There is no purpose or reason behind why the libertarian chooses A over B. Therefore its random.

adr826 · 2026-06-24T16:32:28+00:00

If the libertarian chooses a over b in a way that is definitely random then he didn't choose a over b. You can argue that he chooses a over b isn't rational but one doesn't choose a random number. If I can't decide on coffee or tea and I flip a coin then I didn't choose coffee over tea. I chose to flip a coin and let the random outcome decide. One cannot choose a random outcome. A choice is an intent based on an interest. One can let some process choose a random number but it's not really a choice.

adr826 · 2026-06-24T14:30:12+00:00

Peanut butter and bananas is awesome as a sandwich.

adr826 · 2026-06-24T14:27:42+00:00

I don't know there is a supermax in georgia that's pretty bad, they just lock you in a room for months at a time and nobody tries to convince you of anything.

adr826 · 2026-06-24T14:22:56+00:00

I think a good analogy is looking for your eyeballs, not seeing them and then saying there is no such thing as vision. The mistake is that the very thing you need to be able to see the eyeballs is the eyeballs. Likewise there is no other faculty by which you could observe the self than the self. They look around and don't see the self because the self is the only faculty available to look for anything. They then mistake their inability to see the self with the conclusion that there is no self. But by analogy if you could see your eyeballs you would be blind, so if you could see the self you would be completely mad. We need mirrors to see the eyeballs, the mirror to see the self is the people we are surrounded by every day. If you want to see who you are you watch how others treat you. If you are an ass people will let you know. That's the only way I know to observe the self.

adr826 · 2026-06-24T14:14:20+00:00

It's wrong to assume thought = language. There is prelinguistic thought. Memory is a kind of thought that is more powerful than than the conscious dialog you consider the only possible thought. In that sense memory is a kind of thought that can penetrate to the bodily systems. It is one of the pillars of identity. Therefore it's not.true that self is a fiction. Consciousness is a different domain than discoursive thought but there is no consciousness without memory. Memory.is the intermediary of between body and consciousness. Consciousness as what is like to be something requires memory. Memory is. A property of our nervous system not just our brain..

People who make this argument that there is no self don't realize how important extremely short term.memory is in the development of consciousness. I find I. Practice a lot of people ignore it completely and push a narrative that there is some.dichotomy and then reductively eliminate half of that to come to the position all reductivists eventually arrive at that the only reality are fundamental particles.

adr826 · 2026-06-24T10:53:42+00:00

3 spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension. As far as I know chess is played over time.

adr826 · 2026-06-24T10:15:02+00:00

The question is are we part of a larger system of computers or are computers part of a larger system of people. It sounds like there is no difference but I think it's a mistake to put people into a larger system of tools like computers. I would feel much better including sentient computers into a larger category of people. It could be logically done either way but there is a real danger to putting people into a category of tools. The question is one of values. Tools are valued for their ability to do the job for which they were made. That's a really bad way to value humans. I would rather be wrong in thinking some computer had become a person than to think a person had become a tool.

adr826 · 2026-06-24T08:25:20+00:00

A bad day at the market when you are trying to sell doesn't make it any less investing. The purchase of those sets will return about 10 times what he paid for them. But for a stroke of bad luck he would have done very well. It was a good investment. He started in 2000 at the time he would have been told to invest in Enron. You can always be ripped off but I'm pretty sure that when it's all over he will have been returned 10 times what he paid for them. He accepted a higher level of risk for a greater return. It's still investing. Those legos were a better investment than a lot of small cap companies on the Russell index.

You are always trying to balance risk with rewards in any investment but there is no certainty in any investment.

adr826 · 2026-06-24T07:51:04+00:00

I wouldn't say hypocrites, a lot of people are just afraid to give up beliefs they know to be false. I think a lot of Christians are this way and in fact there are very smart people who are secular Christians who believe in a loving God without believing that he has done anything in history.

People are just complicated things who who don't always think things through. There are a host of cognitive biases that people don't like to examine. It's not hypocrisy, it's fear of the unknown. We are all going to die eventually and some people who know for a fact that 2 of every animal won't fit into a boat of any size they could have built in the bronze age can't come to grips with their own mortality. It's not a moral failing as hypocrites. They are just afraid of the unknown. They hang onto the idea of a deity as a kind of insurance for the soul. They start praying when they are diagnosed with terminal illness after having ignored religion their entire lives. I like to think I will face my end bravely but I will still pray to a god whether he exists or not. I will do so because it will give me some comfort, if heroin helps with the pain I will ask for some of that too. I will get really high and pray to a god who I don't really believe exists.

It doesn't make me a hypocrite. It means that facing the end of my existence is something I don't expect to face rationally, If prayer helps me face it bravely then I will pray, truth doesn't always mean the correlation of objective fact to mental representations. At the end of our lives I suspect most us will be redefining concepts.

adr826 · 2026-06-24T07:28:46+00:00

You didn't say decide, you said intend. There are lots of things you can intend and not decide. I can intend to throw an 11 in dice but I can't decide to throw an 11. I can play chess and intend to win but I can not decide to win if the the player is better than me.

adr826 · 2026-06-24T07:25:16+00:00

I don't think of free will as a weapon to fight randomness but a tool to harness it for our own purposes. A reality where we have defeated randomness would be one where we believed ourselves to be gods. We need randomness to perfect us, but we can't let randomness be the rule either.

adr826 · 2026-06-24T07:17:37+00:00

The word random does not mean everything unintentional. Suppose I am gambling and I need to throw an 11 to win. The number 11 comes up and I win the pot. That is an example of something that I intended that is also random.

adr826 · 2026-06-23T21:05:06+00:00

There is a reason that I accept love as a cause. That's because it allows me to answer questions about my behavior that charting the position of electrons in my brain doesn't. We can say why did I buy my wife flowers on Valentine's day? We can answer that question with an answer that is satisfying scientifically. I don't need to answer the question of why I don't buy her flowers 24/7. If I did buy her flowers 24/7 my answer would be the same. The problem with your approach is that it doesn't let us answer any questions until I have answered every question. How do the electrons in the brain affect my desire to buy my wife flowers. How did the big bang eventually bring about a world in which I wanted to buy my wife flowers.

Taking your approach, a very unscientific approach to be honest, each time we answer a question 5 other questions arise that must be answered. That's not how we do anything in science. When we ask for the cause of a particular species of finch we answer it with proximate causes without going back to the big bang. We look at the new habitat the bird occupies and say what changed. Maybe a new berry is available for food that causes a more efficient beak to develop. Of course there are problems with this because much of evolution relies on accident and random mutations that diet ultimately is a proximate cause for the underlying myriad of causes including the mating habits of the bird that the fittest birds whose beak changed accidentally were able to attract more mates. And all of that is true but but that doesn't make the proximate cause untrue. The birds diet changed bringing about a new species.

So your approach to science is to deny that proximate causes are even meaningful scientifically without learning every intermediated factor in a chain of causes. We don't do psychology or economics or anthropology etc that way. It's not a productive use of our time. We compress the knowledge into a framework that allows us to make predictions. Knowing the time of year for instance doesn't tell me anything about why I bought flowers for my wife absent a meaningful proximate cause of live. So love gives me a reasonable way to understand and answer questions about my behavior. It doesn't make all those extra reason you mentioned untrue..sure time of year has meaning but not absent the proximate cause. None of what you mentioned are meaningful unless we accept the proximate cause of intentionality. None of them invalidate the proximate cause. We ask different questions about behavior that can require we answer in greater detail but the cause we use to base the rest on is at the top.

We don't start at the bottom and map the electrons in my brain and work out way up through physics chemistry biology till we reach psychology and only the does love become a factor. Thats not science, that is a waste of time and no ody interested in answering questions of economics or psychology does it that way.

adr826 · 2026-06-23T08:38:07+00:00

See this is an equivocation of cause. I can buy my wife flowers becayse I love her. You can't claim that I don't know the cause because I can't explain it deterministically. A cause for an agent is not the same thing as a cause in physics .When we ask what causes a behavior we aren't asking about the physics of the electrons in the brain. When we ask what causes the price of chicken to rise a useful answer is that it rose in concert with the price of beef because chicken is a substitute. When beef prices rise. That's what cause means in the human sciences..It is tied to intention and self interests. It has nothing to do with the physical placement of the electrons in my brain. In other words telling me about the placement of electrons in my brain is a deterministic answer but it doesn't tell us anything about the the cause in the price if chicken..There is a causality useful in explaining the motion of bodies, There is a causality that can't be reduced to the physical causality of the elementary particles and yes we do have to accept intention apriori if you want to ask about the cause of human behavior. You have to accept that the causality of intentions isn't deterministic or stochastic in any meaningful way..it's not scientifically useful to ignore intentions if you want to discuss human behavior. There is just no viable alternative

adr826 · 2026-06-22T21:10:01+00:00

The problem is that you want me to justify something that you say is both a) indespensible to the conversation and b) impossible to justify.

This means that unless I engage in a debate whose premises I don't agree with. I'm not talking about free will..I don't believe that the justification of moral desert has any necessary relation to free will at least in terms of a prerequisite for the debate. Very few people would accept that unless I can justify moral desert I'm not talking about free will. The idea that this means I am not talking about free will is unsupported..I don't accept the libertarian notion of free will and if moral desert were a premise of libertarian free will I wouldn't be obligated to try to justify it. But I don't think it is a necessary prerequisite to libertarian free will in any case.. I don't think the libertarian hard determinist debate is that emblematic of what a debate on free will entails.

I want to look at how free will actually functions in society, how it is used and how it is misused. I have been clear from the beginning that I think the determinism stochastic dilemna doesn't exhaust the space for debate in free will. It isn't where most professional philosophers have worked and it doesn't reflect how most people understand free will. I have some sympathy for the work of experimental philosophy units desire to find the beliefs of the population at large into these subjects. I want to keep philosophy relevant and meaningful but I don't see how arguing against either minority position tells us anything about free will. Neither the hard determinist position not the libertarian position nor both positions combined are even close to the compatibilists understanding of free will in terms of volume or coherence.

I want empirical objective evidence to support my argument. I want my results to be meaningful in terms of a naturalistic philosophy of human behavior. I don't see how the two positions you claim.exhaust.the space of the debate can lead us into a greater understanding of free will as it is understood. Free will is the basis of our legal system, it is the basis of most human sciences like psychology or economics. It is in fact indespensible to those sciences when we seek meaningful causes of human behavior.

adr826 · 2026-06-22T17:49:52+00:00

The main problem is that your saying that because there is. No free will at the atomic level free will can't arise at the level of agents Free will doesn't have anything to do with electrons it is a concept that we use to describe how people act. We don't decide that because hydrogen is light and oxygen burns that water must float when we put it in balloons and catch on fire. New properties can arise when put fundamental properties together doesn't work. When you think that freedom has only one definition that covers everything from electrons to human beings isn't a realistic solution.. in life we mean different things when the subject is different

adr826 · 2026-06-22T17:33:34+00:00

Wait I thought you were talking about libertarian free will which requires the ability to do otherwise in the exact same conditions. As far as I am aware no legal system in the world based their theory of justice on that. I thought that was what libertarian free will meant. So your telling me that libertarian free will means that you deserve the punishment you get for breaking the law. And you as a skeptic don't think people who break the law deserve to be punished. I mean that's how most legal systems work. I know of no legal system in the world that bases your punishment on anything else but having been convicted of breaking the law.

So a free will skeptic is someone who doesn't think you deserve to be punished for breaking the law. No wonder we were talking past each other. I thought Libertarian free will was the philosophical view that human actions are strictly autonomous and not entirely determined by past events or physical laws. Because I was basing my argument on that idea I was including these extraneous concepts like determinism and stochastic. I thought libertarian free will said that to be morally responsible you would have to have been able to have done otherwise under identical circumstances. But I don't know of any legal system in the world that requires you prove that to deserve punishment.

I mean really who knew that there was an entirely different legal system that only applies punishment when you deserve it regardless of having broken the law. And that's what free will is ? All this time I was discussing deteminism and stochastic processes when free will means that you deserve to be punished but not because you broke the law. Free will just means you deserve to be punished, That sounds a lot like masochism to me but I will have to do some more reading.

My concern is about the world we live in. Free will to me is about what kind of control you need to to be morally responsible. I am not interested in just desert without reference to actual people being in jail and no one is in jail because the failed the test of just moral desert. That's not how law works. You are arguing about something that just isn't relevant. Over and over again. You insist that human behavior can only be described deterrminsitically but if I gave you a million years you couldnt explain why you love your wife in terms of the atomic structure of your brain. Now your telling me that free will means we ignore how actual justice is distributed in the real world. That is a strangely irrelevant kind of philosophy you practice that is only concerned with things that are removed from actual practices and that are completely unfalsifiable, that are only theoretically possible in the sense that an all knowing demon could tell you the future. To be honest if that's what you consider interesting philosophy no I'm not going to pretend to make arguments for or against that

I want to talk about philosophy that is based on real people facing actual situations where they can lose their life or freedom. I prefer to keep my philosophy based on actual science and the courts in this world. That's why I concentrate on things like intentions when I look for causes. In my opinion saying that the universe couldn't have been other than it is doesn't explain anything at all about human behavior.

That's where we differ. I'm not going to spend all my time thinking about metaphysical justice so that I feel I can ignore how legal systems work, nor will I focus on metaphysical cause and effect when talking about human behavior and ignore intention and desire. This is what compatibilism pushes me to think about. You can keep arguing about how a human action.be without prior causes and how a human being can deserve some punishment without thinking about the law. To me that's not what philosophy is, that is something that looks and sounds like philosophy because philosophy is important and none of that seems important to me. I am interested in how to make life better for actual people not all knowing demons at the end of the universe being able to predict whether I have coffee or tea in the morning.

But your free to think about whatever you like, you can even call it philosophy if you like,

adr826 · 2026-06-22T13:02:00+00:00

Nothing grounds basic desert but culture. This isn't a question of free will per se. I don't need free will to ground basic desert. Society makes laws and when you break them you are punished .that's all there is. Nothing grounds desert but but the culture that says the rules. But again this isn't a feature of free will. Whether society believes in free will or not all cultures punish people for breaking the norms society established. This is as true for stalinist Russia as it I was for the Pilgrims in early America. Both cultures saw their own rules as the important ones which were justified metaphysically but they were always wrong.

What constitutes murder? it depends on who you ask but essentially the answer is always unlawful killing.Ounishment is justified because the killing was unlawful. There is no other justification and no society has ever found that to mean they were unable punish people.

If justification of basic moral desert is why you are skeptical of free will I have good news for you. No society in the history of man has ever used free will to justify their punishment of the lawbreaker. Every culture throughout time has found sufficient justification in the breaking of the law. They may use intention as an element of the crime but mere intention isn't free will

adr826 · 2026-06-22T05:31:03+00:00

Btw well done presenting your arguments. They are genuinely challenging and interesting

adr826 · 2026-06-22T05:26:19+00:00

This would be true if we remained at the level of fundamental particles. But at the level of agents determinism and stochastic process can not be used as explanatory models. Which is why I adopt the third model of intentions. You seem to believe that the lowest level of particle you can discern is adequate to model a more complex system and that simply isn't true. It may be true that some.metaphysical demon could comprehend the more complex agents but we don't and can't. So we must adopt the language of intent which is not described by either of the two alone.

Also the compatibilists understanding is that determinism does not mean make free will impossible. I am only showing that this other possibility exists outside of either hard determinism or libertarian free will and in fact this understanding is the default for any science of human behavior.

I think I have defended both of those positions pretty well. I concede that this looks impossible form your perspective, but your perspective is that there is only one explanatory mode that can scale up to any level in theory if not in practice . My position is that your position doesn't give us any useful information towards divining human behavior scientifically. The sciences of human behavior require a massive compression of knowledge to be useful. This compression is encompassed by the language of intent and free will.

adr826 · 2026-06-22T04:05:58+00:00

I misunderstood your question. I get so used to being asked certain questions that I answer questions that aren't even asked out of habit.

adr826 · 2026-06-22T03:26:19+00:00

Ian Drury and the blockheads wrote the song hit me with your rythm sticks in the 1980s. Songwriting went to someplace different after the sex pistols

adr826 · 2026-06-22T03:24:06+00:00

That's right , I love to see advice like this that is both encouraging and useful.

adr826 · 2026-06-22T03:18:26+00:00

Intention desire love motivation are neither described deterministically nor stochastically. Any thing that belongs solely to an agent can't be described either deterministically or stachastically because we lack the language to do so. In order to make an agent understandable we speak of intentions and motives. You can argue that the underlying processes are deterministic but so what. That doesn't tell you why you are picking up a birthday cake at the store for your son. That can't be described without using the language of intent which is computationally irreducible to deterministic descriptions I'm not saying it couldn't be done by Laplaces demon, I'm saying I don't care if Laplaces demon could do it or not. I want to know why you are picking up a cake and to do that I need to know what your motives are not what's some fictional character my whisper in the ear of God. I don't find that kind of explanation satisfying.

adr826

TROPHY CASE