Pretty sure that means that society/instincts are keeping us from killing ourselves (the "coercive establishment"). — darthbarracuda

It obviously doesn't, since I've explicitly included suicide among those possible actions.

Then why were arguing previously that suicide is not a viable option (because of instincts, pain, relationships, etc)?

Because you brought it up and so I responded.

You responded by saying that suicide is not a viable option, which contradicts what you just said in your last response.

I don't think I ever said that I can't find anywhere where I did, but you're free to point me to it if you find it.

Okay, there is such an incentive. If you don't do it, you literally die painfully. What more incentive do you want? — The Great Whatever

I'm interpreting this as meaning suicide is indeed not a viable choice.

It obviously doesn't, since I've explicitly included suicide among those possible actions. — The Great Whatever

From page 4.

There actually are coercive mechanisms keeping people alive to suffer once they are born, such as survival instincts, the general pain attending dying, guilt, shame and illegality of suicide (including censure from family members, government, and religion, sometimes threats of burning in hell for eternity), and so on.

You are simply wrong in your description; people go apeshit at the idea of suicide, and there are systematic and painfu pressures in place to keep the coercive institution going once in place. — The Great Whatever

From page 5.

Finally, even if suicide were completely free, birth would still be coercive, because one cannot consent to it. The fact that it might be possible to undo does not make it any less forced (and much of the pain endured happens before it is possible to kill oneself). — The Great Whatever

From page 5.

I'm interpreting this as meaning suicide is indeed not a viable choice. — darthbarracuda

What does that have to do with suicide? It was about breathing, etc. not being freely done because they're done on pain of coercion.

The rest is about how people instill incentives against suicide. That doesn't mean suicide can't be possible or viable -- I've assumed it is this whole time because people, after all, do it (but then often in great pain or duress because of the mechanisms that act against them).

The rest is about how people instill incentives against suicide. That doesn't mean suicide can't be possible or viable -- I've assumed it is this whole time because people, after all, do it (but then often in great pain or duress because of the mechanisms that act against them). — The Great Whatever

Dude, I have literally been saying this for the past couple of pages. The only reason I said it is because I thought you held the position that suicide was not viable (that we are "coerced"/"forced" to continue to live even if we do not want to).

In some cases you are. In some cases, other incentives overpower that (in which case, one can't really be blamed for suicide in the sense that one can be coerced into that too, by how unbearable being alive is).

I hesitate to endorse your idea that humans are like puppets that are thrown around the place by external forces outside of their control (even if control is phenomenal and illusory - which is still a contentious topic but I'd be willing to say that classical libertarian free will is not true).

I think ultimately a human being desires to continue to live (on top of other desires). So suicide is not a choice in the way I would choose an ice cream flavor. It's a way of escaping/solving something. It's not that life is inherently bad that warrants suicide, but that the current conditions are unbearable to experience anymore. And so someone is torn between their desire to live and their desire to escape their pain (psychache).

But a person who commits suicide is not coerced. They are torn between two options and decide to go with one of them. The pain of leaving the other option is what gives a person their psychache. But it is not as if the experience of pain is actually forcing us to commit suicide in the same way a person who pushes you off a cliff would be forcing you to die.

Perhaps you could argue that desires are themselves a type of "coercing" because they are so strong. The Buddha recognized this and advocated ceasing desires and living in a stable state of equilibrium so we don't feel this intense need for something. But again, many people, including myself (and presumably you as well) have certain desires that fall outside of this. I desire to write this response. I feel good by writing this response. So it's not coercing if I enjoy it and feel as though I am doing it by my own "free will" (a la compatibilism).

Someone killing themselves by their own judgement is not an example of coercion. An outside agent forcing the person to kill themselves on threat of torture is coercion.

A coercion requires the victim to not want to do something as well as preventing them from fulfilling their own personal desires. Take your example of breathing. This is not coercion. I don't mind breathing. I'm certainly under a kind of pressure to continue to breathe, but I don't mind it. It's a function of the body, a body that I identify with. Like I said above, humans have a desire to continue to live. Breathing is a necessary requirement for us to live.

I get your idea though that it seems like we are slaves to the whims of our bodily needs. But if you also look at yourself, that is, your psyche, you will realize that you have needs as well, needs that you personally identify with. One of these needs would be, to me, to be in equanimity with your environment, which includes your own bodily functions.

So in order to argue that we are coerced into breathing, you have to argue that we actually do mind breathing (it's a pain in the ass perhaps), and that we don't want to live a life that requires us to breathe. Sure, as both of us have contended, you are coerced into a life of breathing. But ultimately it is still your choice whether or not you desire to continue to live a life that includes breathing. For many of us, it would seem that breathing does not matter at all because it does not impede on our desire to continue to live (in fact it allows us to live).

You simply don't understand what I'm saying. You really don't. You can't judge the quality of my argument if determinism is true. If a judge has a predetermined conclusion, he would be recused.

The worst philosophers are those who con you into thinking they had something to say and then you realize you've wasted your time.

Also, I would like to point out that if you reject compatibilism in favor of hard determinism, and then complain that there is no free will and that everything is coerced, then you have to admit that your own thoughts of being coerced were in fact just determined. There is no coercion at all in hard determinism, there is just the natural flow of causality.

Basically, what this means is that you are clinging to an idea of an entirely free will in a universe that is devoid of it, and then wonder why it seems like you are being coerced. It's because it's not compatible with the way things are. It's as if you are not willing to let go of the experience of having control and then wonder why it seems like everything is out to get you.

Also, I don't think breathing is a good example because most of the time it is subconscious and only becomes a controllable function of the body if you focus on it.

You simply don't understand what I'm saying. You really don't. — Hanover

No, I understand, it's just a terrible argument. A variant of it is used by certain sort of religious apologists often. Not that that discredits it in of itself, it's just a really common thing.

You can't judge the quality of my argument if determinism is true. — Hanover

Why not? The qualities that make a good argument would be the same either way, all we have to do is look and see.

I'm certainly under a kind of pressure to continue to breathe, but I don't mind it. — darthbarracuda

Yes you do, hold your breath for three minutes.

Also, I would like to point out that if you reject compatibilism in favor of hard determinism, and then complain that there is no free will and that everything is coerced, then you have to admit that your own thoughts of being coerced were in fact just determined. There is no coercion at all in hard determinism, there is just the natural flow of causality. — darthbarracuda

It doesn't matter whether my thoughts are determined or not to whether they're true.

I would say I'm a 'hard indeterminist' overall, but acknowledge (a) that certain local configurations for all intents and purposes can be modeled as hard deterministic, and (b) there may exist a certain kind of narrow freedom that arises in exceptional cases, but I'm not so confident on this point.

Yes you do, hold your breath for three minutes. — The Great Whatever

Why would I want to? I fail to understand what you are getting at here.

It doesn't matter whether my thoughts are determined or not to whether they're true. — The Great Whatever

But "truth" in this case is in accordance to whether or not we are coerced into anything. If you are a hard determinist, then you cannot be coerced! You are pre-determined to do and be subject to whatever you happen to be. To be able to be coerced is to have some sort of (free) will. The phenomenal aspect of having the impression of having control over your actions (a will) leads to compatibilism (soft determinism). A frustrated will is coercion. So you are essentially holding hard determinism to be true while simultaneously holding that for some reason our wills/desires are important because they are frustrated. It's absurd to ignore the phenomenal impression of having a will, and so hard determinism as far as I can tell is untenable.

But this thread wasn't supposed to be over hard determinism but rather its soft cousin, compatibilism, in which case the (illusion) of having a will is important, primarily due to the ethical considerations regarding a frustrated or externally-suppressed will.

I would say that for the sake of charity and to further the discussion without devolving into hair-splitting definitional semantics, I will grant that our bodily processes can be interpreted as being "coercive", or at least "forceful". However, I want to make a distinction between active "coercion" and passive "coercion". An active coercive act is immediately identifiable as frustrating someone's freedom. An example of this is blackmailing someone by threat of abuse or death. A passive coercive act is one that could be interpreted as being coercive but is not explicitly obvious. An example of this is your own body apparently "blackmailing" you into breathing by a threat of pain and death. The difference between the two has to do with whether or not the individual gives a shit about what is happening to them. Would I care about being blackmailed by another person? Yes. Do I care about that fact that I have to breathe to continue to live? Not really.

So I think that perhaps it's not necessarily a difference in kind but a difference in degree. The problem I see with your view in that you are equivocating one with the other. I follow the laws of the road when I drive not because I'm being coerced by the government but because I genuinely understand that to be safe requires me to follow these rules. I would not follow the laws of Nazi Germany, as those would be often oppressive and explicitly coercive. In each case you could use the world "coerced" to describe the situation, but it sounds more like an equivocation gone too far than a legitimate description.

This goes back to one of my original posts, which said that your positions stems from your (overly) pessimistic view on human life. Actually considering breathing as a coercive mechanism is not at all in line with what most people on Earth would consider it to be. It's a necessary act, often subconscious, that we must do to survive, but most people on Earth would say that they would rather continue to live. It's only when you bring into the picture the idea that we ought to die that the mechanism of breathing becomes coercive. If you don't bring this into the picture, then the "coercive" mechanism of breathing (the pain and threat of death), no longer are seen as coercive but rather as an alarm mechanism to alert the person that, hey, they should probably start breathing again if they want to continue to live. It may not be the most gentle mechanism but I'm sure many people appreciate the warning calls when they come.

I would say I'm a 'hard indeterminist' overall, but acknowledge (a) that certain local configurations for all intents and purposes can be modeled as hard deterministic, and (b) there may exist a certain kind of narrow freedom that arises in exceptional cases, but I'm not so confident on this point. — The Great Whatever

Some philosophers/cognitive scientists think that our higher-level cognitive processes allow our will to not initiate actions but rather suppress actions by formulating internal, private truth conditions. A devotee to Dennett would say that Popperian and Gregorian minds are capable of this internal formulation.

The problem is that holds a misunderstanding of causality. It is always deterministic. Any casual relationship, by definition, has one state relating out of another. Agents are states. One's willing is a state of existence which causes another state of existence (future action). In this respect it it just like any other state of existence. One specific state then results in another. Willing is merely another from causal relationship, it's presence determining the future event in conjunction with that event itself.

All too often we confound ourselves when talking about the causation of future states. We take the abstraction of a meaning of casual states (e.g. "laws of reality)" and treat them as if the are an outside actor which acts to force future events to one logically necessary outcome. We ignore that any casual relationship needs it determined result (the effect) to be defined. The abstractions we like to offer up as the supposedly limiting "laws of reality" are actually immanent to specific causal relationships we have encountered. The outcome of a causal system is not determined into one outcome by an outside force of the "laws of reality." It is an expression of that specific system itself (those existing states of cause and effect together).

Therefore, in casualty, the determining of a future state, places no limit on what is possible. The abstractions we have noted in past casual relationship needn't apply to any other we encounter. That's always a question of the particular state of the case and effect of the specific relationship. Determinism is not the opposite of possibility, but runs concurrently with it. Everything is determined in a world where anything possible. For any action taken or event caused, it was possible for it to be otherwise.

"Laws of reality" do not determine anything. States of existence (including our will and actions), in there respective causal relationships, are the determining actors. They are the "deterministic laws" and so there is no outside force which can constrain states of the world to one necessary outcome. Prior conditions cannot form a causal (and deterministic) relationship. Determined events have no link to "laws of reality," whether we are talking about our will or the movement of a rock (any time it's possible a rock could have moved differently) .

Thus, there is no need to negate determinism to maintain liberty of spontaneity. We have liberty of spontaneity under determinism. Any action we cause, we determine, with our will could possible be otherwise. Agent causation, as you describe it, is an unnecessary effort to protect possibility in the world. It's a response to the idea determinism entails the elimination of possibility. It's an attempt to paper holes left by the mistake of posing of casual relationships as defined by a prior state alone. Far better to get to the root of the problem and take out this logical error in our analysis of casualty entirely, to call out the error of supposing that deterministic relationships can be given by citing a prior state on its own.

Any casual relationship, by definition, has one state relating out of another. Agents are states. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Agents, I would have thought, are rational animals and thus belong to the category of substance (ousia). A state is a particular determination (in one specific respect) of a substance. It is expressed by a predicate, whereas an agent is typically designated by a proper name (or demonstrative), and characterized as the sort of substance that it is by a "substance form" concept, (e.g. the concept of a human being). I don't know what it could possibly mean to say that agents are states. What would they be states of?

Determinism is a concept that applies to certain sorts of systems: those, namely, that evolve according to deterministic laws. The system as a whole, (or the totality of the object that make it up) can be in a determinate state at a time, and if its being in this state at a time in conjunction with the laws that govern its evolution uniquely determine its state at any other time then we say that the system is deterministic. Systems, thus defined, belong to the category of substance since they are what states are predicated of. Thus the doctrine of determinism is the thesis that the universe as a whole constitutes a deterministic system. I doubt that the doctrine is intelligible or coherent because it relies on the concept of the state of the universe at a time, and I don't think there is any such thing. Real systems are deterministic relative to a set of laws that characterizes the connections between some definite set of predicates (that make up the vocabulary of a specific science or empirical domain). But the very idea of the universe -- the set of everything that exists in space and time -- isn't restricted to a particular set of predicates (e.g. it isn't restricted to the set of physical properties).

The doctrine of determinism thus may rely on the flawed intuition that all the predicates that designate real properties somehow can be defined in term of physical predicates, and that the laws of physics are (broadly) deterministic (modulo quantum indeterminacies). In other words, the doctrine of determinism relies on the intuition that all the genuine empirical properties of all the "real" entities in the world supervene on physical properties. Even if we accept that this idea can be cashed out and made plausible (which I doubt) it still would no follow that just because the universe qua physical system is deterministic therefore all supervening sets of predicates must designate properties (possible states of real objects) that evolve deterministically. Denying this still is consistent with the idea that any "event" -- described in whatever vocabulary (e.g. the vocabulary of chemistry, geology or psychology) -- has a cause (or several causes). But this denial of determinism also is consistent with the idea that there are no sets of deterministic laws that connect states with earlier states, as those states are singled out by this "supervening" vocabulary. Davidson't anomalous monism is a instance of this idea of supervenience of the mental on the physical that doesn't carry the determinism holding at the supervened upon level to the supervenient level.

Also unclear to me is what you mean to signify with "laws of reality". Are the principles of theoretical rationality, and of practical reason, that we (often though not always) hold our beliefs, deliberations and intentions answerable to, laws of reality in that sense?

Unfortunately, life itself is such a coercive situation, since it is impossible to consent to being born, and all 'decisions' made while alive are within the context of that coercive establishment. — The Great Whatever

So we are coerced into living by being born? "Living" is equivalent to handing over one's wallet and "being born" to having a gun pointed in one's face, to parallel the other example you gave?

If so, I quite like and am drawn to your argument, but I find there is one issue with it. "Who" is being coerced into being born prior to being born? Fetuses are not persons, as far as I'm concerned, so there is no one to be coerced and no one to consent in the first place.

Why not? The qualities that make a good argument would be the same either way, all we have to do is look and see. — The Great Whatever

So, if offered two options, going to the store or coming home, you are compelled to do that which was pre-determined. If the preexisting causes lead you to come home, you will come home. Your decision is not free.

If offered two options, accepting evolution as true or not accepting evolution as true, you are compelled to do that which is pre-determined. If the preexisting causes lead you not to accept evolution as true, you will not accept evolution as true. Your decision is not free.

The same holds true for everything: whether that be to come home, to accept evolution, to make arguments supportive of evolution, to believe evolution to be true, to be convinced that evolution is true, etc.

When you tell me that you believe evolution to be true for 10 different reasons, you tell me that only because you are compelled to. Whether your reasons are true would just be happenstance. Maybe they are, maybe they're not.

Whether your reasons are true would just be happenstance. Maybe they are, maybe they're not. — Hanover

That doesn't follow.

That doesn't follow. — The Great Whatever

It absolutely follows unless you impose reason into the universe, which requires that all deterministic forces lead conscious beings to truthful beliefs. I still don't know how you'd know that though, considering all that you think you know is just what you happened to be determined to think you know.

Why do I think the earth is flat? The same reason you think the earth round. It's because the laws of nature caused me to believe that.

Why do I think the earth is flat? The same reason you think the earth round. It's because the laws of nature caused me to believe that. — Hanover

So what exactly do you think follows from that? Above you said this means that whether the beliefs are true is just happenstance. But this simply does not follow.

That doesn't follow. — The Great Whatever

You see instead of just asserting that it doesn't follow, it would be kind of nice if you took the time to explain why it doesn't follow. Otherwise you're just wasting everyone's time.

So what exactly do you think follows from that? Above you said this means that whether the beliefs are true is just happenstance. But this simply does not follow. — The Great Whatever

If our beliefs are the result of pre-existing causes beyond our control, what follows is that our beliefs cannot be asserted to relate to truth. To the extent that we believe that there are rocks because there are actually rocks, that would be happenstance. It could not be said that we arrived at that conclusion based upon our own independent judgment, but just as the result of some cosmic coincidence the causal chain led us to form a correct belief.

What follows from this is that the inadequacy of compatiblism is not that free will is incompatible with determinism, but it's that determinism negates the possibility of knowing anything.

I don't see why your thoughts being determined means their turning out a certain way is a 'cosmic coincidence.' Indeed put that way the claim is plainly ridiculous.

Your position is plainly ridiculous.

Your position is plainly ridiculous. — Hanover

One could possibly be some sort of a compatibilist for the case of belief formation too (though I am usure if this resembles what TGW is thinking). That's not my view but a determinist could argue for that. On such a view our beliefs are indeed settled by antecedent causes that lie beyond our control. But it wouldn't follow that what beliefs we have can't be (broadly) explained through reference to deterministic cognitive mechanisms that "implement" our best epistemic principles, as it were. What follows from this, analogously with the case of free will, is the denial of the principle of alternative possibilities: which is something that compatibilists believe they can dispense with (dispense with the PAP, that is).

That is, if one comes to believe that P, in some antecedent "circumstances" (including inner "states" of the cognitive agent), then it isn't possible that, in those very same circumstances, she could have failed to come to believe that P. But that would fall short from showing that her coming to believe that P isn't the actualization of an efficient cognitive power. We can imagine programming a deterministic robot that would explore its environment and come to form true beliefs about it, non accidentally. It would thereby be true that the beliefs of this robot are fully determined by antecedent circumstances that the robot has no power over, and also that the robot has the power to form true beliefs (and that those beliefs thereby can come to constitute knowledge, on many accounts).

Again, that isn't my view, but it seems to be a view that a compatibilist about free will would find agreeable enough, and isn't obviously ridiculous. I just don't know if it is consistent with TGW's other commitments.

What follows from this is that the inadequacy of compatiblism is not that free will is incompatible with determinism, but it's that determinism negates the possibility of knowing anything. — Hanover

Determinism would seem to negate the possibility, not of knowing anything, but of having any justifiable confidence in the rationality of judgements. Of course if you are one of those who is determined by nature to have confidence in the rationality of judgements, and determined to think that confidence justified, then...