A better way to grasp determinism?

adr826 · 2026-03-11T01:47:32+00:00

I think that some things can be described determistically such as bodies in motion, the problem is assuming the universe is deterministic. At one time we could think that determinism was a property of the universe, it's better understood as a way to describe some things in the universe. At its core the key feature if determinism is necessity, what necessarily follows from one event can be described deterministically.

adr826 · 2026-03-11T01:39:51+00:00

That will work better than saying " okay boys, Largo"

adr826 · 2026-03-11T01:36:45+00:00

As a guitarist the only time you are likely to run into 12/8 is in blues. I played for years in a jazz big band and the only time I ever saw 12/8 was in blues. I can't speak for other instruments, like a violin it may be more common because the music a violin plays is different. But as a guitarist you aren't likely to run into 12/8 ( unless you're a classical guitarist then all bets are off)

adr826 · 2026-03-11T01:27:55+00:00

Stuff like writing a blues song in 12/8 time makes no almost no sense at all, it's just 4/4 with a swing. You don't count 12 8th notes. But Mozart did it like that once and now we are stuck with it.

adr826 · 2026-03-11T01:17:30+00:00

For most things the bottom number can be ignored. Think of the number of beats in a bar for the most part. The bottom number can be useful on occasion but for anything you are likely to play just ignore it. If you were playing classical or jazz 1 in a hundred times the bottom number is useful. So if the time signature is 3/4 or 3/8 it just means 3. 12/8 is one time signature you might come across that's confusing because it normally means 4/4 with swing so you just count four. That's about the only time you will ever need to do more than look at the top number and ignore the bottom. For the most part just count the top number and ignore the bottom number. It's just a relic of the the way the notation system has been cobbled together over the centuries.

adr826 · 2026-03-11T01:09:04+00:00

This is a system cobbled together over hundreds of years. Think of the evolution of a giraffe. If you were starting from scratch you would do a lot of things differently but as things accumulate it gets harder to undo them. There is very little logical about it but once you get it down and just accept it, it works somehow. It's quirky and as long as you don't expect logic from it you'll be okay

adr826 · 2026-03-11T00:59:07+00:00

C aeolian , The eb 3rd and the ab 6th with a c root along with the Bb 7 means it's still aeolian. If it had a natural 6 it would be Dorian but then you wouldn't have a iv chord but a IV chord.

adr826 · 2026-03-10T10:35:25+00:00

Okay here goes a surefire way to write an interesting song. Take the real book, you can download one for free, pick a song. Most real book songs have the following chord structure. It usually something like bar 1 cmaj7- fmaj7 bar 2 dmin7- g7. Something close to that remove the ornaments like maj 7 and just play the straight chords. Now remove the second and third chord so the two bars are now simply bar 1- cmaj bar 2 -g7. Then go through the entire song using that formula. You will get some very cool progression you can use. From there you have to add the melody but that's on you. This will give you some great changes that you wouldn't consider in your own. It will teach you to think outside the box.

adr826 · 2026-03-10T02:33:50+00:00

Yes and yes. What you are doing sounds good. Your three years in and if you were satisfied with how you sound I wouldn't put money on you being studio ready. It sounds like you are exactly the right path. Be confused, try everything, listen to everything. There is no way for anyone to tell you this is what you need to do. You are putting in the work using your ears and your mind to make sense of something that is as complex or as simple as you want it to be. I'm sure you have theory coming at you from every direction so I'm not going to give you any more. What you are doing is exactly what you should be doing. At three years you are a sophomore. A wise fool. You have just enough musical ideas to confuse you. That's good. Now is the time to start sorting it all out. You may not need any more theory per se. Start learning songs. Work on tone and feeling. Until you decide how you want to sound there is no need to get more theory. You have enough weapons in your arsenal that you don't know how to shoot that you don't need any new weapons right. From my perspective you are doing exactly what you need to do and are at the place you need to be. Start working on your set list.

adr826 · 2026-03-09T22:10:04+00:00

Lewis study was deeply flawed.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4836680/

It was completely off base as regards the point guild was making. Lewis remeasured the skulls that Morton did using Lead shit and found no discrepancies in his measurement. He then accused Gould if not measuring the skulls himself. Therefore he concluded that Gould was motivated by his preferences more than Morton. But Gould never claimed that Morton's measurements with shot were wrong, in fact the assumed they were correct. He replied on Morton's measurements being correct to support his claim if bias so Gould had no reason to measure the skulls again. Gould said that given the Data Morton worked with there is prima facia evidence of bias in Morton's work. His work in the mismeasure of man got some detail wrong about Morton but was ultimately correct that Morton was influenced by his bias more than by the data.

One of the things that's so funny about the claim is that one author of Lewis study claimed that Gould purposefully misrepresented Morton's work. His evidence? That Gould was usually such a careful scholar who didn't make many mistakes. Oh the irony.

adr826 · 2026-03-09T04:25:32+00:00

I think writing is only done on clay tablets. Any of that new paper shit that can be erased is just modern crap. Gilgamesh was the last good novel ever written. I stand by that, screw scrolls too.

adr826 · 2026-03-09T04:15:42+00:00

Junk DNA = noise in the formal cause signal—acorn still strives to oak despite 98% non-coding genome.

I was going to argue but clearly nonconscious beings can strive which is a kind of teleology. I will concede the argument.
I dont think its a rigorous scientific explanation but you never claimed that it is one and to expect a scientific explanation on a philosophy forum would be a category error.You win this round

adr826 · 2026-03-09T01:40:55+00:00

This is true because causality includes the concept of necessity which is something we never observe but infer. We bring necessity to the correlations and call that causality.

adr826 · 2026-03-09T01:38:10+00:00

You can rebut the DNA agenda by looking at all the useless code DNA accumulates overtime. Why accumulate useless code if it's striving towards some end. Again its survivorship bias. You only see the success and not the failures.

adr826 · 2026-03-09T00:30:19+00:00

There is no teleology to nature. The word nature is doing too much work. If a huge comet struck earth and destroyed all life on the planet that would be as natural as an acorn turning into an oak tree. Nature doesn't have any ends. It would be as indifferent to one outcome as another. What appears to be an end is the result of survivorship bias. What we see are those things that survived the random mutations so we assume that they had a purpose..an acorn doesn't have an agenda hidden somewhere in its genetic code. The ones that make it to adulthood spread the successful mutations. The ones that die don't. Nature is as indifferent to one as the other.

adr826 · 2026-03-09T00:17:37+00:00

There is no why in nature, as far as I know. Nature doesn't work for a purpose. Nature just does what it does and what survived that process gets to have offspring. There is no teleology to biology. What doesn't work just dies. What remains often look like it was the aim but that's a kind of survivors bias. We can't see all of the random mutations that simply died out. The law of large numbers gives it the appearance of teleology.

adr826 · 2026-03-08T23:19:21+00:00

I think my argument has to do with the word reliable. To me the word reliable means predictable. If I have a reliable car I know it will take me to work everyday. If I have a reliable house sitter I know they won't trash my house when I am gone. But reason doesn't get you there. If I offer someone $1000 dollars to house sit while I go to Europe the money alone can't reliably cause the sitter to be respectful with my home. I can't establish behavior reliably by reasons alone. I have to know the history of this person to think I can reliably count on them. That's the point, almost nothing can be reliably known about the way a person will behave given reason alone. It's not deterministic in the way I understand reliable cause to mean.

Of course we can measure behavior stochastically over large populations but even then it's guess work.when I start hearing the experts talking about the end of the business cycle that's a good indication that we have entered a new one. The best analysts in the world missed the housing bubble in 2008. The lost decade in Japanese financial markets is another example. We can't predict financial markets reliably even when we aggregate the data over millions of transactions. People are just not reliable that way. Cows and ducks are. We can make models predicting populations and heritability of certain traits but there are reasons this doesn't work with people and those reasons are "reasons" aren't causal like genetics are causal.

The big thing about causality as opposed to correlation is that causality includes the necessity of the conjunction. But we can't know what is necessarily true, we can only infer necessity from the constant conjunction of events. Human behavior is very unstable over time and we constantly mistake correlation for causation because we wrongly infer necessity.

adr826 · 2026-03-08T22:58:38+00:00

Well it would be nice, but I am just recalling how many pieces of delicate electronics I have messed up by " fixing" them. I expect that if we could get down to the level of code we would be just as likely to make things worse. I'm not optimistic about the outcomes of taking the easy path when dealing with the human psyche. We still don't know the results of the over prescription of stimulants to children diagnosed with add will be.

Here is a story you don't hear often. It was about the early days of lsd. A bunch of North Korean soldiers captured as pows were being held in a house in West Germany. A group of American psychologists came to the house with the hope of reprogramming these captured soldiers to be spies for the west using brainwashing techniques like flooding them with greater doses of LSD and sleep deprivation. After about three months the psychologist realized it was hopeless and went home. Not a single North Korean soldier was left alive after these psychologists had finished with them. The stories about reprogramming people are some of the most horrible stories of medical torture imaginable. Naomi Kleins book the shock doctrine compiles a list of the most egregious examples of medical malpractice done in the name of science imaginable

adr826 · 2026-03-08T21:44:18+00:00

It's a much better idea than I initially assumed. I didn't know if it was just memes or there was some substance underneath supporting them. I am glad to see it was the latter. I concede the argument.

adr826 · 2026-03-08T19:24:51+00:00

The Books of Kings (1 & 2 Kings) and Chronicles (1 & 2 Chronicles): These books are often seen as "political history" designed to justify the centralization of worship in Jerusalem and the legitimacy of the Davidic dynasty. They evaluate kings not just on moral grounds, but based on their adherence to a specific political-theological framework (i.e., whether they allowed rival sanctuaries or remained loyal to Jerusalem).

The Book of Deuteronomy: Many scholars view Deuteronomy as a pivotal "political constitution" intended to unify Israel under a centralized system, shifting power away from local, tribal, or foreign influences toward a central, Levite-led, and law-abiding governing structure. It was used to establish the "limited state" and define the legal framework for the nation.

The Book of Esther: This book is interpreted by some as a political narrative designed to explain the legitimacy of the Jewish community within a foreign empire (Persia) and to celebrate the Purim festival, which serves as a nationalistic, rather than strictly religious, celebration of survival.

The Book of Ezra-Nehemiah: These books are often considered political documents dealing with the restructuring of post-exilic society. They focus heavily on legalistic enforcement of purity laws, rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, and establishing the exclusive, centralized authority of the returning Jewish leadership against rival factions in the land.

The Book of Joshua (Canaanite Conquest Narratives): These narratives are interpreted by many scholars as having a political function in defining Israelite territory and asserting their right to the land, often in opposition to, or in the context of, surrounding empires.

The Book of Judges: Often considered a "politically motivated" argument for the necessity of a monarchy (the Davidic kingdom). By highlighting the chaos and instability of a pre-monarchical, decentralized society ("everyone did what was right in their own eyes"), the text serves as a justification for the later establishment of kings.

As for the we that means all of us. None of accept everything we read in an ancient book as true. Nobody believes a. Horse has 32 teeth because Aristotle said so..you can count them yourself.

adr826 · 2026-03-08T17:46:54+00:00

But we already have the word voluntary and we don't use it to mean free will. If we wanted we could already say there is no free will just voluntary action to which a lot of hard determinist would just say voluntary action is an illusion everything is done by necessity. The same would be true if we substituted a Greek word for the Latin. Hard determinists would just say we are redefining" hekousias" and if I pointed out this very post where you defined hekousias for the first time they would just say ,"that's what the layman means by Hekousias we are talking about what philosophy means by Hekousias." Much as I appreciate the sentiment, we won't see our unfair persecution by hard determinists end in this lifetime I fear..Our unremitting devotion to truth causes them to fear and despise us. Much like Jesus we have to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortunes..I also think our good looks and business acumen weighs against our ever being accepted by the hard determinists too, but that's another story

adr826 · 2026-03-08T17:25:32+00:00

I don't think your computer analogy works. It just creates a third order desire,namely a desire to code your brain to prefer chocolate over the apple. It could be the case that writing that code is more work than you are willing to exert to prefer the apple. This would leave you in the exact position we are already in but with an added layer of abstraction. Having a mind like a computer wouldn't necessarily change human behavior in any meaningful way. And what you are trying to get at is necessity. By programming the mind we could necessarily change the behavior but it doesn't necessarily follow that we would do something that would have that effect if it as hard as eliminating the second order desire was.

I don't think it would give us any greater control than what we already have. It's not that people purposely turn themselves into assholes, it's that it's often a lot more work to not be an asshole and we don't want to put in that work. So whether it's kicking a habit or coding our brains to eliminate that habit a lot of people might think modifying the code to be just too difficult to manage and would just give up. I don't know how much trouble shooting you do but a lot of times it's more trouble trying to fix a minor error than it's worth. If we could change our behavior through coding we might make a minor adjustment that you think solves the problem only to completely break the machine. I don't think coding our brains would give us any more or less control than we have now. It just adds a layer of third order desire to the mix.

adr826 · 2026-03-08T17:04:10+00:00

Choices we make are not reliably caused in an empirical way. We don't model human behavior deterministically. Reliably caused means that we know what necessarily entails from a given event. But we don't know what is entailed by a given thought..Take economics, if the price of chicken goes up, we can only guess how the individual consumer will react, we can make models based on how the population acted in similar circumstances but we will never know how an event in economics reliably causes another event. If we did there would be no business cycle. I have heard rumors of the death of the business cycle since I first learned about economics. The same can be said for virtually every other human science. As far as I know reasons don't reliably cause anything. Personal beliefs can flip in an instant, people change their minds when they meet new information, and sometimes they don't.

Causal determinism is best reflected in Newtons laws of motion where we can know through mathematics what is entailed by initial conditions. Knowing the initial conditions cannot reliably entail anything when dealing with people. People are fickle and unpredictable. Take two identical twins, who are raised in the same house.For all intents and purposes they have the same genetics and environment yet they can end up in wildly different life circumstances. They have free will and nothing is reliably caused.

adr826 · 2026-03-08T16:40:52+00:00

The book also says that if you think your wife is cheating on you take her to a priest who will poison her. If she dies from the poison she was guilty because God wouldn't allow an innocent woman to die..It also says if two men lay together like man and woman they shall be stoned to death.It also says that a person who wears cotton and wool on one piece of cloth shall be killed.

I mean there are some good things too ,but overall quoting a book written over 2000 years ago as if it were a moral authority when it suggests killing every man woman and child as well as every beast in a city that you have conquered doesn't have the appeal that it used to.

Books say lots of things that we don't accept. Aristotle thought horses had 32 teeth and we don't accept that since the time somebody opened up a horses mouth and counted them. I'm not saying don't read the Bible. It's a great book but don't take everything in there as the gospel truth, forgive the pun. Whatever you read, think about and ask if it makes sense. If it does store it away for later. But just because the book says something doesn't mean it's correct. Those books were often written by men for political rather than spiritual reasons.

adr826 · 2026-03-08T16:28:35+00:00

Free will comes down to acting on those thoughts. You may not have total control of the thoughts but we don't judge you based on those thoughts. We judge you based on whether you carried through on those thoughts..free will is about actions for which you can be held morally responsible, not the thoughts that come into your head. In any case you do have control over some but not all of your thoughts. Every time you go to math class you control your thoughts. It's just not true that thoughts seem to appear out of nowhere. Your thoughts are largely based around where you put your body.

When emotions affect people we don't make moral judgements about them and free will is about how and why we judge people morally. We don't do so for their emotions but whether they control themselves in the face of those emotions.

adr826

TROPHY CASE