Here are some of my core beliefs that I have reached throughout my teenage years of thinking:
Hard Determinism
Full Nihilism
Materialism
And I have had countless arguments with some of my other friends, who I consider to be intelligent, and almost everyone disagrees with me. Although, I have not heard any argument that genuinely disproves any of these and it seems strange that not more people than just me has come to these conclusions. Are people just coping? Am I going wrong somewhere? I believe I am an open-minded individual and I do not correlate my identity with my beliefs so if it is a genuinely good argument, I can definitely be convinced. So I am excited to read some of the responses to see if someone can come with a logically sound argument that can potentially change my mind or challenge me.
Physical substances are deterministic things indeed. Free will, however, is very real. There is indeed a strong tension between free will and physicalism. This means that physicalism is not a coherent view alone. So, we need to change our view to something else to accommodate free will, so-called substance pluralism. In this view, there is a mind that is an irreducible substance with the abilities of experiencing, freely deciding, and causing.
The fact that we cannot experience the meaning does not mean the meaning does not exist. We have not evolved well enough to experience meaning.
I canât prove the opposite of these, but I can show that the opposing views are just as well founded.
Determinism and Nihilism:
Hume explained that no argument that is entirely a priori can be used as an ontological proof. Therefore, as solid as the logic for determinism is, you still have to explain why this logic is telling us something true about the world around us. SEP Since you donât have a vantage point on the world that would allow you make that call, youâre stuck unable to construct a proof.
Materialism:
This is a matter of worldview. If youâd been born a few centuries ago, you wouldnât have been able to make sense of materialism.
We canât tell you where you go right or wrong since you donât show your reasoning. I suggest you take one of these bullet points and expand on it: explain what it means for you and why you think it is right.
If you need harsh criticism, I can say that in most cases your beliefs are widespread, and upon the slightest analysis it turns out that there is nothing behind them.
For example, you say that you believe in determinism. But how, then, do you explain quantum physics, where the result of an interaction is fundamentally unpredictable?
What do you mean by materialism? Often it turns out that a person simply âdoes not believe in miracles.â But materialism is a rather complex philosophy. How, with your understanding of materialism, do you explain the existence of consciousness, since it is not material, because it has no size?
What do you mean by nihilism? You may say that you personally have no morality at all. But it is difficult to deny that morality nevertheless exists in society.
I can also add that a philosophical theory should have practical and predictive power. For example, almost any party, if it is professionally designed, must be based on a philosophy.
How would you create anything on the basis of materialism and nihilism? An ethical system is the structure of society itself, while nihilism literally declares that there is no structure at all.
What have you read, on those topics specifically; and
How often is your position moved by argument in general?
I have some comments to make on all three beliefs you put forward. But the above will inform me as to what level of description, what degree of expected knowledge you have and how deep I should be going.
It would help if you briefly explained why you believe any of these, and what you mean by them. âHard determinismâ tends to have a fairly standard definition, but not the other two.
I guess I would just start by pointing out that âhard determinismâ is generally framed in terms of:
A. The premise that microphysics is fundamental and that everything is reducible to microphysics. Often, but not always, this is framed in terms of âsmallism,â the position that all facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller parts (down to some fundamental layer, or else in an infinite chain).
B. Causality is essentially dyadic and mechanistic, as Enlightenment thinkers have it.
I would say one objection is that, prima facie, there is no reason for smallism to be true. Why not âbigism?â Indeed, quantum field theory and information theoretic accounts of physics (e.g., pancomputationalism) both suggest âbigism,â that all parts are only what they are in virtue of the whole. Now, to be sure, bigism can be just as deterministic, but it doesnât lend itself to arguments for determinism via reductionism in quite the same way. Plus, we might not think that reality nicely meets out causality for us according to size, in which case we might be looking for some other notion of causality.
The second issue is simply empirical. There just is not a good scientific track record for reductionism. Chemistry is not an immature science, and yet the basics of molecular structure have eluded reduction for over a century. Plenty of people working in this area think that, for various reasons, such a reduction is impossible. The paradigmatic case for reductionism, thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, is impressive, and yet is now handled with far more nuance. So, given the failures of science to produce reductions, the thesis that reductionism should simply be accepted as true until it is decisively overturned (a tricky standard, since it is arguably unfalsifiable) starts to look more like a bare metaphysical commitment that anything like a scientific finding.
Whereas if âhard determinismâ just defines itself in terms of the âcausal closure of the physical,â without specifying that the âphysicalâ is microphysics, then there is no barrier to having agents (who are surely physical) from acting as relatively self-determining causal wholes. And indeed, we know that systems can be more or less self-determining.
I suppose those comments also get to materialism, in that QFT, the triumphs of information theory, etc. all have been used to suggest a switch to a process metaphysics. By contrast, âmaterialismâ is normally cashed out as a belief in fundamental substances (often a small building blocks). Such a view, aside from now being unpopular in physics itself, suffers from the fact that it has been a recurring conjecture for millennia. There are various psychological reasons for its appeal (in part, that what is most fundamentally real, spatial extension, just happens to be something that we verify through many different senses), and this serves a something of a debunking argument against it being true (prehaps).
Finally, Jaegwon Kim has often been credited with showing convincingly that popular formulations of hard determinism (causal closure) imply that consciousness is epiphenomenal (causally inert). But if consciousness never affects behavior (we never do things because of how we feel or reason), then it can never be selected for because it can never have any influence on reproduction. Yet if this were true, how consciousness appears to us and how we reason could be arbitrarily related to reality, since natural selection will never bring phenomenal experience back in line with reality. We could all really have snake bodies with 9 limbs, and it wouldnât matter that we experienced the world as humans, because conscious content is irrelevant to behavior, and so irrelevant to reproduction and selection. However, if this were true, it would destroy all warrant for believing in science in the first place, in which case such a theory is self-refuting.
Plus, there is just so much evidence on how the world feels and seems to us appears to shaped by the imperatives of our acting in order to survive and reproduce (e.g., the type of food that tastes good, the type of things that feel good or bad, differences in how we experience distance when we are hungry versus full, etc.). Yet that evidence only seems to make sense if consciousness actually does something, such that its content needs to conform to biological imperatives.
Hence, some sort of âjust so storyâ needs to be crafted to save hard determinism, by explaining how mental content just so happens to line up with the world, despite being irrelevant. However, no âjust so storyâ currently exists, or at least none has wide currency.
Perhaps we should think about why that such a hollow opening post has garnered so many response, each of which immediately jumped in to âprove me wrongâ. A provocative post together with a dismissal of disagreement as âcopingâ will do that.
The OP is about beliefs, not conclusions. While itâs claimed they are the result of some cogitation, nothing about why is set out.
And one canât disprove an argument that has not been stated.
Reading the responses, they are much more intelligent than what you give them credit for. Hardly any of them do what you say they do.
@zzz is young, and for whatever reason this sub-par format is incredibly popular among young people. They regularly issue and respond to the sort of challenge presented in the OP. If you interact with a younger crowd you will see a lot of this sort of thing, and therefore I think it must be engaged generously in the way that most of the responses are engaging it.
It is always easier to attack a position than defend it, and therefore we must be careful not to fall into the error of only criticizing the arguments of others and never giving our own. More technically, a good philosopher accepts the burden of proof as often as he rejects it. He will zig-zag between offering arguments for his own positions and surveying the arguments of others. Furthermore, usually the person who writes the OP assumes the burden of proof, thus providing arguments and reasoning for a position which they hold.
Does it make any difference to you or anyone else what you believe, since you do not correlate your identity with your beliefs? You could just as easily claim to believe something else. You have found a soap box from which you can get a guaranteed response (everyone disagrees with you) and you have issued a dare: Just try to convince me that I am wrong! (Thatâs a game we play.)
You are certainly NOT the first person to claim the beliefs which you list. If you do indeed have an open mind, and be quiet long enough so you can listen, you will meet these people. Itâs possible that these beliefs wonât sound as good coming from others.
I have no objection to your claimed beliefs. Your confidence in their soundness is probably over-extended, but time will adjust your certainty.
So carry on. You donât really have a choice, since your behavior is predetermined.
I donât you think you are. Your rhetoric is defensive, not inviting, Youâre challenging others to prove you wrong but in the nihilist worldview, there can be no scale against which to make such judgements as nothing has any real meaning. My advice is, be careful building your âfortess of doubtâ as it will become your prison.
Nothing has any objective meaning. That doesnât mean truth value doesnât exist. I didnât mean for my rhetoric to come off as defensive, I am just not the most eloquent writer.
The âillusionâ of what humans tend to call Free Will, is nothing but an emergent property of complex neurological networks. I do not believe that we truly have the ability to choose our actions freely, rather that is just an illusion created by evolution. What creates our experience of âFree Willâ is the exact same thing that makes up everything else. It is all physical and deterministic. I am not convinced by your argument in the slightest.
Your argument against full nihilism is extremely flawed as we literally experience what we call âmeaningâ everyday or all the time, although I believe that this âmeaningâ is not objective and it is too nothing but an illusion.
Meaning and truth are two seperate things. When i say nothing has any objective meaning, I mean that there is no fundamental purpose or value in the universe. This does not impy that facts or statements canât be true or false. For example, âThe Earth orbits the Sunâ has a truth value, even if the uniers has no objeective purpose. Similarly, âThere is no objective meaningâ is also a claim about reality that can be discussed to see if it is true or false.
In conclusion, rejecting objective meaning doesnât mean that truth, logic, or reason just dissapears. All it means is that objective purpose or value does not exist.
The moment you assert âthe Earth orbits the Sunâ as an objective fact, youâre already operating within a framework of normativity about what counts as evidence, what constitutes a valid inference, what makes one description of reality more accurate than another. None of those norms are themselves bare facts floating neutrally in space. They are standards which are inherently evaluative. So in appealing to so-called scientific facts, youâre already making a judgement with regards to âwhat mattersâ.