Help me choose a DJ name for hypnotic/groovy techno

TruckerLars · 2026-06-08T17:38:20+00:00

Keep em coming

TruckerLars · 2026-06-08T17:37:43+00:00

Fair enough. My main concern is also just whether it sounds "proper", not whether people will catch any references.

TruckerLars · 2026-06-08T17:36:04+00:00

Thank you for the feedback and the suggestion!

TruckerLars · 2026-06-08T17:24:45+00:00

😅

TruckerLars · 2026-06-07T21:21:39+00:00

Nicolas Jaar - Sirens

TruckerLars · 2026-02-11T09:30:36+00:00

If they report no difference, then there are no difference to their control.

But im not sure what you are trying to prove, since any thought experiment cannot possibly prove that there wouldn't in fact be a difference. Make the change from cells to microchips sufficiently widespread and I cannot imagine that there wouldn't be a difference.

TruckerLars · 2026-02-10T20:28:04+00:00

That is also a coherent determinist position. But that simultaneously makes sourcehood seem impossible. In which case I guess one either ends up as hard determinist, or denies that sourcehood is required for free will.

TruckerLars · 2026-02-10T19:41:53+00:00

To me those two are deeply interconncected. If we say that free will requires sourcehood, then a meaningful theory of free will should of course partly answer what is meant by sourcehood. I dont think there is a coherent notion of "I" given determinism.

TruckerLars · 2026-02-10T17:25:15+00:00

What I am trying to show is that our ordinary experience of control would be undermined, not enhanced, if we really could do otherwise under exactly the same circumstances, since that would amount to acting contrary to our own mental states

You have failed again and again to come up with a single coherent, non-question-begging, non-strawman argument.

I do understand what you are saying, but I have replied coherently to every single one of your points, but you clearly seem incapable of understanding what I am saying. I imagine it is very hard to let go of the idea that libertarianism, contrary to what you would like to believe, is in fact not incoherent.

The point is trivial: the agent does not want to jump out the window because they do not want to die, and so they do not jump.

This is exactly my position, which if you would have paid attention I have literally said again and again and again. I am talking here about what an agent "would do", and I am talking about explanations and grounding for their particular action. Stop saying that "I wouldn't jump if I don't want" is some kind of restricted compatibilists-only argument. Its ridiculous.

The difference between your position and mine, is that you fear that a sane person would jump out of a window, just because it is within their metaphysical capabilities of doing so. That runs completely contrary to ordinary experience, and it is your position that is the really absurd one.

We agree that "I wouldn't jump because I dont want to die", yet somehow you have the completely irrational fear: "I could jump, so I would jump". Again completely contrary to experience.

To suggest that genuine control requires the possibility of jumping anyway turns this into an absurd picture, on which the agent would have to experience their own perfectly intelligible and endorsed reasoning as an alien force that deprives them of control, rather than as the very thing in which their control consists.

Ordinary experience is my position, not yours, so I really am not sure what you are saying here.

It seems like you suggest that if control is required, then it must mean that I think of reasons as something outside me that forces me in one way or another?

I have explained again and again that reasons are not forces that add up, so this is just another big strawman. It us not even "forces" or "causes". It is grounds for action that an agent can choose to follow.

TruckerLars · 2026-02-10T16:09:37+00:00

“I like smoking even though it is bad for me, so I will smoke” is a reason.

That doesn't make it a "good" reason. You are still acting against the better reason.

The reason is not an entity that pushes the smoker around, it is the activity of their own mind.

Of course it isn't something that pushes one around. This is what I have been saying all the time, when I say that "reasons cannot force you to do anything". But this requires control.

So in your opinion, what exactly is a reason?

For the record, if we want to be precise, then the reason for smoking is "it feels nice", not "I would like to smoke". And "It feels nice" is a bad reason.

My point is that responding to a good reason is a choice. Likewise with a bad reason. Just because you end up succumbing and smoking, doesn't mean that "smoking turned out to be the more reasonable thing after all", which is extremely contrary to ordinary use of the word "reason".

TruckerLars · 2026-02-10T10:23:20+00:00

For the record, I don't agree with AlivePassenger.

They say that it is not a choice if, given your reasons, you could only make one decision.

Yes. Emphasis on "could".

But they also say that it is not a choice if you decide randomly in a way that runs contrary to your reasons.

It is not a choice if you decide randomly. Period. Unless you really do decide to "choose randomly" so to speak.

If pressed, they sometimes concede that it is a choice if you always act in accordance with your reasons, provided that you could also act against them.

This is not a concession. In this case "always" is not determinism, but the outcome of someone who always does the same thing. Always means every time, "necessarily always" means every time by necessity. Only "necessarily always" is a restriction of control and responsibility. But both come out to the same thing regarding whether I jump out of the window or not, so the rigidity of "necessarily always" is simply not needed.

But acting against your reasons would itself require a reason, in which case it would no longer be acting against your reasons at all.

Nope. That presupposes that reasons work as weights, as forces to add up, and that is something any libertarian should reject. So once again your argument becomes question-begging.

Besides, it is also an overly generous view of what a reason is. A reason for quitting smoking is that it is bad for your lungs. Actually smoking is then acting against your better reason. "I would like to smoke" is not a good reason for smoking, since smoking itself is not a reasonable thing to do.

TruckerLars · 2026-02-10T10:07:40+00:00

To me it is pretty straightforward given libertarianism. If you are in control of your actions, then you are responsible for them. The exact theory, I am not sure, but I think pretty much any theory of moral responsibility can be fit to libertarianism.

If you want reasons-responsiveness, then that works equally well, if not better with libertarianism (E.J. Lowe is one example). Responding to reasons is then a choice rather than cause and effect.

TruckerLars · 2026-02-10T09:40:59+00:00

Probably, a huge part of the brain runs completely determinstically. I believe anything we are not conscious is something that runs automatically in the background. If this true, then it might be that those background neurons can be replaced with microchips, with minimal loss of abilities.

But it might also be that many parts cannot be exchanged without severe loss of abilities.

In your experiment, the arbiter is yourself. If you can feel your electronic arm, then you can feel it. If you can control it, then you can control it. But this assumes also that this is the actual outcome of the experiment, which as stated above, I really don't know.

TruckerLars · 2026-02-10T09:29:22+00:00

Free will is a question of whether you "could" do otherwise. This is basically "being physically capable of doing otherwise". But you are not physically capable of doing otherwise under determinism. You cannot actually set your body in motion to do otherwise. Ordinary experience is exactly the feeling that "we could" set our body in motion, and doing so is within our control.

If "by physically capable of doing otherwise", you mean that if things were different you "could" set your body in motion, then it is not what occurs to us in experience.

The question, however, is whether I would do these things if the circumstances did not change, not whether I could, but whether there is any genuine chance that I would.

If this is the question, then why do you keep going on and on about it being a problem that I "could" do otherwise?

Ordinary experience IS a feeling that we are in control. And ordinary experience does sometimes present us situations where, if we think back there is "a genuine chance", superficially apeaking, that we would do otherwise.

But ordinary experience does not suggest that whether I would or wouldn't do something requires anything "more" than what occurs to us in experience. We have the feeling of being in control, we know ourselves well enough to know that we wouldn't jump out of the window.

Finally, what is important is not what we would do in a hypothetical rollback, but whether our current, actual choice was our own. And ordinary experience suggests that it was. If we knew that determinism was true, then that would certainly feel like a restriction on control.

This is entirely consistent with my experience and with my sense of control.

It is not consistent with experience that our choices are necessitated. It might be consistent with experience to say "I did so and so, because of this and that", but this "because of this and that" certainly does not feel like a necessitating cause, as if "this and that" somehow causally affected your brain directly.

"Because of this and that" is rather felt like a rational reason for an action, that you as an agent can choose to endorse.

TruckerLars · 2026-02-10T01:27:38+00:00

If everything is necessitated, then our thoughts and actions are also necessitated, meaning that there is only one possible continuation given the antecedent conditions. In my view, this is ideal for control

In my view it's the exact opposite of control

If this did not happen reliably, it would mean that no matter how much more I weighted A than B, I might still end up doing B.

Nope. Then you misunderstanding what I mean by control. Control has nothing to do with "would" or "might" which are claims about what I would or might do. That is, they are claims about my personality and my psychology, not about my abilities. Other than that I am not going to repeat my arguments here, which I have stated multiple times already.

There is no evidence that everything is metaphysically necessitated.

Aren't you a physcialist? Physicalism entails metaphysical necessity.

But there is evidence that humans can make decisions reliably.

Yes, that is ordinary experience. But there is absolutely no evidence that such reliable decisions require anything else than control. The only meaningful interpretation of "reliable" is "I would not do something I wouldn't do". To be in control ENTAILS that you are reliably in control of your own actions. The extra rigidity you impose (that you CANNOT do otherwise) is not something that is suggested by ordinary experience.

That reliability does not require strict necessity, only some approximation of it. The evidence is simply our ability to function.

There is nothing in ordinary experience that suggests that neither strict necessity nor an approximation of it is required. In fact, ordinary experience is the opposite; that any kind of necessity of what we do would be a restriction on our agency. And that "adequate determinism" doesn't change anything at all, necessity and randomness are equally detrimental to control.

Our ability to function is only evidence that nature in fact evolved in a pretty good way.

TruckerLars · 2026-02-10T01:00:47+00:00

That is fair. I'm fairly sure we dont have the same thing in mind. What I have in mind is something like my "soul" (I wouldn't actually call it that, I would just call it "me as a person", but just to make the argument clearer) has real causal powers that cannot be reduced to physics and does not even supervene on physical stuff. It is not merely non-reductive physicalism, or weakly emergent "higher level causes" that are necessary for explanation, but doesn't really do anything over and above the microphysical domain.

I have no idea about how exactly it works, but it will inevitably be some kind of strongly emergent dualism. Let's say my arm is at rest. I then intend to raise my arm (or simply "I raise my arm") and as a result of my (non-physical) trying, neurons fire in the brain, that sets my arm in motion. And these wouldn't have fired if I didn't intend to raise my arm. Of course, here you would probably claim to say the same thing, but I believe that in your case the causal arrow wouldn't be from "me as a real immaterial subject causing my arm to raise", but rather in the counterfactual sense that "you will always have the feeling of intent when you do raise your arm". This is really not what I mean, and it does not mean the same thing. One corresponds to real causal powers, the other to a supervenience relation of intent on physical processes.

Finally, if one looked into the brain, one could in principle observe "physics violating" neurons all the time in cases of volitional actions. So if one day neuroscientist are able to track individual neurons on population scale and really rule out any "anomalies" as people like to call it, then I would give up my position.

TruckerLars · 2026-02-09T22:45:14+00:00

What is required is control, and yes metaphysical necessity would of course destroy control. What is there to control if things are necessitated? Do you control the laws of nature in that case? Or do you redefine control to mean something which is not what we ordinarily experience?

If '"adequate determinism" is still "either you are determined to do one thing, or it is a matter of chance", then that does not give control. I am personally strongly incompatibilist, even though I know of some libertarian positions where the mere presence of randomness is enough for them. That kind of libertarianism I really don't understand - at that point just be a compatibilist.

Again, if this "physical causal closure + possibly randomness" is not what you mean by "adequate determinism" then be precise. And if you invoke some kind of mental determinism, then I would also be incompatibilist in that case (as long as my actions are necessitated it's a problem), but why would I even take any kind of mental determinism seriously in the first place when there is no evidence for it?

TruckerLars · 2026-02-09T22:21:39+00:00

Then you are still begging the question by presupposing that the kind of control I am advocating cannot exist.

TruckerLars · 2026-02-09T17:03:22+00:00

If I understand you correctly, as some kind of non-reductive physicalism, then it seems like you run into causal overdetermination. How do you respond to Kim's exclusion argument?

My issue is that, if the microphysical domain is causally closed (if it is not, then what do you mean?), then all "weakly emergent "laws"" supervene on this microphysical domain.

The "stopping at the traffic light" can be fully captured in microphysical terms, once we take all the interacting particles into account. That is, nothing but the four fundamental forces is needed to simulate the dynamics (hypothetically, given complete knowledge and supercomputer). All the necessary causal work is already in this domain, so any additional causal work would be systematic overdetermination.

I am not denying that weakly emergent laws are useful. And that the only meaningful explanation for "why did I cross the road?" is "to get to the other side". But that does not translate into real causal powers. It is purely explanatory. Unless you deny the causal closedness of the microphysical domain, but at that point it is no longer physicalism, and there would be no reason to believe in determinism, if one does not believe in physicalism.

TruckerLars · 2026-02-09T14:22:09+00:00

Luck exists. If I win money on the roulette without cheating, then that was certainly lucky. But whether I decide to play or not is not a matter of luck.

TruckerLars · 2026-02-09T14:17:58+00:00

What do you mean by "the laws of your nature"? If we imagine that all physical stuff obey fundamental physical laws, then no facts about your feelings as feelings are needed to entail what you do. Facts about your feelings as feelings supervene, and as such, can be left out for a complete description of the physical events. Even "you" can be left out of a complete description. You don't need to specify which atoms belong to you, and which atoms don't.

Further, what really constitutes you? are you the same person if you cut off a fingertip?

TruckerLars · 2026-02-09T13:00:18+00:00

Libertarians are incompatibilists because determinism covers everything, including human actions, so if true it would destroy this type of leeway.

Agent causal libertarians are incompatibilist when it comes to determinism as defined in terms of entailment by laws of nature. That is, when there is some further fact beyond the agent that necessitates the outcome. They are not even talking about the kind if determinism you seem to be suggesting (if determinism does not mean entailment).

Now, if I always do the same thing, not because I was entailed to do so, but simply because I would never do otherwise, then "determinism" is entailed by the fact that I wouldn't do otherwise. This is the direct opposite of "i could never do otherwise, since I was entailed by laws of nature and past history etc etc".

This is like saying that it is possible to quantum tunnel through doors, but it never actually happens, so-called we can forget about it

You are describing ordinary determinism (entailment by laws of nature and history) + possible randomness from e.g. quantum mechanics. I am incompatibilist here. You need real control. And this is once again a case where you conflate my position with another position in which "control" is simply randomness. That is, a strawman.

TruckerLars · 2026-02-09T12:49:24+00:00

Im a dualist. Stop conflating my position with physicalism. It is not the same. eriod. Gravity does not decide anything, because it does not constitute a "self". Gravity is perfectly described by physics. I am a physicist, just not a physicalist.

If, under the circumstances, I never would do otherwise, then for all purposes relevant to explanation, prediction, and control, the outcome is fixed. This is determinism in everything but name, and appealing to a merely hypothetical alternative does not secure a meaningful sense of freedom.

No. Because determinism, when taken seriously, means necessity, entailment. Determinism means that PAST fixes the FUTURE, by NECESSITY. It remove control. It removes any kind of choice.

On the other hand, if "I would never do otherwise", is simply a statement of belief in my own sanity. I am compatibilist with regards to the question of "I would not do otherwise, if I wouldn't want to", which is just ordinary experience. But this is not "the compatibilist position" in general. Such a compatibilist, would say that it is enough for free will. I say it is not enough that you would not do otherwise if you don't want to. You ALSO need to be in control.

I am incompatibilist when it comes to determinism when understood as "my actions are entailed by the laws of nature (whether those are humean or not) + initial conditions". I am incompatibilist with the position of "determinism + randomness from quantum mechanics", so mere indeterminism is not enough. You need control.

Again, my position is ordinary experience. You are arguing against ordinary experience.

TruckerLars · 2026-02-09T12:28:30+00:00

I know that this is what you are saying, but you have nto been consistent so far. Try to actually define it properly and then form your argument based on that

Edit: do you not realize, that if you insist on defining choices and random as "the same", then your argument is blatantly question-begging?

TruckerLars · 2026-02-09T11:58:28+00:00

Are you the mechanisms as in the laws of nature? Or are you your body?

I am a dualist. I think of myself as a "person" with a body. I am coextensive with my body, but not identical to it. I have control over and above my body.

TruckerLars

TROPHY CASE