/lit/ - Literature

it doesn't matter because whatever is going on is already perfect

>>13488009 I agree
>>13488024 Why?

>>13488024
What makes you think everything is perfect? Do you not think the world has any flaws?

>>13488024
nothing matters from an outside perspective, but that is not relevant to OP's point.

>>13488049
What would you compare the "flaws" with?

>>13488060
If we can assume the existence of a moral center, then I suppose that would be a strong case to display these flaws, unless you don't believe in good or evil. Then I suppose I would compare them against the capacity of an action to benefit us or hinder us. A world without free will is chaotic, and malicious actions which are destructive in their nature. Do you believe things like murder, rape, torture, or wars are perfect?

>>13488121
I don't think there is good and evil, I guess a world where I got what I wanted would be good?

>>13488152
Let me add to that I think things that harm me or hinder me are evil.

materialism isn't so much the issue as determinism is; idealism and materialism both discount free will if they are framed as deterministic. there are materialist theories that allow for free will

>>13488171
Such as? No bait I would like to know more.

>>13488178
unironically Zizek

>>13488206
Yes, he seems interesting has he written anything interesting?

>>13488178
>>13488206
just to clarify, the issue regards determinism because if a materialist theory contains within it a level of indeterminacy (usually appeals to quantum science) then there is much less reason to rule out some level of agency in the mind. If an idealist theory has no room for indeterminacy then it by definition rules out free will.

>>13488214
if you really want to get into his ontology read Less than Nothing, but no one manages to read that, so probably something like Parallax View

>>13488048
I think for anything to be it can only 'be' in one way, like 1+1 must equal 2, there is a logic to reality and only 1 achievable model, which all other models fit into, something about the contradiction of something and nothing and the necessity of that relationship, and all other things come from that root Dao
>>13488049
I think flaws are needed as above, I think that a good way of decoding that structure is perceiving it through duality, this isn't it's actual structure because it goes in all directions and is basically just pure potential, but we can use it as a tool to understand it, and in that same way it needs it to realize itself or exist or to be able to stand up at all or something, like there needs to be a black and a white so to speak for you to deduce an object from its background, and that spirals infinitely into itself, so we end up with things like up and down, good and bad, creation and destruction, which also goes into another point of necessity of structure like an equilibrium of energy that recycles itself, and has infinite momentum because of that and to do that, again a sort of contradiction but like the infinity of the gradient of potentiality there can be the paradox of that cooperation and relationship between two mapped points

>>13488258
Ok I see
>>13488223
Yes QM might allow it. I did not think about that thanks.
>>13488245
I will try Less than Nothing, if I feel like I need more understanding before that I'll take a look at Parallax View. Thank you for your recommendations.

Our self-creative freedom is a form of epistemological evolution, where question -> choice -> action corresponds to variation -> selection -> reproduction. "Free will" is a creationist concept which ignores the whole process of self-evolution and focuses only on selection. Early in the history of biological evolution this creationism was retained as a characterization of evolution as "survival of the fittest," wheras modern biology paints a much more complicated picture, such as the ecosystem (i.e. "selection factors") being in co-evolution with the organism.

Bergson and Whitehead both approached epistemic evolution, with the former characterizing it as a process of discovery and understanding, where every discovery is an un-doing of an explanation and every explanation the un-doing of a discovery, and Whitehead famously describing it as "like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.” I see our self-creative freedom as emerging from our ability to question, with our questions leading towards the formation of possibilities that only then are selected from to be realized as action. Self-creative freedom is a skill, and to cultivate it isn't to "program" someone with the "right" answers, but to cultivate their ability to question in general and themselves in particular.

Biological or experiential evolution isn't possible in the framework of mechanistic materialism, as it must account for it solely in terms of mechanistic abiological processes (i.e. physics.) Mechanistic materialism is a substance theory and to make it the ground of reality is a creationist account, it's just that atheistic materialism has a black hole where the creator was, leaving a creation without creativity. Process metaphysics is a truly evolutionary metaphysics that has no such problem, and is fully compatible with the thesis of metaphysical naturalism. Emergent physicalism is an example, many sciences have moved beyond materialism (and the mechanicism of Descartes and Newton) yet it is still strongly dominant in how we see the world and ourselves. The reason for this is political: if you can convince people that improving the world is impossible due to "human nature" you have pacified them. So we have a culture with incredible technological and scientific development EXCEPT when it comes to human relationships, which are the most important thing to us. Hopefully this firewall of monetized ignorance will fail when it can no longer subvert human wisdom.

>>13488009
...daily thread about the free will. Someone should finally prepare a standard response we can pasta.

There are two sides to the problem:

1, The misunderstanding of "free will" as "indetermined will".
Will can't be indetermined, otherwise it wouldn't be will: if you want something, it's a conscious decision in contrast to desires, instincts and impulses; it's not a chaotic decision to want something, at best it's a pretty well-considered one. This, on the other hand, includes an influence of all those elements considered on the will: they determine it in a certain way. That means an undetermined will is a contradictio in adiecto.
Swiss philosopher Peter Bieri wrote some interesting stuff about that - unfortunately, it was never translated into English (afaik).

2, The misunderstanding of "determinism" as a scientific insight (although it's a metaphysical concept).
Determinism cannot be proven or somehow be detected, otherwise, we'd be able to look into the future without any problems. It's a concept we presuppose due to a certain scientific claim, we once formulated; nothing more, nothing less.
Actually, there are basic mathematical and physical limits which hinder us to really discover the "truth of determinism".
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon#Arguments_against_Laplace's_demon
(And there are some more arguments btw.)

The classical "problem of free will" (which is posted here over and over again) is actually pretty simple.
>I postulate: will is indetermined
>I postulate: everything in this world is determined
>oh fuck, we need some magical mumbo jumbo so that both can be true...
After all, it's quite a naive presentation of a problem which might simply vanish if the ideas of "free will" and "determinism" are clarified properly.

>>13488024
define what you mean by perfect

>>13488603
Great post and good take, detailing how the classical problem of free will is due to a questionable postulate. On the other hand the end of uncertainty means the end of consciousness, as everything can be accounted for programmatically. Modern physics does suggest an inherent uncertainty in reality itself due to mathematical limits which I see as requiring conscious experience to account for; the "job" of conscious experience is never finished. This makes sense when you see the ultimate ground of reality as co-emergence and mutual influence of all things with each other rather than comprised of linear cause and effect, with causation being an abstraction: not all influences are equal in all considerations, for example a speck of dust across the universe is so infinitesimally influential to the motion of the Earth around the sun compared to the bodies of the solar system that it can be completely ignored for our purposes. We must limit relevances to make sense of the world, and as this is a necessary omission all accounts are intrinsically incomplete.

>>13488694
He can't, because if "everything is perfect" perfection is meaningless, as it has no contrast. The goal isn't to make a meaningful statement, but rather to encourage passivity.

>metaphysical realm

Define this, what does this even mean? Aristotle certainly didn’t define a ‘realm’ when he was creating the confines of the discipline. From whence does this term come? :3