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I think those 'subjective catalysts' are the qualia of consciousness. It's just input and output as regards the mind if you take it to the extreme. Input is what our senses deliver and output are our actions. The qualia is 'us' being aware of the process. The rider on the elephant.
Did someone say it was a proof? You wanted to know why ethics and morality were connected to determinism. Did it really need to be explained?
This is one of the silliest arguments I've ever seen. And it seems rather immaterial to your larger argument, since becoming convinced would not be a true prior determinant. The determinants would be the dispositions that lead you to feel convinced, because the reality isn't that you've evaluated and weighed the evidence and then chosen to go with the stronger evidence but that you feel as if you've done that when in fact some prior determinant is the real cause of your accepting the conclusion.
Of course you have to choose to accept an argument, and you're free to reject evidence on the basis of more crucial beliefs. But you're seeming to ignore the 500 pound gorilla in your argument, which is the underlying prior determinants which are the true explanation of your choices. The things that give you the illusion of making choices to begin with.
This is the most contorted way of discussing supposedly being convinced by evidence. And you seem to be conflating multiple ways of using the word determined, rather than the way that it is expressed for determinism in the context of free will being an illusion.
But with the mentality that often passes here and in the public these days, I'm sure that someone will read that story and think the Hulk is the actual intruder rather than the protagonist.
If that's what you were talking about, then YES! Please give context. Then I would know what you were talking about. In my review to figure this out today, I discoved that you'd referenced FFRF over a month ago. (I stopped reading when I found your reference.) Since "freedom from religion" is just a phrase, leaving out the "foundation" part removes the context. So if you had said something like the text quoted just above, it would have made all the difference in clarity.
I don't know Sapolsky. The only thing I know about him was in your older posts, some of which I read again today.
Is it different than being active on any other social media platform, like for example "Twitter", or those made by the Christians to discuss things that aren't religion? (I have no idea how much time they spend on religion here, I don't go to those parts.)
I would cross check your epistemology then. I think you are seeing things that aren't there. Perhaps you are mistaking the complete non-interest or regard in your god or religion for attempts to drag it down.
Never ready any Hulk comics, so I don't get your reference, but since I understood the source of your reference and decided I didn't care what comic book reference you were making, I didn't ask what you meant............................. Hence my allusion to The Incredible Hulk #200 comic-book story.
I do, at least out side of your head. How this interacts with your own psyche, I leave to you.
Bradskii mentioned Sapolsky was a major recent source of persuasion in his subscribing to Determinism, and I don't take it that it's merely a 'methodological determinism' for the sake of scientific praxis within the fields of Psychology.
I joined CF because it wasn't simply a "public forum." By having the qualifier of "Christian," I assumed that when I came on here to discuss things it'd be within a primarily Christian social and ideological context. I don't expect Twitter to be primarily Christian, or any other more general social media to be so.
That's fine if you're here to learn more about pseudo-science because you got tired of reading Massimo Pigliucci's significant critiques of what isn't quite valid science.
I'll have to "recheck" my hermeneutical reading of said skeptical inquirers who alight upon these, here, forums.
That's quite alright if comics have never been your cup of tea. You don't have to be a comic-book nerd to get the gist of what I'm implying.
That's right. Being convinced is what you do. It's the decision. The evidence is why you do it.
Who ignoring gorillas? Yes, the prior determinants are the true explanation of your choice. You keep repeating what I am telling you...
This is contorted?
That was quite a plaintive post. Oh no, all these atheists coming here to dismantle our religious beliefs. Poor you.
I did see that in the OP and immediate environs in my review today. He found it convincing after reading a bunch of other things first.
Oddly enough, I would have never gone near a site like this when I was a Christian.
Don't know him or his work.
It's always good to reevaluate how we approach things. Hopefully we all do it.
I didn't have the budget for comics or much contact with them. (Not so big in the late 70s/80s.) I could [not] afford my space program. I did read some bound volumes of Superman and Batman comics from the library (including the origin issues).
Not originally, but...
Nope, not if your decisions are ends generated by irrational priors. The why you do it is nothing more than because some chemical and electrical signal behaving according to physical laws. The stuff with the evidence is just an illusion, when in fact the underlying cause is purely a matter of the prior conditions in your body's chemistry.
You are, because you don't seem to be willing to take your claim all the way. I keep repeating what you are supposedly telling me because you stop short and play at both sides of the coin, rather than going whole hog and accepting that none of your reasons for believing what you believe are material to what you believe, but instead are all part of an illusion of making your own decisions.
Why wouldn't they be? If the antecedent conditions are irrational and they convince you then they are still the reason you are convinced. The arguments that cause you to make a decision don't have to be valid. They don't have to be correct. They can be the most badly written, fact free dross that's ever been proposed. But if they convince you then they are still the reason you are convinced. If they don't convince you then you maintain your original position, which was itself determined by arguments that you did find convincing.
Do you think that all these chemical and electrical signals just emerge from nowhere? They are the result of the evidence. It is the evidence prompting the process. And the process will generate a decision. Oh, except you know of some undetectable something that changes some other thing somewhere at some time. I'm sure you'll get around to telling me about it.
There's nothing missing. You make decisions on prior input (whether it's wrong or not doesn't matter - whether it convinces you is the only criteria). You cannot make decisions without a reason. And those reasons are the antecedent conditions. The process runs its course and your previously noted electrical and chemical changes are the process whereby the decision is made.
(Your post was in reply to @Bradskii . I leave in all of your original text, but I'm not going to reply to the first paragraph.)
You seem to think that an "atheistic" view is some how harsher/stronger (or it would seem worse) than an agnostic one. I don't think there is any real difference between the two. Most who self-identify as agnostics are atheists who either think that "atheist" must include a belief in the non-existence of god, or don't want to sound so "extreme" and do so to soften impressions for social reasons. A small portion fall into the uncanny middle of (Huxley?)'s original proposed coinage of the word. We're just non-believers, nothing more.
The smaller part of this podcast was about free will/determinism, particularly the consequences for correction and punishment of wrong-doing and ill behavior. Since this was the podcast of a state teacher's union, the focus was clearly on juveniles in school (and I think in criminal justice). What changed approaches to student behavior that have been made are based on actual studies of the origins of those behaviors and how to prevent them. Schools have moved away from retributive punishments for correctable behaviors as is discussed in the video.
I can't speak for @Bradskii (though he flat out denies it in a response I can see on the same page of posts from May), but when I watched Sapolsky talk about these things, it was clear to the extent he was presenting policy changes (for example school discipline) that these were a consequence of his conclusion of (hard?) determinism, rather than political goals that he uses a philosophical position (determinism) to achieve.
Perhaps you intuition is a bit off. I don't think all of your philosophy is going to help you work out motivations or how you assess them.Maybe you're not doing this as I'm inclined to intuit here, but as a philosopher, I'd have a host of other overlapping fields I'd have to bring into the ongoing research and deliberation over the Nature of Determinism, and I think that not implications from Epistemology should come to bear, but also those from Neuroepistemology and the Philosophy of Neuroscience (which I'm beginning to explore to add to what I've long dealt with in Epistemology and in the Philosophy of History).
Neuroepistemology - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
The Philosophy of Neuroscience (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
plato.stanford.edu
You seem to be confused as to how I'm using "irrational" since I'm speaking of determination by the laws of nature, in which case the semantic content of an argument is irrelevant to whether or not it is accepted. If materialist determinism is true, then our evaluation of semantics in arguments is purely a matter of illusion with the real explanation being found in chemistry and electricity, which the meaning of the various terms of debate have no impact upon. So whether or not the arguments are poorly written is entirely irrelevant to the point I am making, which is that the arguments are superfluous to whether or not we are convinced by them on materialist determinism. We only feel as if the arguments make a difference, when in fact something as trivial as having eaten an egg salad sandwich is far more likely to play a determining role since it actually changes our body chemistry.
Nope, they emerge from the physical fabric of our bodies. Which makes things like the atmosphere we're breathing in, the food we ate for lunch, and such, far more instrumental in "convincing" us than the meaning involved in the arguments we engage with. If materialist determinism is true, especially of the eliminativist variety that you seem to be pushing, then things like the meaning of the arguments and our reasoning are illusions of a purely physical apparatus. Something you seem to be affirming, while denying with your own participation.
Again, "determined" has a very specific meaning in terms of physical processes which is a subtly different meaning from being swayed by an argument. It seems like it should go without saying, but whether or not something is convincing depends on our active participation with it. We're not simply passively receiving arguments and then flipping a switch from convinced to not convinced, but weighing out the possibilities and considering the implications among other tasks that require a degree of freedom in order to operate. Sloppily incorporating a wide range of meaning and then pretending to use a term in its narrow sense is nothing more than a sign of intellectual laziness, and certainly not a sign of a properly constructed argument.
