Haha yeah fair enough. I tried to ask for vagueries…
Right right, okay. So one thing you will need to pretty much immediately accept (despite your resistance, it seems) is that everyone here, and most people, have done this. There is a plethora of work from all angles on this topic ranging from purely theological positions, to crazy, speculative science-fiction type ones.
That said, your positions are not entirely uncommon, other than nihilism. Hard determinism is often times cloaked by other things. I’m guilty of this: my intuition is strong that free will obtains in some way (obtain=exists/is the case/manifests) but every time i look into it, i am drawn to a hard determinist conclusion. The only saving grace, as mentioned by others, is QM. I don’t quite know enough about Qm to really speak to that, but there may be an example of true randomness there. It would be extremely - and I mean extremely - disconcerting if the coherence of the world was borne of any significant randomness. Again, though, I don’t know enough. Maybe that’s not actually what QM is saying and hard determinism is still live. It’s quite hard for me to say. But that’s an example.
My suggestion, along Banno’s lines, but constructive rather than critical, is take some time to get interested in these topics, read through some of the key historical writings and come to some conclusions with benefit of much smarter, and probably much dumber, people working on the same issues for lifetimes.
Where you say no one can come up with good arguments, I can see in this thread that several have. But you are not moved. This is perhaps why I thought that question important.
The strongest argument I can muster is your parents. If they’d been nihilistic, materialistic, deterministic they wouldn’t have had you. They too must’ve argued between themselves and with their associates/friends and even random peeps.
I think of what Shadguru said “If none of you ever had a happy moment, you would not be sitting here.”
The fact that we can be on this forum pondering about deep thought means that many of us are still okay.
We are not nihilistic when eating a stake or making love. We are not nihilistic when we win an argument on a forum.
As for materialism, I may agree with some of the concepts but not all. I think if we’re too nihilistic we will have unhealthy materialism in our life.
Hard determinism, we’d have to understand free will and how it is incorperated into determinism to see that free will still can exist working with determinism.
First of all, those isms don’t quite fit in beliefs, but sound more like rather ways to see or interpret the world. They all seem not much useful for either believing in, seeing or interpreting the world due to following problems.
Hard Determinism - This sounds too fatalistic, dogmatic and superstitious. Surely we have free will for choosing certain things in certain situations.
Full Nihilism - This sounds for folks with too much negativity in their psychology. Surely there must be meanings and positive sides in the world and life.
Materialism - This sounds too limited and narrowed vision in thinking. Surely the world is more than just material. People have emotions, passions, will etc, which is mental states and languages.
It really depends on what you take from these “isms”.
I believe that the only way to make sense of the world is to describe things in terms of causes and effects. Suggesting something that acts independently of causes and effect is literally speaking of a world that doesn’t make sense. In that sense, I think hard determinism literally makes perfect sense, and that any alternative is literally nonsense.
However… many people draw some pretty strange and, I think, unsupportable conclusions from this starting point. For example. the idea that we don’t make choices. That’s a huge logic leap.
Is there half-Nihilism? Again, it seems blatantly obvious to me that there is no objective meaning or purpose to life that is discoverable the way that facts about physics or chemistry are discoverable. I know there are moral realists who disagree, but those are really boring discussions IMO.
However… the fact that meaning and purpose are something that we get from ourselves and our community doesn’t make them less important, and the fact that they aren’t objective facts about the world isn’t depressing. To me, it’s liberating.
I hate this debate, and these characterizations. Are things fundamentally material? What does “fundamental” mean in this question? I mean traffic is real, and traffic is more than just vehicles made of steel and rubber and a road made of asphalt, but the “more” it isn’t magic. The “more” is the relationship between the material of the vehicles, the material of the road, and what we want out of the interaction of those things… namely to get somewhere. Over-committing to an “ism” makes us say things like “but what we want is just chemicals in our brains”, which while I get the point a person saying that is trying to make, is just a stupid thing to say.
Although determinsim is possible, believing in it has negative effects because you give up your sense of agency, and therefore it becomes self fulfilling. 2. I’d agree, there is no meaning besides our creations of meaning. 3. There is value in the invisible like thoughts, beliefs, etc. Like this writing. It may be an illusion on a screen but it holds language.
There are lots of variables for decision making. I tend to categorize them into conscious and sub-conscious. There’s a logical rationality in the conscious, emotions, narratives, drives, and the subconscious I think of like the deep state. It’s quietly influencing and ordering thoughts behind the scenes based on what happens in your conscious mind, but that doesn’t remove free will entirely though.
There might be a common link connecting your three core beliefs: structural analysis. Free will is blocked by an overriding structure of events logically connected. Meaning is absent until human idiosyncrasies project it onto structures. The structures of physical things contradict causal claims attributed to abstract formalisms.
These three beliefs are not perfectly consistent. If determinism prevails, then logical structure is meaning. In turn, that says there is ontological meaning. Materialism, because it imposes physical structure upon logical meaning, overrides human projection explaining away the ontological meaning denied by nihilism.
Math, which models the world successfully, includes statistical analysis and probability. This language weakens hard determinism. Even if, at the ontological level, the outcomes of elections are determined, such knowledge is not specifically known before final vote tallies.
QM has repeatedly shown that the ontology of physics, at microscopic scale, does not have rigid structure un-ambiguous regarding interpretation.
The primary solvent of your three core beliefs, structural analyses at their core, is entropy. The structurally pre-determined decay of all dynamic systems in a closed environment is nature’s hedge against a rigid systemization that hardens into monotony. Irreversible time forward imposes discipline upon reality admissibility; admitted real things are constrained structurally by invariant laws permitting lawful transformation. This is the balance of predictability and creativity.
If you believe that your beliefs and arguments are merely inevitable results of physical causes, why consider them rationally true rather than simply causal events in the brain?
Good question. I would think that he has no choice but to consider them rationally true. It has been determined that he will hold that belief about them. But I don’t know. Determinism tends to make me dizzy.
What is matter? What is it that materialism is claiming? As far as I can see scientific materialist when they find something they consider real, call it matter regardless of it’s qualities. Massless particles, ‘things’ that are potential here or there traveling potentially at different speeds (superposition), fields, etc. They call these things matter or at least consider them within materialism, even though they lack qualities that matter once indicated. It seems to me ‘materialism’ looks like a committment to a position on substance but it isn’t.
It seems to me that materialism (or physicalism) no longer identifies a particular kind of substance. Rather, it commits itself to accepting whatever entities physics ultimately posits, regardless of whether they resemble what has traditionally been called matter. If so, the view appears to have shifted from a substantive metaphysical claim about the nature of reality to a commitment to the ontology of physics, whatever that turns out to be.
So, it looks like a committment to ontology, but I think it’s really a committment to method. Which is fine, but there’s no reason to use words that imply a substance committment. It’s like it comes out of the old battle between ontologies (monism vs. dualism, idealism vs materialism, etc.).But if one is open to scientific revision, then committment to substance is a problem. Do we use current physics ideas about matter? Only what fits with what we know about matter or the real now is real. That doesn’t allow us to make the kinds of discoveries humans have made over the last 100 years when we found real things that didn’t act like real things before and didn’t seem to be made like real things before were made of.
Your inability to see and/or accept the workings of our practices (with our ongoing responsibility to them and for their imperfection), is because of your imposed desire for pre-defined certainty, which makes everything need to be “objective” or chaos. This is not an argument for a right answer (on the terms you insist upon or not), but a description for your realization.
They too must’ve argued between themselves and with their associates/friends and even random peeps.