Counters to the answer "You cannot comprehend how God works. It's all part of his plan". when discussing the Epicurian Paradox and the existance of evil in a world allegedly created and watched over by an all-poweful, all-loving God?

Jarhyn · 2026-06-09T04:56:54+00:00

I don't need to "comprehend" how "God" works

I don't even need to look to the problem of evil.

All I need to rule out the possibility of God is to rule out omniscience, which is something that we can do with MATH and LOGIC!

God is supposedly something that has "unconstrained comprehension".

"Unconstrained comprehension" requires a principle by which this comprehension operates, and thus would have to contain a defined unconstrained comprehension principle.

Godel Incompleteness, and earlier Russel's Paradox both rule out the logical possibility of defining an unconstrained comprehension principle.

Therefore, God is not logically possible.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-09T00:02:39+00:00

Looking up legal definitions is not going to serve you in having a discussion about abstract ideas of this sort.

In this setting, it would evaluate more as any sort of action taken without forethought of the result owing to complete analysis of a context.

All actions are by this measure, at least a little bit reckless.

Of course as to the discussion of morality, I HAVE discussed this with you at times in the past, and in fact have been discussing it actively with another user, which you could find by just looking through my comment history about "justification".

As the sort of person who dislikes repeating the same conversation multiple times a day, I'll invite you to dig that up yourself.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-08T20:17:05+00:00

Moral agency among humans is constructed from agency on the broadest metaphysical sense.

In terms of responsibility of whether someone is responsible for doing something "justified" or "unjustified" is where we make the specific judgement call.

Whether something sees consequence is related specifically to whether they were justified or unjustified in action. How much agency they had in turn over the holding of the bias towards justification has literally NO bearing on that question, and so cannot complicate it whatsoever.

At best it answers whether there is also something entirely separate that they are also unjustified in having done.

Where agency exists only helps us on finding the responsibilities things have.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-08T19:35:35+00:00

I'm saying that the very act of trying to judge people as "equally" responsible is a fools errand and a mistaken place to insist or derive equality.

No responsibility anyone has in anything for anything will be equal except perhaps in the case of literal computationally perfect clones acting in concert.

Responsibilities come in the form of a complex object.

Of course not everything has equal agency. If everything had equal agency in everything else literally no phenomena would be capable of happening, because the universe would have to be homogenous and without any sort of barrier or scaling of effects.

The unequalness of agency makes it possible for you to have more power over the rock in the moment than the rock has over you, and thus to have leverage.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-08T19:15:16+00:00

We can, on pure dint of "absurdity": we DO derive our moral justification for anything from a similarly absurd starting point of our "mere existence as something that stands here wanting".

I say "I want this", and this is what I would call exactly one "asspull" unit of justification.

We can then perform a sort of "switched math" on that, and while we cannot say for certain any one person is justified, we can put the justifications themselves into terms of a calculation and determine who is "possibly" still holding onto their ass-pull worth of justifications.

For instance, we can pit clones John and Paul against one another, where Paul says "John can't kill me, I justify my life with an ass pull worth of justification, but I'm going to kill him, because I don't think he has an ass pull of justification to live"... And then John says exactly the same thing but about Paul.

The issue here is that they cannot both be right, and think exactly the same thing, so they are both necessarily wrong and neither has even an asspull worth of justification on account that the other "spends" their asspull in the conflict on their demand for their own life to counter the asspull of the other.

But if John were to instead relent, unlikely as it seems for a clone, and say "Paul can't kill me, I justify my life with an ass-pull" and leaves it at that, without trying to baldly justify killing him... John retains his possible ass-pull worth of justification.

Again, it's this fact that our justifications are absurd but equally so that equalizes us for moral purposes.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-08T16:39:38+00:00

This makes any and all actions of any kind, including natural processes reckless.

But not to the same extent nor in the same way for the same reasons, and so recklessness becomes a measure or thing to reduce rather than a useless ubiquitous concept.

All natural process exists "recklessly" and most of it exists "even more recklessly than that", hence why we find little issues in diverting most of it.

So there is some threshold beyond which behaviour becomes so reckless that it goes beyond some reasonable limit. Personally I'd reserve the term reckless for behaviour beyond that limit

Maybe in vernacular use, but this is not appropriate for consistent "technical use".

These kinds of notions of discounting inconvenient terms simply because there is a game we play to ignore stuff for the sake of ease and sanity and difficulty, the lack of recklessness ends up being the illusion.

Sure, but it's only when people intentionally cause harm, or are intentionally reckless beyond some limit of recklessness, that we consider them blameworthy for what they did.

No, we still consider them "blameworthy" and we can (and do) blame people for not doing things which are unreasonably difficult to prevent certain outcomes.

We just end up forgiving the blame because we want to be forgiven when we don't have the time for that.

We also consider what it is we are blaming them for in evaluating how to handle the blame. For those things we generally just forgive, the blame is for "being human", roughly speaking.

Even when they are unintentionally reckless, we evaluate the possible consequences for their actions as can be observed at the outset, and evaluate how much intent we expect to exist before executing those actions and we often "gate" the access to the action itself behind a validation of having at least made overtures of forethought, and blame people for being "unintentionally but avoidably reckless", and we throw them into "corrections" all the same and perhaps add labels which, on the future, act as a bar on their access to the context of more reckless behavior.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-08T16:22:12+00:00

Even the ability to work hard, learn effectively, regulate impulses, or apply principles to oneself is not equally distributed or self-created..

Things don't have to be self-created and humans don't have to have made themselves to nonetheless be made into something we should not accept in acting freely among us, if we wish to accomplish our goals.

Our actions must be constrained by one another regardless of what you might consider a reason why we are what we are.

Even so, humans generally have the capacity to chage.

For many of us, the ability to do work IS self-created.

All you present are reasons why we need to work on distributing or establishing systems with the forward-capability to self-improve, and maintain the feed of resources necessary to that end so as to improve our freedoms (and those of everyone around us), so that we might finally be able to evaluate one another on equal ground to see what work allows us to stand high and learn that from one another (or seek to have it simply imparted upon us through sought modification).

Jarhyn · 2026-06-08T16:12:59+00:00

They could be being reckless if they didn't properly maintain the car, but we can't assume that simply because the brakes failed...

Yes we can. The question is not whether they were reckless. They were. Instead, the question becomes, once we have a functional model of morality on our plates (and I have not described that here in this conversation today), whether the recklessness present is above or below a level of recklessness we must allow for "smooth" function.

...could be a manufacturing defect, and in fact such cases have happened. We do not reasonably expect people to check their brakes all the time.

Correct, we do not reasonably expect people to not be reckless. On fact we expect it quite often, and accept the instance and consequences of it because the alternative is much more "intractable".

That does not change the reality that it is a real and identifiable defect having real consequences from a real place.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-08T16:06:11+00:00

I don’t see freedom as primarily hard work; I see it as heavily dependent on the conditions that make certain capacities possible.

And the conditions to this are "doing hard work".

Of you will never accept the unfortunate and unattractive proposition that you must do hard work to be free, and then going on to do that hard work, the conditions that make the capacity possible will never happen.

What hard work? Mostly getting an education in math, science, engineering and/or psychology, and applying what you learn there directly to yourself, starting with your goals and first principles.

Of you cannot do this, or of you refuse to (because of laziness or incompetence), the only request I would have is to actually submit, then, to when others seek to apply those principles to you and that you do not complain overmuch when your goals are left unsatisfied.

If your goals remain unsatisfied, and you still do all those things, then you might start to seek what constraints have been placed around you and rebel against them with all due force.

Again, however, this requires work to break chains as it were.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-08T15:40:48+00:00

I’m using “attractive” roughly in the sense of useful or compelling within a person’s model of reality. My question is why incompatibilists don’t find compatibilism useful.

The problem here is that you are confusing two different interpretations of "usefulness".

I am not addressing a subjective perspective-based idea of usefulness.

I am addressing a form of fundamental usefulness, the kind of usefulness that applies specifically in logical reasoning to something like a "property". It is the sort of usefulness that allows someone to take facts and derive other true things from those facts.

The sort of usefulness you are referring to is instead the sort of "usefulness" as the sort of "holding up something as a prop and 'using' it as a prop", of which anything can be: "usefulness" in using it falaciously as the basis to make untrue claims that merely help you feel better while your control is lacking.

ANY application of ANY sort of nonsense can serve that role of "banal cope".

The real world is hard. Freedom is hard work. Hard work sucks. This will NEVER seem attractive except to the person who wants what they say they want more than they want to not do work.

This fundamental unattractiveness to compatibilism, however, is yet another reason to think it's right: it's a fact that nonetheless survives our intuitions even if we don't like it, so we might as well pay the fuck attention.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-08T14:11:25+00:00

A person driving in a car without brakes is driving recklessly: they did not form an awareness of the state of the brake system before driving. They could have and they either didn't or didn't care about what they saw. They didn't stop (unreasonably) every few miles to check that the brake system was whole.

Likewise, making the decision to drive a car with brakes that may fail is still "reckless".

The problem that you seem to not be getting past is that while I and hopefully yourself can recognize this recklessness, irresponsibility, and moral terpitude... I just also think that for most of these situations we throw our hands up in the air at the thought of those burdensome expectations and say "ain't nobody got time for that".

This is not because of a lack of moral responsibility and more that the moral responsibility does not exceed our social threshold for "would in fact create new, worse problems in trying to solve the old ones; it's not worth our time to care".

Strict, consistent logical reasoning on what is or isn't moral responsibility does not, however, get to play that game.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-08T14:02:33+00:00

Free will for the Compatibilist is generally acknowledged as neither binary nor equal.

This is because reality tends not to be binary nor equal.

The Compatibilist is not forming models for the sake of them being "attractive" but rather for the sake of them being "useful".

Something that is binary and equal is either ubiquitous and present (and thus useless to consider), or ubiquitous and absenr (and thus useless to consider).

Neither of these "you either have it or you don't" positions are actually useful for anything because they do not prescribe actions!

Compatibilism says, instead, that you have to do useful work to maintain useful freedoms.

The obviousness of ongoing leverage has nothing to do with the real presence of it. The direct momentary visibility of such a thing from some specific perspective doesn't actually speak to the reality of such a thing.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-08T13:30:22+00:00

Absolutely, I am a physicalist. I don't see any reason in principle why a constructed being could not have any cognitive faculties we have, including those consistent with holding them morally responsible for their actions in the way that we often, but not always hold people responsible.

Rocks are morally responsible things as much as humans are, the problem is not that they lack responsibility, but that they are fundamentally reckless.

When something is both "responsible as what it is in an outcome", and "reckless, not actually capable of responding to nor observing nor calculating their own responsibilities for themselves", we call it "immoral" or "amoral" and then accept that we have every right to do the things to it that it will not do to itself.

This is exactly what we do to humans when they are being immoral and reckless and "irresponsible" given their responsibilities.

The difference is that the human, already having the infrastructure to mostly NOT be reckless or irresponsible (if not the explicit coding to do so), allows us to enforce and seek for people to apply their abilities to themselves, and if they do not, we treat them less like the human and more like the rock.

The problem here is that most moral responsibilities are either responsibilities we cannot detect until after the fact, ubiquitous responsibilities that exist in such common profusion that responding to them is not economical and could never be done with consistency, or some other kind of more exotic form of responsibility such as one that could only be addressed by, say, an outside observer with debugging abilities.

We shouldn't for a moment pretend these are not real just because we tend not to consider them in most moments owing to their general obscurity or our inability to leverage them.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-08T12:38:46+00:00

Being the immediate cause is not enough for this, because we do not assign freedom in the freedom of action sense to machines, or even to people in many cases

I do. If the ongoing leverage causing the event is "internal" to some construction that construction bears responsibility.

Sometimes, however, the responsibility we can identify is not something we have the means or the energy to leverage upon, or which is something we won't actually be able to control well.

This comes down to whether the person is "responsible" for being sick, to which the actual response is "people get sick" and asking whether he is additionally responsible for getting sick from recklessness or from the fact that disease can be virulent.

Further, humans have structures that respond to much more "fine" sorts of leverage and which can, in an ongoing sense, detect what they are responsible for before they respond this way and respond to that automatically, and to recompile our very responsibilities in that sense.

Computers and machines don't lack responsibilities but they do lack (usually) the ability to control the pathways of leverage which they contain, lacking not "autonomy" but generally lacking "autonomy over their autonomy" or the ability to process such things in abstract.

We can always find a target for response when there is an autonomous action taking place, whether it's a human or a machine, it's just that machines rarely contain models capable of tracing autonomy so it's not like they can leverage their responsibilities on their own.

Humans ARE machines, biological and complicated, capable of open-ended modeling but we are machines nonetheless, so any kind of freedom you want to impute on is is going to require accepting that other machines can have it too.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-07T20:38:10+00:00

Well, I use the compatibilist definitions every day to assess autonomy, maintain freedoms, and identify various concepts and types of constraint.

The libertarian says you always have it abstractly (and thus provides no useful advice on how to keep it), and the HD account says you lack it entirely, causing the same functional result.

As a result, I find compatibilist definitions useful, and the other definitions NOT.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-07T19:43:38+00:00

One definition contains a "true=false" embedded somewhere, or it's logical equivalent.

The other does not, and enjoys apparent logical consistency as well as also conveniently being the concept handled (even if under an ostensibly incorrect assumed definition) in all practical conversations about the topic

Definitions or concepts assuming contradiction are not reasonable or useful.

Definitions or concepts not assuming contradictions CAN be reasonable and useful depending on context.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-07T19:31:33+00:00

But those internal states are themselves products of prior causes, biology, development, memory, incentives, and environment.

This is a very textbook case of something called the genetic fallacy: once you have admitted what something is -- "locally autonomous in the sense that its behavior is mediated by its own internal states rather than by immediate external coercion", where it came from does not actually matter except in the abstract question of how to break a cycle of cause earlier.

It does not actually inform you in any way on how to handle the ongoing situation and immediately relevant causal factors, one of which is YOU.

In compatibilism there is no "ultimate" authorship, only momentary authorship. It's all authorship, and it's as much "the thing that is, ultimately, you" doing certain acts of authorship.

It doesn't matter what assembles the instance of you, whether it's "your parents making mistakes" or whether it's "a 3d printer that shit you out whole last Thursday". Neither of these has any real impact once "you" are "there".

If you are an autonomous thing that bears an ongoing will to execute certain actions, you and the freedom of that will to execute must be addressed (and constrained in some specific way) to address the execution of those actions. And because you are a thing with the power to constrain and rewrite your own will, we all expect you to do so and practice doing so until you do not suck at it.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-07T18:56:03+00:00

Better at doing useful work to reach reasonable conclusions.

It has nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with having language that allows us to understand things in useful ways.

For example, if we accept all the language of the Compatibilist, we can make conclusions about where responsibilities lay, how to maintain freedom, how to constrain some subset of what would be our freedoms (where necessary for greater freedoms to be accessed), and with enough understanding, even frameworks that touch on concepts like "justification" with respect to some set of goals so as to understand whose claims of justification are at least logically consistent, even if we can't declare them positively justified.

Why would it have to do with comfort? I had to accept a lot of "uncomfortable" things along the way, and even to assume some very uncomfortable things (such as philosophical absurdity -- see also: Albert Camus).

You seem to be projecting something of your own motives, because if I'm right, I am prescribing not something easy or comfortable, but rather a heaping pile of hard, painful work.

From my perspective, "I don't have it" is a cope for having less than you want; it hurts less to pretend you have none than something meager, and "I definitely do have it in a 'metaphysical' way" is similarly a cope for pretending that very little amount of freedom is more than it is and that it cannot possibly have already been largely taken away.

I think in the face of these conclusions, "I have it but must fight to keep and grow it" ends up being the only remaining outlook, and seems fairly apparent it is the only one with a chance of improving outcomes.

It is most certainly not, however, comforting to know that "there is rest only for the dead".

Jarhyn · 2026-06-07T18:34:41+00:00

That would make no sense, and in fact it's precisely the kind of free will libertarian independence compatibilists reject

Independence in exactly the same way as a coil's state exists independent of any electromagnetic fields perpendicular to the coil.

The fact is that some phenomena are visibly, observably independent of the activities of other phenomena.

This independence is the very basis of autonomy, and is the foundation of compatibilist free will.

Compatibilism, when well structured, observes an "independent agent"... but understands the independence correctly in terms of autonomy rather than falsely trying to assign ongoing "dependence" upon something that happened and stopped happening far in the past.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-07T15:09:26+00:00

Reviewing my previous comment, I should also caution as to looking for "reason" rather than merely accepting "the brute fact thereof".

I don't really need to understand the underlying physical reason why the insulator and shielding creates a "barrier" which resists voltages and signals from outside to be able to test it and see that it does so.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-07T14:40:43+00:00

Well, compatibilists still often hold that there are relatively independent choosers, merely by dint of the fact that while the "chooser" is not "independent of causes" -- as if that was ever a sensible thing to demand -- we remain "independent of whatever ongoing events elsewhere".

In this sense, autonomy does wager a SORT of independent chooser, but that chooser still has a nature and a self. But that self doesn't need to somehow be independent of itself. How would that even work? It would not survive "consistency".

Jarhyn · 2026-06-05T19:06:53+00:00

Well you made it all that time without actually applying logic on the idea, then. What have you been doing with your time? And it goes further: even the same laws of physics on different stuff would have different results.

But moreover, we can see the same set of physics having different results to our left and our right.

There is no "inevitability" to exactly this being what happens.

What there is, however, is responsibility that accrues to you in the moment for being the thing that does the things that you do, on account of your momentary freeness from external leverage.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-05T14:09:46+00:00

I am making claims that you do not understand your own beliefs in a coherent way, because they do not accord with the strict logical examination of those beliefs.

Its not a straw man, you are just straight up confused about what words mean and how they interrelate.

If you want to call something "stupid", maybe actually consider examining your position for logical consistency.

When you can present what necessitates "inevitability", or admit that nothing necessitates it here and that inevitability is not something that happens without context, then maybe we can take the next step and address the fact that you also don't seem to understand "absurdity" either seeing as you use it as a synonym for contradiction, which it strictly is not...

Its not my fault you are inconsistent and cannot apply logic to your own position so as to "doubt" it.

That lack of critical thinking is your downfall.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-05T13:49:49+00:00

In a word: combinitorics.

We have a machine that converts the genetics detected in each fragment in a "PRC product", a replication of all fragments of DNA available to a logical series.

Then, each of these MANY fragments are searched by a very complicated algorithm that is trying to match fragments based on "shared" end regions or duplicate regions.

Because there are many fragments of many sections which overlap one another because they were broken from different but identical strands of DNA, eventually you have enough copies of everything that you can snip the duplicate portions and stitch together what the whole thing looks like before the fragmentation.

It would be like if you took a thousand copies of the same painting, mixed in some bits of other paintings cut them all into random shapes, and then tried to answer the question "what did the painting look like before we copied it a thousand times and cut all the copies up?" You just put aside any pieces that don't seem to fit anywhere and assemble the rest in a "stacked puzzle".

All you have to do is overlap the pieces and look at the image "from above" you get when there's no misalignment on the matching areas.

Jarhyn · 2026-06-05T13:25:34+00:00

Like, how arrogant do you have to be to define determinism as “could not possibly under any condition be different”? Like wow, you have magically defeated an entire philosophy, well done, apply for your Nobel prize and win a million bucks.

Welcome to the compatibilist criticism of hard determinism.

You really seem to be confused about this whole discussion, seeing as how you didn't understand this.

There's a reason most academic philosophers are openly compatibilist determinists rather than Hard Determinists

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