I would jump in, but I have a real job.

I miss the wonderful feeling that only comes from avoiding working on a master's thesis or doctoral dissertation

Except that it was more fun on usenet.

I am feeling in a positing sort of mood. Have fun finding inconsistencies and your take on the implications.

Determinism: Nothing happens without a cause or a set of causes. This does not preclude complexity of the set of causes or the possibility of feedback loops. All effects are definitively caused.

Time happens, at least on a human level, exactly as it appears to happen - In a straight line, going forward.

Consciousness: The subjective feeling of being aware of one’s thoughts, perceptions and agency.

Assumption: Consciousness exists in people.

Choice: Internal thought process that leads to one of several possible actions and the result of that decision. “Several possible actions” is meant in terms of the current knowledge of the actor.

Agency: The feeling of internal decision making process and resultant action as separate from immediate external causes.

Intentionality: A workable description of part of how people think. What it attempts to describe does exist.

Agency exists in people.

People have desires (wants, wishes, preferences and needs).

People’s actions are be determined, in part, because of their desires.

People’s desires are based on prior causes, (including internal feedback loops and prior learning) and immediate external causes.

There is no duality. People follow the same general laws of the universe that the rest of the universe follows.

People’s actions are determined, in part, because of their thoughts. Those thoughts are caused by previous thoughts, etc. etc. etc.

Although everything is determined, we have insufficient knowledge to predict the future.

?

Intentionality is required for consciousness.

If consciousness then intentionality.


PairTheBoard

Well...maybe not. Intentionality may be a sufficient condition for consciousness. Something could conceivably be conscious without an intentional thought.

What do you think would be an example of propositions P and Q where P is a necessary condition for Q but Q is not sufficient for P?


PairTheBoard

You're right. That one is definitely backwards in my presentation.

(Good catch... I'm surprised it went for that long without being spotted.)

Can't think of any of the top of my head.

The good news is that a quick glance seems to show no immediate internal contradictions as a result. But it does show that my view of consciousness is what is driving my view of intentionality and free will.

Consciousness -> Free Will -> Intentionality

Note: In my statement, I had that *SOME* conceptions of consciousness require free will, and by that I meant that mine does, but there are others that don't. So if you want to be more correct, more like this:

Consciousness -?-> Free Will
Free Will -> Intentionality
Consciousness -> Intentionality

...profit.

FMP. This is why I probably shouldn't post during a short break.

Obviously, changing the definition of consciousness will impact what can be derived from it, so both implications need to be marked.

Aaron,
I was wondering something. I noted earlier in the thread that you spoke about 'arbitrary circle drawing' when critiquing someone's attempt to distinguish proximate causes from ultimate ones. I'm still unclear why this is so. When I think about disciplines and sciences that are wholly concerned with mechanistic / deterministic and human-free subject matter, I know that they deal all the time with and ascribe significance to proximate and local causes when explicating or modeling phenomena. And yet it seems you concede that, per your views on the implications of determinism, since all such phenomena are ultimately causally rooted in the Big Bang, identifying local or proximate causes, even in the case of, say, meteorology, would be 'arbitrary circle drawing.'

Is this so? I'm trying to get your position clear. Perhaps I could better express myself in a series of questions to you:

1) Do you think disciplines and sciences that deal with local and proximate causes when discussing non-human phenomena are doing something invalid and/or meaningless, because the Big Bang is said phenomena's only meaningful cause?

2) If we leave aside the matter of free-willed entities like human beings, does your conception of how the rest of the physical universe operates and unfolds basically conform to a version of determinism (modulo QM), or do you have an alternate view?

3) If, under a limited non-human-affecting determinism, you are willing to concede that it is meaningful or valid for disciplines to identify, focus on, and engage with proximate or local causes when dealing with non-human material phenomena, whose ultimate cause is nonetheless the Big Bang, why does doing so for human material phenomena, if we then extend determinism to encompass it, then shift to 'arbitrary circle drawing' and, presumably, meaninglessness or pointlessness?

[Edit! I phrased the third question poorly, and have changed and bolded the relevant sections! Sorry.]

...pretty sure that was me. No?

I think you both made a very similar point, though likely at different times. For some reason, Aaron's expression of the 'arbitrary circle' criticism was foremost in my memory. I did think about adding your name to my previous post's subject of address. In any case, please feel free to help me figure out how you are (or Aaron might be) thinking about the questions I raised.

[Note, I have edited the 3rd question in my previous post, which was badly phrased.]

My only reason for suspecting that it was me is that I use that phrase a fair amount...not a huge deal. I actually don't have the energy to respond yet.

Yeah, this thread is a vampire. Also, I'm beginning to anticipate that part of Aaron's (and maybe your) answer to my 3rd question is that once determinism is extended to human beings, and not just non-human physicality, then a kind of general meaninglessness descends upon all human affairs, be they meteorology or the proximate causes of my attraction to this thread.

But even so, I'd appreciate an eventual response (from anyone, really) to the various parts of my extended query, energy permitting.

Under determinism all phenomena are ultimately causally rooted in the Big Bang. If free willed decisions can be made, then this can impact the causal roots.

Going back to the tides...

* Why do we have tides?

It's related to the moon's gravitational pull.

* But what about the sun? It's a big thing out there that has a lot of gravitational pull.

Yeah, that's there, too, but it causes a smaller effect.

* But what about the other celestial objects? They have a gravitational pull, too.

Well... yeah... but those effects are even smaller.

So we're sort of in a position where we *IGNORE* things because we have concluded that they are "smaller" effects. This is the arbitrary circle-drawing that we do. We are only paying attention to the things we want to pay attention to. This doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't a level of pragmatism to these "choices," but we can at least recognize the arbitrary nature of it all when pressed on it.

Now what makes it harder is that I don't see any reason to think that humans are the only freely-willed creatures that can impact the flow of the universe. I think when I brought up that the big bang could ultimately be the cause of tides, I think I had a clause in there that said "If there were no freely-willed decisions between the big bang and the creation of the planets" or something like that.

We cannot *test* for freely willed decisions (that's back to the whole empirical question). Therefore, it is better to try to draw as small of a circle as possible to avoid confounding variables such as freely willed decisions. And this is another form of arbitrary circle drawing. But here, we are trying to keep out the types of freely willed decisions that impact an experiment (as opposed to ignoring them).

In the process, we could find ourselves with a perfectly deterministic bubble (like a basic pendulum in physics), but it would be erroneous to assert that the principles inside our little bubble are necessarily going to perfectly generalize to a larger bubble (say, one that includes humans).

As I said above, there's no particular reason to think that humans are the only entities that have free will that can impact the flow of the universe. What those other things might be, I don't know. But I can (if I wanted to) conceptualize a universe that conforms to basic determinism and I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that.

I think I've addressed this somewhat above. We draw our circles with a purpose (to simplify the description or to exclude confounding influences). But these are *choices* of what to ignore and what not to ignore. We are actively picking the things that we will focus our attention on, and then we go through a process of trying to weed out all of the other influences until we've got the thing we want.

But once we've got that little deterministic bubble isolated, expanding the bubble becomes dangerous because we don't always know what we're letting in. For example, we might let in freely-willed decisions that will change the results of an experiment for no discernible reason, and which cannot be controlled out of the experiment.

That was thoughtful and elaborate. I will take some time to mull it over and internally synthesize it with other points and comments made in this massive thread. And maybe a little later respond to some aspect or other of what you said.

Determinism links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/

(Note: I did not find a page on non-causal determinism, or any other form of determinism which may stand in contrast to causal determinism.)

http://www.informationphilosopher.co...terminism.html

I find that none of these descriptions are consistent with madnak's reverse-time concept of determinism. The reverse time concept is also inconsistent with the historical development of the concept found in chapter 2 of the following:

http://books.google.com/books?id=hsY...page&q&f=false

?


PairTheBoard

You are being very internally consistent. Your "don't see any reason" statement shows a lot about you. In a good way. It makes it easier for me to consider your position.

However, you still have the problem of the tides not being caused by the moon. Whatever freely willed the moon to be where it is causes the tides; not the moon itself.

The implication is that this lessens the moon's importance than if it were the prime cause of the tides.

I'm not opposed to that sense of meaning. However, we find ourselves in the position where we simply do not (and cannot?) know what caused the moon, whether it is some freely willed entity or the big bang. And because we don't (can't) know, it makes no sense for us to trace back further than what we can ascertain for now. This is our arbitrary circle that allows us to keep out the stuff that we don't want to think about (or can't figure out). The trail disappears in a universe with free will, but in a deterministic universe, we know that whatever happens in between, it will always be the big bang's fault in the end (err.... beginning).

I don't know that it "lessens" the moon's importance. The moon is simply the closest domino in the chain that leads to tides (sort of**). The circle-drawing that we do nothing more than an expression of our desire for answers to our questions.

Maybe instead of dominoes, you can think of a Rube Goldberg machine.



Looking at the whole picture, we would be right to say that the rock P causes the toothpaste to come out of the tube. But let's pretend that all of the components were hidden (maybe the light in the bathroom isn't working), and all we see is the (whatever it is) A being flicked. We would not have any problems saying that A caused the toothpaste to come out of the tube. Or perhaps we can only see bits and pieces. Perhaps we see the bird N take off, and associate that with the toothpaste.

Once the deterministic ball gets rolling, our explanations for the event are all a bit arbitrary. In a purely deterministic world, we could push back farther and talk about the man being another deterministic machine, and keep on pushing backwards. But with free will, we can (potentially) get off the train and say that the man flicked the thing, but nothing preceded the man flicking the thing.

----

** It's actually a bit more complicated than that because we're actually playing a game when we say that the moon causes tides. According to this nifty graphic, the sun has 46% of the tide-generating power of the moon. That is, if we didn't have the moon, we would *STILL* have tides.

To put another kink into the same argument, if the earth were not spinning, we would not have tides. This is very much the type of game that we play when we try to talk about what causes things to happen. We're really just choosing what we want to focus our attention on.

Edit: That last paragraph isn't quite true. I think the orbit of the moon might cause tides anyway. If it did, I think they would be very slow tides.

I think that's directed at me. My entire case did not implode on itself on account of a sloppy mistake.

I thought it might be the beginnings of an example from durka of propositions where P is a necessary condition for Q but Q is not sufficient for P.


I didn't think your mistake mattered to your main argument although it was a bit ironic that you should make it while berating another poster for making a similiar error in interpretation.


PairTheBoard

I thought about that one for a while, but couldn't think of an example. If there is something that he's remembering correctly, it's probably some far more subtle point having to do with the nature of the propositions themselves.

The irony is not lost on me. There was definitely a moment of facepalm. But at least I'm not belligerently defending my wrong position (though to be fair, when the other poster finally understood what was going on, he accepted his error).

Mistakes happen. Life goes on.

Originally Posted by PairTheBoard
"I thought it might be the beginnings of an example from durka of propositions where P is a necessary condition for Q but Q is not sufficient for P."



All I can imagine would be some kind of quirk of language whereby the terms don't carry the meanings we normally intend for them and thereby don't provide their normal logical force. I would be suprised if there were such a category of use generating much of a caveat. I've never seen it suggested that we need to tiptoe around when using the logical equivalence between (P is necessary for Q) and (Q is sufficient for P). They both equate to (If Q then P). Thus (P if and only if Q) is universally described equivalently as (P is necessary and sufficient for Q).


PairTheBoard