bad writing, then I'll accept your opinion on that. I can definitely use some work.

But in a thread where I'm arguing with a special context, you have to take that special context into account in order to evaluate my arguments.

Retract it? I'd love to double down on it. This is just off the top of my head:

1. You demonstrably didn't know what hard/pessimistic incompatibilism was.
2. You didn't know that more than one Strawson wrote papers on free will in the last 50 years and pretended you were merely confused.
3. You didn't know that there was a difference between the China Brain argument and the Chinese room argument and pretended you merely forgot.
4. "Aristotle's captain analogy for the win." (of course, when Original Position points out your obvious errors, they are 'nice catches' because you are a sycophant on top of everything else)
5. You talk about R as if you've read him.

Over and over again, you prove yourself to be a joke and a fraud. I'd respond to your latest fraudulent criticisms, but what good will that do me, you'd just come up with more utterly moronic responses. But, I'm getting too irritated by a troll and it's not good for the forum.

So like a snowflake on a river, a moment there then gone forever.

I like ad hominem arguments.

I'll wear a plaid dress to work if you can quote me saying that dualism has been refuted. I said, "...This seems like a pretty good a priori argument against (naive) substance dualism. I don't know if it's ultimately correct, but empirical underdetermination is not an issue here."

This is the objection that you say is "AT BEST" a fallacy of ignorance: "How could an extended substance interact with a non-extended substance? Extended substances have surfaces; they come in contact with each other. There can be no point of contact between a substance with a surface and a substance without a surface, and therefore there can be no interaction."

Find ONE person (edit, other than you ldo) on this forum who thinks this is a "fallacy of ignorance" and not a legitimate or canonical concern with (naive) mind-body interaction and I'll eat my hat.

double edit: The point is that if you're going to conceive of substances only in terms of extension, this anxiety arises.

You're the little boy who cried fallacy.

lol@self i cant quit

I already gave you a source. The IEP entry clearly makes the same point that I was.

You consistently fail to acknowledge or understand my qualifications. I didn't say or imply that the objection was conclusive, or that it refuted anything. At worst, my post passes IEP's "merely to raise a topic for discussion" test and it passes IEP's test, because the point of my post was to identify a relatively trivial a priori objection to a simplified historical position that did not involve “empirical underdetermination”. I specifically said I didn't know if the objection was ultimately correct; that means I don't know if the objection is definitely non-trivial. Do you read?

And this is +1 for the most tendentious piece of reasoning I've ever seen in an otherwise seemingly credible internet article. Why should the astrologer be any different? Astrologers should not be put on the defensive by the request for clarification about the nature and possibility of planetary alignment influencing or predicting the fates of human beings or by the criticism that they have no research strategy for producing this clarification.

I don't particularly care about your qualifications. You think that it's a really strong a priori objection and I disagree. Dualism is out of style now but not because there is any conclusive refutation of it. You seem to think that it's more than just "out of style" and the implicature of your post(s) was that you thought that it was refuted.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

ok game over I guess

thx for telling me that my implicature was that dualism is refuted, when I'm a borderline Nagel-style dualist. edit: although of course, I part company on autonomy

The implicature of this is that it has been refuted.

I then responded that no such refutation has been given...THEN you bring out the 'arguments' against the naive cartesian. Maybe you can see how the discussion went the way it did. Own up to your part in that.

There is a buried implication there, but it's not the one you responded to. If you want to argue that my question objectively implies "it has been refuted that extended substance can interact with non-extended substance", then you are welcome to do so. I guess I can see how, out of context and ignoring my previous and succeeding posts, you could read it like that. Since my line of thought had nothing specifically to do with arguments (edit) for/against naive cartesianism but with the nature of an a priori objection to a philosophical position in general (since I think the case against libertarianism is an a priori case), you will find that I was not randomly asserting that dualism was refuted.

Now, you might want to say that I was so terribly discursive that I didn't know what I was implying or whatever, but you did end up narrowing in on and responding to the exact analogy I was trying to make, (except again you were way too assertive and pompous as to make an unpoisoned discussion impossible).

To those who are uninitiated to academic discourse and think it is all nice, see the above few posts.

Niceness is reserved for those outside of the actual argument.

(for both, using latinized english makes you both look like jackasses)

See, this is why I asked for a clarification before. It is clear to me that you have a notion of moral responsibility, because you use it to say that no one is morally responsible. So far, mainly what I know about your notion is that one of the requirements of moral responsibility is that you be the initial cause of the action for which you are responsible. But as I already said, it is not a requirement of my theory of punishment that someone be the initial cause of the action for which they are being punished.

In response, you can say, well, by your definition of responsible, the criminal is not responsible for the crime. Now, presumably (correct me if I'm wrong) you still think that punishment can be justified in some situations. Specifically, I've assumed you think some forms of consequentialist punishment is justified. Now, when you punish criminals for consequentialist reasons, it is true that they are not responsible for their crime in the sense that you use responsible. And in the same way, when I punish criminals for non-consequentialist reasons, it is true that they are not responsible for their crime in the sense in which you use "responsible."

But if it is okay to punish non-responsible criminals for consequentialist reasons, then I don't see why we can't use other, non-consequentialist reasons like fairness or equality as a justification.

I don't see why his control over his own intentions in the way you describe is necessary. I am not punishing him because he made a free choice to commit a crime, but because he committed a crime. Since the pessimist doesn't think anything is morally relevant, I don't see what is wrong with that from your point of view.
Yeah, see you are again importing a moral theory that says it is only right to punish people for actions for which they are the initial cause. Why would anyone accept such a theory?

Free will arises from nature's own incompatibility with itself. The laws of nature appear not from a perfect balance but from a primordial disjointedness, or contradiction. The mind is an emergent entity, meaning it is based in corporeal matter but cannot be reduced back to it. The better question is not "does free will exist?" but rather "how is the illusion of free will possible?", and "how can this illusion have real effects?" Pushing this idea to its most radical, if we take away the illusions of reality, reality itself breaks down, something akin to the superimposed ambiguity of Schrodinger's cat when we place it in the box. The question would be then, not "is the cat dead?" but rather, "how does the definitive status of the cat appear from non deterministic chaos?" this bypasses dualism, because it presupposes a shared antagonism. both mind and the matter it is based on are attempts to resolve the inherent incompleteness of reality.

This argument is based on Zizek's reading of Hegel.

Wall of text warning

You said before that I was adopting a Wittgensteinian view of language. If I am, I'm doing so unintentionally (I could not defend or even fully identify a Wittgensteinian view of language), but if it applies to my analysis of free will and moral responsibility, then so be it.

I do not have one notion of moral responsibility; and I can't tell you what I think moral responsibility is in a sentence or two. I am aware of two routes to a notion of moral responsibility: the route that closely follows libertarian free will (ie you are morally responsible for an action if you acted according to your free will) and the route that follows enumerating human actions and asking, “do you consider the person morally responsible in this instance?”.

Since I think that libertarian free will is incoherent, the first route leads me to say that moral responsibility is incoherent. Unless I'm technically mistaken about what 'incoherent' means wrt a concept, that's about as good as I can do explaining that part of it. Substitute impossible for incoherent if that makes for an expository difference. If the incompatibilist's “intuition” is right about the kinship between free will and moral responsibility, then the impossibility of free will also closes the book on moral responsibility. To look at it another way, libertarian incompatibilists, who believe in moral responsibility, must argue that libertarian free will is real because they agree with hard incompatibilists that libertarian free will is required for moral responsibility.

Compatibilists deny that you need libertarian free will for moral responsibility (notice right away, are we still talking about one and the same notion of moral responsibility)? Since compatibilists deny that, I have to entertain the possibility that moral responsibility can be adequately characterized/defended without libertarian freedom. So this is the second route to understanding what is meant by moral responsibility: to examine cases in which we have strong intuitions for holding people morally responsible and also when we don't hold people morally responsible. Literature on moral responsibility is often not about the existence of libertarian free will per se, but about our intuitions for holding people morally responsible given a series of hypothetical scenarios.

For example, Frankfurt's argument against the principle of alternate possibilities is a compatibilist's attempt to show that the possibility of alternate possibilities is not required for moral responsibility. If I recall correctly, Frankfurt's third case is that Jones decides he wants to murder Smith but an alchemist gives him a magic potion which ensures that Jones could not do otherwise than to murder Smith. The point would be, Jones could not have done otherwise than to murder Smith, but he is still morally responsible for murdering Smith.

On the other side, you could look at Pereboom's also relatively famous “Four Case” argument. From here
There's really nothing in the above that you need to respond to, I'm just writing it out so you have a better idea of what I think the issues are. If your point is that ultimately I affirm an incompatibilist's notion of moral responsibility, then I guess you would be right. Except I affirm it after (not before) I consider the compatibilist's arguments that there's an adequate notion of moral responsibility consistent with determinism that is also consistent with our intuitions for when we don't hold people morally responsible.

At any rate, the reason we started discussing punishment is because I think that how one views or justifies punishment is a good test to see if they have consistent views on moral responsibility.

I said a few times that I don't consider consequentialist punishment to be punishment proper. If you are punishing a person for purely consequentialist reasons, the punishment is punishment in name only. Consequentialist punishment is the maximization of whatever it is you think you are maximizing when you are a consequentialist, no?

But, you brought up fairness and I can see a way to justify the practice of being fair even if moral responsibility is not possible. However, I'd be inclined to think of it along the lines of pleasurable things, not punishment. For example, if moral responsibility is impossible and you have two candy bars in your pocket, it's still fair to give one to one child and give the second to another child (instead of giving two to one child). However, I'm not sure it's fair to punish person B just because you punished person A, even if both are guilty of the same crime. If the punishment is fundamentally unjust in person A's case, then it seems it would be unjust (though in some sense fair) to punish B. But maybe this is not exactly what you had in mind when you brought up fairness.

This is not meant to be polemical, although it might read that way. Do you think that rocks are morally responsible for falling on people's heads? Do you think that bears are morally responsible for mauling campers? Do you think that the mentally insane are responsible for striking out at orderlies? Do you think that kids are morally responsible for sticking forks into outlets? Whatever moral theory I'm importing, you still have to have some point of departure from not holding stuff/people morally responsible. Whatever that criterion is, you'd have to explain why it's adequate or relevant. What makes a second-order intention to do bad stuff (which seems to be the neighborhood of your criterion) relevant?

The problem with Frankfurt is right up front: it's a huge intuition pump. It's actually quite easy for the libertarian to still say that CDO (in some important sense: see this thread!) is still necessary for responsibility. I don't share Frankfurt's intuitions about when we should hold someone responsible.