Your argument would be valid to me if I was only talking about politics. I'm not.
I'm talking about every aspect of life. And the PAINFUL slog it is to get people to even play pretend at critical thinking.
The conclusions that people draw from information is in my experience, barely even tangitally related to what the information actually IS.
And again, if I only saw this in politics id say you have a point. But it isn't. There are programed blindspots, I'm not disagreeing with you there. And there are people who could otherwise make connections and leaps of logic that don't because of that programming. But in my experience the vast majority couldn't. Even without the programing.
Free will is a separate issue, I don't believe it exists and I've yet to hear an argument that was convincing. Most boil down to "but it'd be totally lame if it didn't exist" and I don't find that paticularlu compelling.
I still think you're not giving credit. This strategy isn't just for politics, it's a strategy that humans use for everything because cognitive loan is always a permanent issue.
I think Free Will is a larger debate, but fundamentally my argument would be that it is effectively required to exist as a mechanism of randomization, otherwise you would exist in a determinist universe, which is patently false.
If you think it's holistic than I can't fault you, I just can't bring myself to see it that way. It seems too...chaotic as a strategy.
It's why I don't buy most conspiracies as such, I don't think people acting in large groups are good enough at keeping secrets to pull most "inside jobs" off. But people who went to the same schools, believe the same things, have the same friends, and have the same ethics will as a force act in a way that furthers their agendas without coordination.
Which i suppose from your perspective is just evidence that the programming IS that effective. I can't really see anyway to prove it one way or the other personally. But you're consistent on that so I'll concede the point.
Whats your faith convictions/lack thereof? Id guess that colors your perspective on this more than anything. For my part, the universe IS deterministic in the sense that there are no truly random actions. And our belief in randomness is just an illusion created by our inability to perceive all things at once in full detail. It's the perfect simulation argument I realize, but I do believe in a God that's all powerful, and every argument with an all powerful God that tries to square that with him somehow blinding himself to the outcome of Free willed beings falls flat.
Otherwise it wouldn't be free will, it'd be predictable acceptable outcome that he elected not to alter. Which still make the only choice and will that matters His.
I'm not even sure in that context what free will IS. It can't be part of the natural world, so it's either mechanically Void and therefore random or mechanically random. Neither of which work because... if you have perfect information randomness doesn't exist.
On the flip side. A secular perspective on it demands consciousness be chemical. Or at the very least, physical. In which case I come to the same question. Hormones and neuron temperature and whayever else reacting in complicated ways that we aren't even aware of producing a process we can't even quantif yet.
So ignoring all the metaphysics of it all.
Tldr. You seem to be saying that not understanding basic chemistry and linguistics is the same brainwashing that turns people into pavlovian attack dogs in politics. In which case, hey fair enough.
I don't disagree with your assessment of, what I would call, systemic indoctrination: same schools, friends, culture, etc. In fact, I'd say it's the primary mechanism of control and it took decades to build.
I'm anti-theist and libertarian; but I'm not like a christ-hater r/atheism bro. Frankly, the idea that Jesus Christ is effectively a physical personification of "The Truth" as a literary device makes perfect sense in a way that I hadn't been considering the past decade. If you manifested "The Truth" into a person, then even kind of the cultish things that Jesus sometimes said make perfect sense. I don't think a real person can claim such a thing, but the idea of promoting psychological healing and health from the rapid acceptance of reality, personal responsibility, and duty of care is such a good idea that I would unironically claim that Jesus's guidance forms the basis of a near perfect civilization; and I'd even be willing to entertain the argument that the real Jesus probably had something like that in mind.
However, from that, the institutionalization of Jesus' teachings are an inherent mechanism that can corrupt those very teachings; to the point that Catholics basically built themselves their own pharasies.
Protestantism was a rejection of that, but in so doing (as you can see from the 30 Years War), when you reject the institution you have to replace it with a new institution, and if you don't do it right you get people like Carolus Rex massacring people because he is an absolute tyrant.
Liberalism is the first idea in this chain which then says: "Hang on, the institutions of power are the real problem here. Maintain an individualist focus on the moral framework of Christianity (reality, responsibility, duty of care) [overly simplified to: Truth & Love]; and suddenly everything will work." Now, Liberal philosophy does make several faulty assumptions, but that core procedure that it's based on, to me, is fucking masterful. Any civilization that has managed to maintain individuated Truth & Love (or: decentralized institutions promoting: rapid acceptance of reality, personal responsibility, and sacral duty of care) has exploded with prosperity, wealth, and happiness. Even if it happens for only a short time, this becomes the golden era of that civilization. Or, effectively, the "kingdom of heaven on earth".
I don't think he's god or anything, and I don't want people to just worship others as a deity just because; but this Jesus fellow sure hit on something really good.
All that being said, this comes well after my recognition that a deterministic universe is a fundamental violation of Goodell's Incompleteness Theorem; and that every single field of every since has some major law which always says the same thing: perfect knowledge can't exist. In Computer Science, it's The Halting Problem. In Economics, it's The Knowledge Problem. In Mathematics it's Goodell's Incompleteness Theorem. In Physics it's The Uncertainty Principle. In Quantum Mechanics: it's the proof that QM doesn't follow the laws of Statistics & Probability (hence proving that QM uses probability, but isn't governed by the rules of probability, thus defeating the Einstein's "Hidden Variables" argument). As such, since every field has a similar law refuting perfect knowledge, it's not possible for a deterministic universe to exist, because a deterministic universe requires perfect knowledge.
For evolution, the fact that a conscious mind developed at all in any animal underscores the fact that simple stimuli-response is an inferior way of responding to the environment. Homo Sapiens would never have evolved to develop a conscious mind if stimuli-response was sufficient. A conscious mind allows for a large amount of free-wheeling associations that aren't directly tied to environmental stimuli, because the conscious mind creates abstract constructs to model on top of reality in order to make decisions. The species that dominates this planet, happens to be the only species capable of abstracting the environment, others, and most importantly: itself, with time dependency in it's analyses. Giving it the unheard of ability to make plans as well as create deceptions and then counter-deceptions to benefit itself. This ability caused this species to focus so heavily on biological investment into mental capacity that their off-springs' brains barely fit into their heads, and their heads barely fit in their mothers. Evolution so favored this animal that it landed on a nearby moon! No other species in that planet's entire existence has ever achieved such a feat in billions of years. It is likely that in the coming millennia, it will be a kind of zygote species that populates life outside of it's own planet. An unheard of accomplishment outside of massive cosmological events. They are quite remarkable, and it is explicitly because stimuli-response is as inferior of a form of behavior regulation to free will, as asexual reproduction is inferior to sexual reproduction.
A secular perspective on it demands consciousness be chemical. Or at the very least, physical. In which case I come to the same question. Hormones and neuron temperature and whayever else reacting in complicated ways that we aren't even aware of producing a process we can't even quantif yet.
Negative. Again, this is a kind of simplistic materialist determinism, or as it was known at the turn of the 20th century "Philosophical Positivism". Positivism asserts there is absolutely nothing outside of the material, and all metaphysical concepts, including abstract concepts, are false. Let me counter this for a second: there is no IQ gene. However, genetics absolutely influences IQ. IQ is an abstract categorical measurement of a creature's ability to engage in abstract thinking. The mechanisms of which are primarily genetic (but other environmental factors like violence and nutrition have added weight). To say that IQ does not exist is highly reductive. There is clearly some mechanism which allows for abstract thought. This mechanism is clearly multi-variate, and is not based on one single mechanism. There is no IQ gene, there IQ chemical, but abstract thought is an emergent property of many biological and environmental causes.
Emergent properties exist from the combination of other things. But we can also see that when you have many emergent properties, the combination of these emergent properties can create another emergent property.
For example, there is no IQ gene, there is no IQ chemical. However if IQ is low, we could expect to see some increased level of interpersonal violence (this is an emergent property of one layer). If you have a community (a second layer of emergent properties) of humans with low IQ, you will tend to find violence common-place within that society (a third layer of emergent properties). If left for a long time, these communities may develop traditions over time that control such community wide violence as a culture (a fourth layer of emergent properties).
Emergent properties, especially when they are emergent from other emergent properties, tend to be abstract or even metaphysical in nature (happiness, contentment, skepticism, "a sense of meaning" are all effectively metaphysical concepts). But to claim they do not exist, is to reject the very basis of human interaction. There is no "sense of meaning" chemical, yet these feelings exist. Yes, down line of interactions you can find chemicals at the bottom, but they alone are not causal. A single gene in the society I mentioned flipping one way or another does not create the tradition of accepting spousal violence. These are knock-on effects pushed by abstract structures. What we see is that although we can not touch and feel abstract constructs, we do see that they exist, and that they do have an effect on society. To deny this would be positivism, which has long since been abandoned because it is fundamentally flawed as a philosophy.
TL;DR:
Determinism has a nasty habit of asserting a positivist philosophical interpretation of reality which is false, but it also requires a solution to the knowledge problem which simply can't be solved in any field of science. Wherefore, free will is required to exist as we know it, because it allows for the abstractions that governs our abstract concepts, and it also introduces non-deterministic outcomes into any system.
A lot to respond to, but the knot cut is that it's obvious difficult me for me to construct the alternative that I don't belive in as perspective conparision for what I do.
Obviously I don't believe that only the physical is reality, but to make that claim without also making a supernatural or at least preternatural doesn't seem reasonable. Any argument that essentially says "but it has to or nothing works" hits the same problems that I have with a secular universe to befin with.
I'm a determination not because I think perfect knowledge is possible, but because reality is independent of knowledge. We as humanity have claimed to have completed possibly knowledge repeatedly and then summilary been proved wrong. Over and over. That leads me to believe that while we can't know the substance perfectly, it doesn't change that it already IS and has always been.
The sun shined at the exact intensity both before and after it was assigned its proper place in astronomy. And every atom had a precise position and velocity in The Begining regardless of our inability to measure that. Unless something outside that system acts, those results are precise based on the interactions within that closed system. There's no randomness there. And nothing that couldn't be predicted with perfect information.
So taking free will onto that, it's either a result of those processes in which case it is also predictable and thus "not free" OR something outside that system COULD make those predictions and somehow didnt. Which comes to the same thing.
Again, outside ive that model, I've no idea what free will even means.
Assuming it isn't a by product of physical process, which seems to be where your aiming with emergent concepts creating emergenct concepts, I still have two problems.
#1 they still have a physical zero point where they started if they aren't super natural to begin with.
2 if they are "divine" rather than physical they're either predictable or they aren't. Both options aren't "free."
Outside of that, we get into stuff that's so epistemological I don't know if it even serves to say more than "I believe" this or that. How do you define "real" why does that matter and what constitutes distinctions between real things.
I believe justice exists because the Supreme being defined it the same way he defined the atomic weight of Hydrogen. There's not debating either philosophically because both are reality that exists.
Anything that can't be defined as precisely as the atomic weight of Hydrogen doesn't exist in any meaningful sense. And I don't me to say you have to be able to define it, just that it has an objective definition at that level of certainty.
What societies DO or do not do seems irrelevent to me I'm defining those realities, unless you define moral along utilitarian lines, which is fine but A. Isnt what I hold to, B. Is one choice among many that can't be proved. And C. (This is the big one) demands that other belief systems kowtow to it for it to exist, while pretending not to do that.
Liberalism MUST triumph over all. That's built into its premise, if something else becomes more practical, or a society is bless by their God for arbitrary reasons, that society tramples a liberal one. And the belief in that ideal creates more motivated conqourers than one that believs in utilitarianism. Because utilitarianism doesn't allow you to choose the king of ashes option. And when ashes comes something else grows out of it. All of that is true whether the God in question exists or not.
For my part, the God I follow has decreed my behavior regardless of whether it leads to me winning or not. It's not about winning or losing, but about doing assigned duty unto death.
Your argument would be valid to me if I was only talking about politics. I'm not.
I'm talking about every aspect of life. And the PAINFUL slog it is to get people to even play pretend at critical thinking.
The conclusions that people draw from information is in my experience, barely even tangitally related to what the information actually IS.
And again, if I only saw this in politics id say you have a point. But it isn't. There are programed blindspots, I'm not disagreeing with you there. And there are people who could otherwise make connections and leaps of logic that don't because of that programming. But in my experience the vast majority couldn't. Even without the programing.
Free will is a separate issue, I don't believe it exists and I've yet to hear an argument that was convincing. Most boil down to "but it'd be totally lame if it didn't exist" and I don't find that paticularlu compelling.
I still think you're not giving credit. This strategy isn't just for politics, it's a strategy that humans use for everything because cognitive loan is always a permanent issue.
I think Free Will is a larger debate, but fundamentally my argument would be that it is effectively required to exist as a mechanism of randomization, otherwise you would exist in a determinist universe, which is patently false.
If you think it's holistic than I can't fault you, I just can't bring myself to see it that way. It seems too...chaotic as a strategy.
It's why I don't buy most conspiracies as such, I don't think people acting in large groups are good enough at keeping secrets to pull most "inside jobs" off. But people who went to the same schools, believe the same things, have the same friends, and have the same ethics will as a force act in a way that furthers their agendas without coordination.
Which i suppose from your perspective is just evidence that the programming IS that effective. I can't really see anyway to prove it one way or the other personally. But you're consistent on that so I'll concede the point.
Whats your faith convictions/lack thereof? Id guess that colors your perspective on this more than anything. For my part, the universe IS deterministic in the sense that there are no truly random actions. And our belief in randomness is just an illusion created by our inability to perceive all things at once in full detail. It's the perfect simulation argument I realize, but I do believe in a God that's all powerful, and every argument with an all powerful God that tries to square that with him somehow blinding himself to the outcome of Free willed beings falls flat.
Otherwise it wouldn't be free will, it'd be predictable acceptable outcome that he elected not to alter. Which still make the only choice and will that matters His.
I'm not even sure in that context what free will IS. It can't be part of the natural world, so it's either mechanically Void and therefore random or mechanically random. Neither of which work because... if you have perfect information randomness doesn't exist.
On the flip side. A secular perspective on it demands consciousness be chemical. Or at the very least, physical. In which case I come to the same question. Hormones and neuron temperature and whayever else reacting in complicated ways that we aren't even aware of producing a process we can't even quantif yet.
So ignoring all the metaphysics of it all.
Tldr. You seem to be saying that not understanding basic chemistry and linguistics is the same brainwashing that turns people into pavlovian attack dogs in politics. In which case, hey fair enough.
I don't disagree with your assessment of, what I would call, systemic indoctrination: same schools, friends, culture, etc. In fact, I'd say it's the primary mechanism of control and it took decades to build.
I'm anti-theist and libertarian; but I'm not like a christ-hater r/atheism bro. Frankly, the idea that Jesus Christ is effectively a physical personification of "The Truth" as a literary device makes perfect sense in a way that I hadn't been considering the past decade. If you manifested "The Truth" into a person, then even kind of the cultish things that Jesus sometimes said make perfect sense. I don't think a real person can claim such a thing, but the idea of promoting psychological healing and health from the rapid acceptance of reality, personal responsibility, and duty of care is such a good idea that I would unironically claim that Jesus's guidance forms the basis of a near perfect civilization; and I'd even be willing to entertain the argument that the real Jesus probably had something like that in mind.
However, from that, the institutionalization of Jesus' teachings are an inherent mechanism that can corrupt those very teachings; to the point that Catholics basically built themselves their own pharasies.
Protestantism was a rejection of that, but in so doing (as you can see from the 30 Years War), when you reject the institution you have to replace it with a new institution, and if you don't do it right you get people like Carolus Rex massacring people because he is an absolute tyrant.
Liberalism is the first idea in this chain which then says: "Hang on, the institutions of power are the real problem here. Maintain an individualist focus on the moral framework of Christianity (reality, responsibility, duty of care) [overly simplified to: Truth & Love]; and suddenly everything will work." Now, Liberal philosophy does make several faulty assumptions, but that core procedure that it's based on, to me, is fucking masterful. Any civilization that has managed to maintain individuated Truth & Love (or: decentralized institutions promoting: rapid acceptance of reality, personal responsibility, and sacral duty of care) has exploded with prosperity, wealth, and happiness. Even if it happens for only a short time, this becomes the golden era of that civilization. Or, effectively, the "kingdom of heaven on earth".
I don't think he's god or anything, and I don't want people to just worship others as a deity just because; but this Jesus fellow sure hit on something really good.
All that being said, this comes well after my recognition that a deterministic universe is a fundamental violation of Goodell's Incompleteness Theorem; and that every single field of every since has some major law which always says the same thing: perfect knowledge can't exist. In Computer Science, it's The Halting Problem. In Economics, it's The Knowledge Problem. In Mathematics it's Goodell's Incompleteness Theorem. In Physics it's The Uncertainty Principle. In Quantum Mechanics: it's the proof that QM doesn't follow the laws of Statistics & Probability (hence proving that QM uses probability, but isn't governed by the rules of probability, thus defeating the Einstein's "Hidden Variables" argument). As such, since every field has a similar law refuting perfect knowledge, it's not possible for a deterministic universe to exist, because a deterministic universe requires perfect knowledge.
For evolution, the fact that a conscious mind developed at all in any animal underscores the fact that simple stimuli-response is an inferior way of responding to the environment. Homo Sapiens would never have evolved to develop a conscious mind if stimuli-response was sufficient. A conscious mind allows for a large amount of free-wheeling associations that aren't directly tied to environmental stimuli, because the conscious mind creates abstract constructs to model on top of reality in order to make decisions. The species that dominates this planet, happens to be the only species capable of abstracting the environment, others, and most importantly: itself, with time dependency in it's analyses. Giving it the unheard of ability to make plans as well as create deceptions and then counter-deceptions to benefit itself. This ability caused this species to focus so heavily on biological investment into mental capacity that their off-springs' brains barely fit into their heads, and their heads barely fit in their mothers. Evolution so favored this animal that it landed on a nearby moon! No other species in that planet's entire existence has ever achieved such a feat in billions of years. It is likely that in the coming millennia, it will be a kind of zygote species that populates life outside of it's own planet. An unheard of accomplishment outside of massive cosmological events. They are quite remarkable, and it is explicitly because stimuli-response is as inferior of a form of behavior regulation to free will, as asexual reproduction is inferior to sexual reproduction.
Negative. Again, this is a kind of simplistic materialist determinism, or as it was known at the turn of the 20th century "Philosophical Positivism". Positivism asserts there is absolutely nothing outside of the material, and all metaphysical concepts, including abstract concepts, are false. Let me counter this for a second: there is no IQ gene. However, genetics absolutely influences IQ. IQ is an abstract categorical measurement of a creature's ability to engage in abstract thinking. The mechanisms of which are primarily genetic (but other environmental factors like violence and nutrition have added weight). To say that IQ does not exist is highly reductive. There is clearly some mechanism which allows for abstract thought. This mechanism is clearly multi-variate, and is not based on one single mechanism. There is no IQ gene, there IQ chemical, but abstract thought is an emergent property of many biological and environmental causes.
Emergent properties exist from the combination of other things. But we can also see that when you have many emergent properties, the combination of these emergent properties can create another emergent property.
For example, there is no IQ gene, there is no IQ chemical. However if IQ is low, we could expect to see some increased level of interpersonal violence (this is an emergent property of one layer). If you have a community (a second layer of emergent properties) of humans with low IQ, you will tend to find violence common-place within that society (a third layer of emergent properties). If left for a long time, these communities may develop traditions over time that control such community wide violence as a culture (a fourth layer of emergent properties).
Emergent properties, especially when they are emergent from other emergent properties, tend to be abstract or even metaphysical in nature (happiness, contentment, skepticism, "a sense of meaning" are all effectively metaphysical concepts). But to claim they do not exist, is to reject the very basis of human interaction. There is no "sense of meaning" chemical, yet these feelings exist. Yes, down line of interactions you can find chemicals at the bottom, but they alone are not causal. A single gene in the society I mentioned flipping one way or another does not create the tradition of accepting spousal violence. These are knock-on effects pushed by abstract structures. What we see is that although we can not touch and feel abstract constructs, we do see that they exist, and that they do have an effect on society. To deny this would be positivism, which has long since been abandoned because it is fundamentally flawed as a philosophy.
TL;DR:
Determinism has a nasty habit of asserting a positivist philosophical interpretation of reality which is false, but it also requires a solution to the knowledge problem which simply can't be solved in any field of science. Wherefore, free will is required to exist as we know it, because it allows for the abstractions that governs our abstract concepts, and it also introduces non-deterministic outcomes into any system.
A lot to respond to, but the knot cut is that it's obvious difficult me for me to construct the alternative that I don't belive in as perspective conparision for what I do.
Obviously I don't believe that only the physical is reality, but to make that claim without also making a supernatural or at least preternatural doesn't seem reasonable. Any argument that essentially says "but it has to or nothing works" hits the same problems that I have with a secular universe to befin with.
I'm a determination not because I think perfect knowledge is possible, but because reality is independent of knowledge. We as humanity have claimed to have completed possibly knowledge repeatedly and then summilary been proved wrong. Over and over. That leads me to believe that while we can't know the substance perfectly, it doesn't change that it already IS and has always been.
The sun shined at the exact intensity both before and after it was assigned its proper place in astronomy. And every atom had a precise position and velocity in The Begining regardless of our inability to measure that. Unless something outside that system acts, those results are precise based on the interactions within that closed system. There's no randomness there. And nothing that couldn't be predicted with perfect information.
So taking free will onto that, it's either a result of those processes in which case it is also predictable and thus "not free" OR something outside that system COULD make those predictions and somehow didnt. Which comes to the same thing.
Again, outside ive that model, I've no idea what free will even means.
Assuming it isn't a by product of physical process, which seems to be where your aiming with emergent concepts creating emergenct concepts, I still have two problems.
#1 they still have a physical zero point where they started if they aren't super natural to begin with.
2 if they are "divine" rather than physical they're either predictable or they aren't. Both options aren't "free."
Outside of that, we get into stuff that's so epistemological I don't know if it even serves to say more than "I believe" this or that. How do you define "real" why does that matter and what constitutes distinctions between real things.
I believe justice exists because the Supreme being defined it the same way he defined the atomic weight of Hydrogen. There's not debating either philosophically because both are reality that exists.
Anything that can't be defined as precisely as the atomic weight of Hydrogen doesn't exist in any meaningful sense. And I don't me to say you have to be able to define it, just that it has an objective definition at that level of certainty.
What societies DO or do not do seems irrelevent to me I'm defining those realities, unless you define moral along utilitarian lines, which is fine but A. Isnt what I hold to, B. Is one choice among many that can't be proved. And C. (This is the big one) demands that other belief systems kowtow to it for it to exist, while pretending not to do that.
Liberalism MUST triumph over all. That's built into its premise, if something else becomes more practical, or a society is bless by their God for arbitrary reasons, that society tramples a liberal one. And the belief in that ideal creates more motivated conqourers than one that believs in utilitarianism. Because utilitarianism doesn't allow you to choose the king of ashes option. And when ashes comes something else grows out of it. All of that is true whether the God in question exists or not.
For my part, the God I follow has decreed my behavior regardless of whether it leads to me winning or not. It's not about winning or losing, but about doing assigned duty unto death.