Rico Penguin

Over the next day or two I will be discussing the following topics:
Formulating and Explaining: Determinism, Hard Determinism, Soft Determinism, Indeterminism, Volitional Indeterminism, The Theory of Agency, Fatalism, Theism, and Atheism.

Presenting, Explaining, and Evaluating: An Argument Against Moral Responsibility, The Kid Patriot Argument Against Soft Determinism, The Ernest Patriot Argument Against Simple Indeterminism, The Vera Patriot Argument Against Volitional Indeterminism, What I take to be the best argument against The Theory of Agency, The Argument for Fatalism, What I take to be the best argument for Theism, and What I take to be the best argument for Atheism.

Bolded parts can be found here. This may be a few days worth of material so I’ll continue to bold things and perhaps color them so its easy to find the parts relevant to visitors. I also realize that some of this has been stated before, but I will try to give new (I know fantastic) responses to them.

Hard Determinism

(1) Determinism is True
(2) People never act freely.
(3) People are never morally responsible for their actions.

Determinism was defined earlier and the this requires no further explanation. Hard determinists believe that determinism is true, just like gravity. If Determinism is true then one would be hard pressed to say that people act freely and likewise a hard determinist says just that, people do not act freely. Finally if people never act freely then they are never morally responsible, after all you wouldn’t judge a man forced to kill someone as you would someone who freely does so the same.

Soft Determinism

(1) Determinism is True
(2) People act freely when they commit unconstrained and voluntary actions.
(3) People are morally responsible only when they commit unconstrained and voluntary actions.

Again we are looking at the statement that determinism is true, again for the same reasons above. However we introduce two new ideas. The idea of unconstrained actions and the idea of voluntary actions. So lets clarify those two .

An action is unconstrained if it is an action that is if the agent were to decide to not do an action that it would in fact not do that action. Seizures for instance are not unconstrained as you will do them whether or not you want to (which is sad). However jumping is an unconstrained action as you don’t jump if you don’t want to and aren’t forced to. However no amount of hope keeps you from returning back to the Earth which is why falling is unconstrained . Hope that helps.

An action is voluntary if the agent decides to do the action. More specifically the action is voluntary if the organism doing the action decided that it wanted to. Sort of sounds the same but I believe there are subtle and appreciable differences (might be the coffee).

The basic idea here is that there are activities that people can do that do not conflict with Determinism and those particular actions are the ones you are responsible for as long as they are unconstrained and voluntary. However this raises a complaint that was labeled the “Kid Patriot Argument against Soft Determinism”.

The Kid Patriot Argument against Soft Determinism

(1) If Soft Determinism were true kid patriot would be morally responsible for shooting the president.
(2) Kid Patriot is not morally responsible.
—
(3) Soft Determinism is False.

Short sweet and to the point. However you might be asking yourself “Why the hell did kid patriot shoot the president?” Well here is the story in a nutshell. Lets say that there is a boy by the name Kid Patriot, as his last name would suggest he is absolutely obsessed with protecting the president. He spends his whole life getting the grades and experience required to become a secret service agent. Truly an example for us all. Well a group of Aliens who hate the American Way (or perhaps were bored) secretly implant a chip in Kid Patriots brain that essential tells him to do things (mind control). They could give him urges to eat pizza, slap nuns, or perhaps…shoot the president.

When he’s at the white house they flip the switch to “presi-kill” and indeed he puts a bullet into the president and with the precision of a surgeon kills him. The second its over they turn off the brainwash and he is mortified, the other agents gun him down and that is the end of Patriot. Poor kid.

Kid patriots action was unconstrained and it was voluntary. Now I personally was very hard pressed to accept these reasoning’s and in fact I’m likely forgetting the rationale. Because in this situation he is indeed not morally responsible it is argued that soft determinism is equally flawed. I warn you now these stories only get wackier from here.

The argument itself is valid, if kid patriot is indeed supposed to be morally responsible for the presidents death according to soft determinism than we have a conundrum because it would appear he is a victim in the situation like the president. The second premise is true because it seems relatively reasonable to say that he was not morally responsible. The argument also appears to be sound for the same reasons that it is valid.

I would argue personally if you want to make Soft Determinism more appropriate you would perhaps replace voluntary with desired.

Desired Actions would be defined as “Any action done in sound mind that the agent finds the most appetitive.” The idea being that whenever an agent acts in the interest of itself with full faculties that it is acting to its desires. Introductions of great distress, ultimatums, and brain control devices negate the sound mind feature of the definition so I ‘think’ that it is relatively solid.

Indeterminism: Not every event that occurs is completely determined by previous events.

Indeterminism finds strength in not making a universal statement (in the conventional sense). It leaves room open for human naivety. Much like soft determinism it essentially establishes that the entire timeline has not already been determined and played out (and consequently boring). There is nothing about natural law that dictates that it has complete domain over thoughts and decisions (which is something that determinism never seems to address).

To be Continued Tomorrow . (Slowly but surely folks expect other updates with these too. I’m feeling spunky.)

Over the next day or two I will be discussing the following topics:
Formulating and Explaining: Determinism, Hard Determinism, Soft Determinism, Indeterminism, Volitional Indeterminism, The Theory of Agency, Fatalism, Theism, and Atheism.

Presenting, Explaining, and Evaluating: An Argument Against Moral Responsibility, The Kid Patriot Argument Against Soft Determinism, The Ernest Patriot Argument Against Simple Indeterminism, The Vera Patriot Argument Against Volitional Indeterminism, What I take to be the best argument against The Theory of Agency, The Argument for Fatalism, What I take to be the best argument for Theism, and What I take to be the best argument for Atheism.

Disclaimer:  For those of you that are here for entertainment, than I’d say you are in for a good couple of days. However if you are one of those students currently taking metaphysics with Ned Markosian that you might as well just turn around, he dislikes my explanations a great deal. Whereas the average visitor here understands this stuff, I have quite a few “makes no sense” tags in the exam. At any rate that’s the disclaimer since I know people Google before exams.

So lets get this part started:

Determinism: Every event that occurs is completely determined by previous conditions.

It’s essentially explained just by writing the line. Completely determined essentially means that the laws of nature require that the action carry out in the manner that it does. The common theme here will be abusing the concept of natural law.

The Argument Against Moral Responsibility

(1) Every event that occurs is completely determined by previous conditions.
(2) if (1), then every action that transpires is completely determined before the birth of the agent.
(3) If every action is determined by events before its agent then people do not act freely.
(4) If people do not act freely then people are not morally responsible.
—–
(5) People are never morally responsible for their actions.

The idea for premise one is that every event is completely determined by the series of events that lead to its activation. If you flip a coin the action of your finger would be the previous event beginning the flipping of the coin, your decision to flip the coin was the signal that told your finger to flip (ideally) and a series of events leading to that thought…so on and so forth. Premise two says that if everything is indeed decided by events before it then obviously the series of events leading up to your activities began before you existed. Another very reasonable assumption. The third premise states that if every action has already been determined by a series of events going before you were even alive then you do not act freely. Again reasonable given the argument. Finally the fourth premise states that if people do not act freely then they are not morally responsible.

Well once we make our way past that huge layer of text it pays to mention that indeed that is a valid statement, if premises are true then indeed the conclusion is true as well. However I would not go as far as to say that it is sound. The laws of nature, gravity, space, and time as well as others I am not thinking about are indeed outside of the control of humans (at least for now). However it is quite a bold jump to say that something like gravity has the same effect on thoughts and decisions as it does on a coin flip.

Reflexive actions are indeed outside of the realm of responsibility of a person. I’m pretty sure all reflexive actions from below the neck happen (relatively) long before a signal reaches the brain. However actions that are decided upon are hardly decided before the agent is born. I would never argue that you are in full control of the events transpiring around you, but you are (to a great degree) able to decide how you respond to them. It is that ability to choose your response that is why people are morally responsible. Natural laws play little or no part in the thoughts and decisions of any living organism. That is the primary difference between a living organism and a non-living thing (like wind). Wind is entirely at the whim of natural forces, your thoughts are not.

Once my headache breaks (hopefully tomorrow) I’ll have a larger chunk of this done.

  Dipping back into the wonderful world of Determinism we have a slightly different take on the idea. We’ll begin by defining Indeterminism:

Indeterminism: Not every event that occurs is completely determined by previous conditions.

  Now you might be saying “Well that’s obvious Captain Jack.” To which I’d remind you I’m not Jack, regardless we’ll continue. The next important thing to know is what it means for something to be undetermined.

e is undetermined =df e is not completely determined by previous conditions.

  This is important because it leads us into what becomes of Indeterminism. It’s a fascinating philosophy because as with other philosophies it gets taken to some very unusual extremes. One such extreme is called “simple determinism” which looks as follows:

Simple Indeterminism
1) There are some undetermined actions.
2) People act freely whenever they perform undetermined actions.
3) People are morally responsible for their own undetermined actions.

    At first glance this appeared to be a pretty reasonable setup. The first tenet says that there are ’some’ undetermined actions. It is difficult to say that something never happens, so its safe to say that there are ’some’ undetermined actions. Likewise it comes out to feeling common sense when you look back on your life. Some events did not move along because of the flowing of the wind or the force of gravity.

  Likewise tenet two is making a general statement that seems difficult to argue with. A person is acting freely when they are performing an action that is undetermined. In essence they had options A) and B) (at the very least) and decided to go with one or the other. That choice was their freedom in action.

  Finally the third tenet states that when you act freely you are morally responsible. The idea being that if you choose to murder someone then you are responsible for that activity. However there is a large loophole that this particular version of Indeterminism has and it has to do with the global nature of the third tenet. A seizure is indeed an undetermined action, during that particular moment before the seizure you had the event you desired and the possibility of a seizure. However if you killed someone while having seizures many would be hard pressed to file charges against you. There are more complicated examples but this simple situation puts us in the place of either denouncing Simple Indeterminism or deciding that indeed a seizure victim is fully responsible for the repercussions of their seizure.

  If we were to make some minor modifications to Simple Indeterminism we could clean up most situations.

Rico’s Indeterminism
1) There are some undetermined actions.
2) People act freely whenever they perform undetermined and desired actions.
3) People are morally responsible for their own undetermined and desired actions.

  The introduction of desired to the pre mentioned “undetermined” situations fixes the issue of involuntary problems. In this case when presented with (for simplicities sake) two options if you choose to do one but you are unable because of uncontrollable variables (IE. Seizures or similar situations) then the resulting act is not something you are morally responsible to.

  Now this philosophy has the possibility for abuse but only in the judgement of the person by other persons. If we are to accept morality as something of a natural law (which it isn’t but bear with me) then the person IS morally responsible it’s just that they are attempting to mask the fact that they are. Likewise the action of lying about it being their desired action is also another situation of being responsible.

  Morality is certainly a discussion for another day, however when taken into context of the idea of Indeterminism I feel it’s somewhat self explanatory. Likewise I’m relatively hard pressed to think of a situation where your desired action is not one you are morally responsible for or even one that isn’t an act of freedom. However anyone feeling frisky can take a shot at providing a situation where you are acting out in a desired fashion and are not morally responsible (or even should not be).

  As I sit here realizing that it would cost me 100 dollars to recover my corrupt one note files, I feel that (time permitting) that it may at least be good for the topic of determinism (Note: Time was not permitting). Otherwise its an incredibly crushing experience that gives me a very negative view of Microsoft at the moment (which is a shame because Windows 7 had peaked my interest in them). So to anyone out there make backups of your one notes, there is NO way to recover them (as far as I know) without paying some random asshole 100 dollars. May sound hard but charging that much for file recover is preposterous.

  So without further delay:

Determinism: Every event that occurs is completely determined by previous conditions.

E is physically necessary =df E is required by the laws of nature.

E is completely determined by previous conditions =df the combination of previous events and the laws of nature makes e physically necessary.

  Now this is important information. For those that do not know =df means "if by definition", likewise if you’ve seen it before iff means if and only if. E is simply a variable much like *.

  The idea is that our history is a singular line, each event directed by the previous event which is also governed by its previous event traveling all the way back to the big bang (be that for you a cosmic blast or just some deity doing the ole bang solo). In essence it says that all actions have been predetermined by events that happened even before the agents of those actions were alive.

  It goes so far for some as to say that because we cannot control our actions (and instead are merely reacting) that we should not be responsible for those actions. It has caused a few thoughts to spark in my head that make it a very sketchy system.

  The second is an example of the life of a simple system. In the beginning it’s as simple as a coin toss, then in this particular case it becomes a 3 way outcome. However if we look back historically the actions of this organism would look like the above line because there would be only one outcome to every one of the actions.

  Essentially Determinism says that because natural law is unable to make decisions and must act directly with the world around it that living organisms act entirely in the same way. However essentially determinism says the following.

If every single variable in the past happened exactly in the same way the exact same history would transpire.

  This explains everything and in the same manner states nothing (a very popular tactic in philosophy). When an organism is born the actions it makes are at the simplest level a coin toss between two possibilities, the response is so quick to the outside viewer that it can be mistaken for a mere reaction to the environment not unlike how the waves move with the turning of the Earth, the gravitation of the moon and other bodies, as well as the shear orgy of shoving between the forces in the sea. In fact random functions like coin tosses aren’t even negated in the universe of determinism. Because if the coin was tossed with the exact same force, from the exact same point, with the exact same wind resistance, the exact same gravitational pull, landing exactly on the same spot on a surface that is in the exact same condition as the first attempt, and all other variables I cannot even fathom being exactly the same then the results would be exactly the same. However this requires a universal knowledge (omniscience I think its called) for it to be a form of understanding that has any purpose in life.

  Even the previous example explained by determinism breaks down when rendered on a PC. If you created a simple program to flip a coin (return the result of 0 or 1 with a 50% chance) you would receive results each time that are completely separate from the results of the former. In theory if you were to rewind time you would get a different set of results each time that you did it (assuming you did it 10-20 times). This is because the forces acting upon the results in the digital realm are not a result of the outside world and thusly would not be held down by the rules of determinism.

  There are many different forms of determinism, some harsher than the one I’ve described and some weaker. However in all cases it appears that determinism is very weak. Organisms much like Personal Computers take in information, run it through a series of scripts (or a script if its a really small program on a PC >_>), this is a process that nothing else in the universe does (to my knowledge). There is a point where the outside senses of an organism does indeed directly influence it to a point that trumps the looping processes, but that appears to only be in instances of errors. If you place a person in a room that’s twelve times their body temperature you will find a direct influence on their activities (producing a small set of responses), however if you place someone in a room that is .12 percent warmer than their body you will find a multitude of responses. However in either case when you look back it will only look like a straight line.

  It is impossible for history to have more than one result when looking back, philosophy aside, it wouldn’t make any form of sense to expect anything else but single incidents in history. One of the simplest forms of logic known as modal logic says (essentially) the following:

If X can exist without Y then X is not identical to Y.

  What this essentially says is that you cannot logically exist and not exist at the exact same time. Likewise in history an event cannot happen and not happen. This means that in history even if an event had 90 trillion possible outcomes, there can only be one to have happened, and I feel this is something that even a child grasps. Which is what bothers me about Determinism. It essentially says that since history only happened in one way then all of time has only one possible outcome. This seems like quite a bold statement, it would be like me saying that if I ran a program to flip a coin and it returned heads, that in all cases in the future I’d see heads. It seems foolish to take an obvious property of history and attempt to use it to explain the future.

  I’d have dipped more into this but spending 5 hours attempting to recover my notes has all but crushed my writing spirit… Goodnight all . I should be more chipper next update.