/lit/ - Literature

>>18959084
my big guess is that there is no "time" between reactions/interactions between matter/particles/etc in the universe, thus everything happens instantaneously, thus everything already happened
imagine it like we're on event horizon, we're already gone but it's stretched out for our perception
time is over except where it is perceived

i don't think there would be a way to prove or disprove this theory, it basically just separates perception from "reality"

Here anon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orMtwOz6Db0

>>18959148
thanks, but i'm familiar with that but it's about where consciousness resides, not of there is such a thing as free will, as far as i understand. if consciousness resides in the quantum states of certain parts of certain neurons that doesn't say anything about agency, freedom etc

>>18959084
Free will exists at the level of the perceiving self-consciousness, which is what's secretly being posited & hidden in the "scientific" observation which makes it possible to begin with. The observer observes then tries to erase himself. There's no reason to imagine that your "experience parsed by mind" as you put it is somehow secondary to this quantum flux and soforth thus described. Rather the opposite is true.

>>18959084
>butterfly-effect-esque
yikes with your dumb language

William James almost committed suicide due to similar worries in the 1870s but then read Charles Renouvier and recovered. That's how it's usually told but Renouvier's actual positions on free will always seemed unsatisfying to me. I think James' position went far beyond Renouvier's and that's why most commentary on issue doesn't say much about the ideas James actually got from Renouvier directly.

If you ask me, James discovered Kant's position on free will through Renouvier, that our moral experience requires it as a postulate even while our theoretical experience can never "locate" it in the theoretical world (the world of natural science). This leads us to the paradoxical position that we always already believe, indeed have to believe in free will, even to be able to think and act in the first place, but nowhere we look will "show" us freedom.

Kant clearly believes free will exists in the thing in itself, and that the problem results from our only having access to the thing in itself through our phenomenal presentation of it, which (for whatever reason of God - who is another of our necessary postulates) does not let us see things like the soul, the absolute, or free will sub specie aeternitatis, i.e. as God presumably does. As Kant said, he felt compelled to "deny knowledge" (of things themselves) "to make room for faith." This is a result of his Protestant, pietist heritage, which glorified God by not presuming to scan Him. It goes back to medieval notions of the relationship between human and divine knowledge of the same things: when we "see" our concepts, even when we use them correctly, we don't see what God sees. We see by the light of the divine mind, but not with it. The intervening early modern period, especially people like Leibniz, had much more optimistic (and honestly strange) notions of equivalence between our concepts and the concepts of God's mind or absolute Reason. Kant was a return to humble scepticism, built on a kind of loving trust and gratitude toward God that also prevents it from lapsing into nihilism.

>>18959415
James is interestingly close to Kant's position but I think he puts extra stress on the platonic dimension in Kant's thinking, namely: everything about reality, including our own experience of it, ought to be "saved" in any final analysis or deduction of it. So why when we make our best attempts at models do we exclude all the "subjective," human, squishy bits of reality? Is the experience of freedom, of the paradoxical "necessity of freedom," any less a part of objective reality than the non-experience of a rock? They both exist, they both have "ontological status" and are thus both explananda, awaiting a unified and unifying explanation.

James' pragmatism dictates that, until we have such a theory (or perhaps whole new way of scientific or metaphysical seeing) that successfully raises us to this amazing and literally unforeseeable level of knowledge of the things in themselves, such that we can understand how dead deterministic matter produces/conjoins with freedom-craving souls, how dead objective things produce subjective experience and why these take place in the same universe, without contradiction, we should withhold judgment. And we should respect all the phenomena we currently only understand in this subordinate, latent way, both the objective and subjective, i.e. both the beauty of determinate laws as revealed by Descartes' and Newton's mechanics, and the many "unsquared remainders" like freedom, morality, consciousness, etc., as well as progressive or evolutionary development.

>>18959415
>>18959420
That was very much the kind of reply I was looking for, tyvm.

>>18959158
Sure, but it at least leaves free will as an option, which is so far as science can get. Whether you believe that objective reduction is simply random or is guided by some external force (soul) is up to you and philosophical at the core.

>>18959148
I came here to post it.

/lit/ hive mind strong.

>>18959084
For me, it's simply not caring or thinking about it.

yeah
i got worked up about that for a good while, age 18 to like 26
then i just accepted it, because it's true, but i selectively choose to apply it
i apply determinism to others; to forgive them, understand their perspectives, their constraints, that they had to act as they had to
i apply non-determinism to myself; i'm an agent, i'm to blame (mostly), i'm to praise (mostly), etc.
i find it's healthier
it's really just willful (ho-ho-ho) lying to oneself
but it made life a lot better
applying determinism to yourself gets you nowhere. you always end up blaming your faults on things beyond your control and you are less likely to act. once you accept will and responsibility, it's on you again, so better shape up.
this is probably a ton of projection or whatever but it's where i'm at now and have been for about 5 years and it's working pretty well
getting older, it also gets generally easier to get less worked up about such things and just live. you're too tired to care, more often than not. again, probably projecting.