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Originally Posted by Vana
I am familiar with this criticism: Ryle's The Concept of Mind.
Witt asked "How do I move my arm?"
Also he asked: "Where do thoughts come from?"
In either case, the answer is nothing.
Hence the massive importance the Existentialists, the major philosopher of freedom, at least of the last century, put on the word nothing.
You are nothing. Thus you are free.
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There are lots of assertions of fact there(guilty as charged also, all of what I said should all have been prefaced with "I muse" - though I think that's redundant on a forum such as this), most of which are up for debate. Sources of knowledge, assertion of radical freedom (Good Faith?) through Sartre's Existentialism without its 'nature and nurture' component of facticity, etc.
As for where do thoughts come from, your answer looks distinctly idealistic. Asserting the existence of entities and sources of knowledge outside of the observable universe we'll have to agree to disagree about. That's a discussion that pretty much ends up in qualia, and there's no agreement on that at all. It's a topic for another thread, which as far as I'm aware pretty much always ends with Idealists in the "They Exist!" trench and Materialists manning guns from the "Huh? What are you talking about?" fox holes.
(Materialists in Foxholes. They Exist!)
"You are nothing. Thus you are free."... I'd rephrase that to: "You are utterly inconsequential within your time, the time of your species and the time of your sector of the universe. Thus you are free."
Being "nothing" and "you" and "free" simultaneously? Could you point me to your particulars?
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No doubt, but you will have to spell that out more clearly, I am not familar with your thinking, so it's hard for me to be sure what you mean here, how you use the words, etc.
Is an "unending recusrion" an Infinite Regress? If so, it obviously does not help the determinist cause, since it means that a chain of causation is impossible to assemble.
If you think of the problem from the objectivist line, naturally you will come to this conclusion.
My interest in entering this thread is to point out that it contains a false or dumby choice: between nature and nurture: both of which are scientific, rational, and objective criteria. It is sort of like asking which is better Coke or Pepsi, and not considering that some people prefer spirits, fruit juice, etc.
The objective line: determinism, and the subjective line: free-will, are both true. Something very few ever grasp. They are equal and opposite, simultaneous: each is a perfect contradiction of the other.
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My view of the brain is of many massively parallel processing apparatus independently dealing with senses, etc. (Neural nets, as a horribly obtuse analogy) Shaped and 'wired' in different ways to suit different tasks, interlinked in some way, and passing information to other, similarly specialised structures which then deal with decision making, aspects of memory above the localised, orientation and motion, spacial awareness, etc and then on to towards speech, etc. There's a massive gap in human knowledge here, but it's getting there.
That God of the gaps for Idealists is being plugged more and more every day.
If you can direct me towards an excellent source for the assertion of radical free will as an equally valid truth, I'll be very glad to go read it. It's always seemed to me an argument from Idealist thought, that we should be free to just make unverifiable stuff up that sounds good... because we should. In my view, it's very similar to the problem of induction for many materialist points of view.
Nature and nurture are similar concepts in many ways, but not the same. The genetic material with which you are endowed, combined with the physical development processes you are exposed to aren't the same thing as the culture you are indoctrinated with.
That's nowhere near a selection of different colas, one with more sugar than the other. I'm struggling for a metaphor.
Unending recursion was my patois for what i know see to a "Vicious Infinite Regression". This _clearly_ isn't an academic paper, but thanks for pointing out that terminology.
Also, Materialist I am. Objectivist I am not. Rand can rot.
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How many Asian languages can you speak?
("ludicrous": google for the fallacy: "Appeal to ridicule".)
Unfortunately you are trying this on someone who speaks several.
That some Far Eastern languages use the plural first-person pronoun and not the singular, says something about culture: not about metaphysics.
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(You got me with the Asian language thing, I couldn't profess to speak any Asian languages. I'm aware of the rudiments of Indonesian, and was mostly regurgitating information from sources I'm scrabbling around to find)
Your mother tongue shapes and informs your reality, your worldview, which shapes your metaphysics.
The view of the person who has number ingrained in their being is different from the person who does not(some of the native Australian languages). The view of the person who describes the majority of their everyday world in relative directions (left, right, etc) is different from the person who only has a cardinal system of direction (analogous to North, South, East, West)(Ngaanyatjarra in Australia, IIRC). The view of the person who must always mark tense/time(roughly)(All Indo-European languages, afaik(less accurately in English than most)) is different from the person who does not(Vietnamese, Indonesian, etc).
Are you a student of Linguistics?
I've not studied linguistics, but AFAIK, the above is pretty standard stuff?
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Looking at every problem from the perspective of objectivity, science and rationality? Your right, it is.
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Google: 'Appeal to ridicule' + 'sarcasm' + 'superior attitude'
I liked it, though.
And don't google it. I didn't.
Aside: Until there's a point of view that has the capability of solving the developing energy crisis, reliably describing the motion of the heavenly bodies, growing enough crops to feed the 10 billion who are coming and designing the logic machines and networking systems that allow you to flippantly toss it away or equate it to... well... some mysterious source of thought and truth... I'll keep my materialism, empiricism and skepticism with the scientific method applied (careful with the induction, which probably goes some way towards what seems to be your problem with (hard)determinism. I don't subscribe to hard determinism either).
I was going to write something about Nietzsche, but i'll let it bubble.
Myos... "Vana" = Eesti? (Minä asuin lähellä. Suomessa.)