Atlas Shrugged and so did I...

[Oblimo]

But Ami would accuse you of denying free will.

He already has, so where's the harm.

I posit for the sake of argument that free will is illusory and all attempts to define it fall quickly into self-contradiction. Or at least I will tomorrow. I'm getting a bit fuzzy round the edges.

 

[amicus]

I like you fuzzy all over, m'dear...rest well...




ami

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

I just read through both of the first thread, Rox, and I can't find a single denial of free will-- not even by implication. I've read through the first two pages of the second. Once Pure and Gauche start talking philosophers I feel a bit past my depth-- but I haven't found any denials yet.

Can you find the quotes you have in mind?

As always Pure the trickster leaves himself big escape hatches, but here's what he said in post 82 of that second thread:

Pure:
In fact, of course, there are positive arguments for including human choices in the natural world, not floating above in some 'moral sphere.' Assuming causation is an axiom of science; it's done in phsyics, biology and the study of human behavior. It cannot be proven, but it gradually overpowers all contrasting positions. In the history of science, all attempts to privilege certain phenomena--e.g. transmundane or heavenly ones-- have failed.

So there is no reason to privilege human choices, and exclude them from scientific accounts of psychology. This is the assumption of any number of psychologists; Freud being a prime example. Scientists on human-related topics--and psychotherapists-- have succeeded in their endeavors based on the assumption that human choices are parts of patterned behavior --causal chains and networks.

 

[rgraham666]

A few years ago Foreign Policy did a series of articles on The World's Most Dangerous Ideas. One of them was Undermining Free Will. (Unless you're a subscriber you won't be able to read the entire article.)

The author pointed out that there is, per se, nothing wrong with doing away with free will. Except that there's no ethical system that will work without it. All ethics are based on the idea that the person, assuming they aren't limited in some psychological or physiological manner, chose to act the way they did. They bear the responsibility for their actions.

Which, to my mind, makes the people who deny free will and those who exalt it above all things the same sort of people. People who don't want to be responsible for what they do.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Libertarians wanna smoke dope and not pay taxes; thats their entire agenda.

And own unregistered firearms and perform tax-free abortions. Or somethin'. I can't quite remember because of the contact high I got as soon as I walked over to the Austin, TX Libertarian Rally to see why so many people were goin "Woo!"

It can't be that simple, because with such a dynamite platform how could they not already be in control of all three branches?

 

[Stella_Omega]

He already has, so where's the harm.

I posit for the sake of argument that free will is illusory and all attempts to define it fall quickly into self-contradiction. Or at least I will tomorrow. I'm getting a bit fuzzy round the edges.

are you off to dreamland? Sleep well!

 

[Stella_Omega]

As always Pure the trickster leaves himself big escape hatches, but here's what he said in post 82 of that second thread:

Pure:
In fact, of course, there are positive arguments for including human choices in the natural world, not floating above in some 'moral sphere.' Assuming causation is an axiom of science; it's done in phsyics, biology and the study of human behavior. It cannot be proven, but it gradually overpowers all contrasting positions. In the history of science, all attempts to privilege certain phenomena--e.g. transmundane or heavenly ones-- have failed.

So there is no reason to privilege human choices, and exclude them from scientific accounts of psychology. This is the assumption of any number of psychologists; Freud being a prime example. Scientists on human-related topics--and psychotherapists-- have succeeded in their endeavors based on the assumption that human choices are parts of patterned behavior --causal chains and networks.

That's IT? Pure's minimalist summation of one of Freud's assumptions? Damn, Roxy, I thought this was gonna be juicy!

I did go through the whole thread and I found no other mention of Free Will-- not a sausage. You'll have to do better than that. That was no better than Ami.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

That's IT? Pure's minimalist summation of one of Freud's assumptions? Damn, Roxy, I thought this was gonna be juicy!

I did go through the whole thread and I found no other mention of Free Will-- not a sausage. You'll have to do better than that. That was no better than Ami.

Eh, I was going from memory. As I said, Pure the trickster leaves big outs and ambiguities, so it's not surprising that this was the best/worst I could find. If I was wrong to say some here had denied the reality of free will then I'm delighted to be wrong.

Delighted too to be in the company of sensible people who basically agree with what RG referenced, "All ethics are based on the idea that the person, assuming they aren't limited in some psychological or physiological manner, chose to act the way they did." (Although his "those who exalt free will above all things . . . don't want to be responsible for what they do" was a bit gratuituous, if not not self-contradictory.)

I suppose that's not really an assertion of the reality of free will, actually - just a consequentialist argument that we're kind of fucked if we don't base our ethical systems on a claim that it is real. I'm like you though, Stella, less interested in the arcane philosophical arguments. A consequentialist claim and acceptance is about as deep as I'm likely to get anyway, and good enough for my purposes.


(Prediction: Pure will be along to say that he doesn't deny the reality of free will, just that there's no evidence that it's real. Does predicting this make me a determinist? )

 

[Pure]

note to roxanne,

speaking of uncharitable.

As always Pure the trickster leaves himself big escape hatches, but here's what he said in post 82 of that second thread:


i did skim the thread and its about what i said. posting #82 responds to one of yours and does deal briefly with the subject of free will--thank you for pointing this out--, and this subtopic wasn't pursued.

what i don't understand is why free will suddenly pops up? why didn't rox just say, "Hey, let's talk about free will; it was important to Rand." instead of "some here don't believe in it and here's proof."

i re- summarized some of my views, just above, since it's a Rand thread and Rand and Randians think it's important.

i think the best way to deal with it, is to point out that IF it's meaningful, it's outside of science and empirical investigation. it's a bit like someone who pops up in psychology class, in a discussion of "instincts" in humans and says, "humans aren't animals, they have a soul."

nothing counts for or against this claim, it's outside of science and informative facts.

===
further note as to uncharitability:

Rox (Prediction: Pure will be along to say that he doesn't deny the reality of free will, just that there's no evidence that it's real. Does predicting this make me a determinist? )

The above posting was made before i read Roxanne's. As to her prediction, it should be evident to anyone, including her, that it was not accurate.

further i'm rather disappointed when a mind like roxanne' is not employed to deal rationally with substance, but picks up where ami left off with warning people "my opponent is tricky"--pure ad hominem.

oh, and the answer to rox's last question, is 'yes, a least in part.' most of us work by deterministic principles, e.g. when we attribute "character" or traits to people.

 

[Stella_Omega]

What i don't understand is why free will suddenly pops up?

Ah, that was because Ami-- in lieu of course, of actually answering my questions-- claimed that we "deny free will" and won't tell him what our favorite colors are.*
http://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=24979039&postcount=413


* Have you ever been around five and six year olds? "What's your favorite color?" is the MOST important thing in the world to them! And they like to say; "You can't have blue, Blue is MY favorite color!" Ami's insistence that people name themselves Liberal or Conservative, Left or Right, Good free-Willer or Bad Collectivist, is very five-year-old to me.

 

[amicus]

Aw, shucks, I just have to do this...your favorite color is no doubt pink, you are just ashamed to fess up.

grins...

amicus...

 

[Stella_Omega]

Aw, shucks, I just have to do this...your favorite color is no doubt pink, you are just ashamed to fess up.

grins...

amicus...

How cute!

read anything about William Hickman yet? Or is your favorite color yellow?

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Free Will.

Much of what I do is the result of habit. That is, I get in a groove and remain there until frustration or curiosity or accident or whatever alters my course. When new information comes to my attention I make the effort to add it to my repertoire.

When I set my course for WAL-MART I occasionally discover I'm well along the path to my office. Habit hijacked my free-will and I'm forced to turn the car around.

Some folks flit about in an aimless trajectory, like a wind-up toy car. They go every which way until they collide with something or run out of eneregy.

People like STELLA and PURE and COOKIE MONSTER hold up inside Fort Hillary, and treat anyone outside the fort as wild Indians.

 

[Handprints]

First - in those instances where "it just doesn't matter what's on the return side of the ratio if risk exceeds X," what really are the sources of that risk? I'll bet that more often than not they are political ones, not financial, "green eyeshades" return-on-investment ones. The source of those political risks is the entity you want to empower to "compensate" for the excessive risk-averseness of private capital. Obviously, there are some problems in that.

Also, I would examine more carefully the incentives that drive government's selection of which capital projects to fund, and how they are done. Those incentives are such that you inevitably end up with a lot of bridges to nowhere being built at excessive cost by rent-seeking cronies (or members of special interests like modern unions, who benefit from obsolete and unfair "prevailing wage" laws).

I think that's fair: I want to use about 2% of the nation's personal income to do this, so I've no doubt there is a political calculation that follows on from the basic execution risk - "How badly are we screwed, as a nation, if he gets this wrong?" That said, the green eyeshade types, particularly if I want to build this network in the teeth of a depression, will have some excellent - if wholly short-term - arguments relating to their odds of bankruptcy to put forward against investing. Of course, we seem to veering back to the real world here from Randland: in the real world, the only person who could initiate this sort of project in a democracy is the guy with the massive electoral mandate...

On rent-seeking in appropriations: funny how we get right back to culture, isn't it? Is it possible, do you suppose, that above-board, non-criminal rent-seeking is more prevalent in democracies which employ a convoluted checks-and-balances system of power-sharing than in, say, a parliamentary model? I'll give you prevailing-wage supporters and sports-stadia developers as examples of short-termist irrationality without demur.

Your response to the holdout problem is worthy of a thoughtful anarcho-capitalist like David Friedman, but it still depends on the holdout having some scintilla of rationality, which won't always be the case.

Finally, toll roads are not the only way to create voluntary highway system. The oil companies might build roads, to name one possibility - can't sell gas if people can't drive. Opponents of post office privatization always hurrumph that private services wouldn't deliver to remote low-traffic are "unprofitable." Hmmm - UPS and fed-ex do. You will understand the value added by having a complete network that even goes to the "unprofitable" places - and so will the private providers.

I think "might" is the operative word in your analysis - I'll go so far as "might well" in Randland. The extent to which their efforts are going to mirror those of the US' electricity companies' "open-hearted" decisions about where (and to whom) those lines should be built, as well as their objections to rural extension circa 1935 come immediately to mind.

The difference between free-to-use infrastructure (alternatively, infrastructure priced to maximise users, like the post office) and market-rate-use infrastructure for an economy isn't small. If we compare the number of business who can make money marketing and shipping by US Mail to the number who could using Fed-Ex, I'm pretty sure I've got a good idea which one's the larger number. That you can deliver almost any service anywhere profitably isn't in question: what economic benefits accrue to the economy - the number of value-adding concerns that are created to use the service - is.

What distinguishes private efforts at infrastructure extension from government ones, to my mind, is that they aren't going to create anything like the benefits for the economy that larger-scale, lower use-cost projects can - and do. That seems an awfully strange benefit for an economically self-interested person to pass up on.

Best,
H

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Bridges to nowhere.

I'm reading a history of the War of 1812. My esteem for Thomas Jefferson is falling like a rock. His cronyism with his political friends set America up for the war with Britain. He did virtually all he could to gut the army and scuttle the navy. Then howled and screeched at the military when the war went bad for the Americans. James Madison comes off looking like Tom's butt boy.

 

[Handprints]

I'm reading a history of the War of 1812.

JBJ - Author and title? I'd like to read that if I can get it out here. That's one of those key dates in European history, so we don't get taught as much about US events at that time...

Thanks,
H

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

HANDPRINTS

AMATEURS TO ARMS! by John Elting

It's a dry read, but does reveal our leaders and commanders and the grunts as rubes & boobs. Not all. A few brave souls defied the American leadership to save some of our honor.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2007/11/14/congressional_and_leftist_lies

For PURE and the gang.

 

[Handprints]

AMATEURS TO ARMS! by John Elting

Thanks - I'll look for it. A friend just sent me a care package with the complete Army/Marine novels of W.E.B. Griffin. They're like a crack pipe for anyone who likes military novels. I've lost interest in everything else...

Best,
H

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

HANDPRINTS

I read most of the W.E.B.Griffin novels several years ago. I enjoyed them, but they are formula plots. The hero has no blemishes, his girl-friend is starlet quality, etc.

I'm writing a detective novel about an old guy I call Lester. Lester is 60ish. Anyway, he's immersed in a department filled with W.E.B. Griffin studs & starlets. Lester is bald and fat and old, and closes more cases than anyone. He has no earthly idea what CSI is about as he uses his relationships in the black & cracker communities to nab the bad-boys.

He keeps the city fathers (and "mothers" as he calls them) off his ass by collecting everyone's dirt and filing it away for future reference.

 

[Pure]

roxanne fades out,

after introducing 'free will' as a topic with much fanfare and talk of my trickiness.

rox having received offers from oblimo and myself to show the basic meaninginglessness or unscientific nature of 'free will', makes her exit.

"free will" is part of rand's "romantic" program, i.e., to write novels that inspire, that show people how they could be, etc.

not for the "objectivist" to induce readers to look at reality.

there is a well known quote from rove, of similar import:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html

_Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush_

By RON SUSKIND


In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.

He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

 

[xssve]

XSSVE

That's because you scream for oxen to be recognized as bulls, and if AMICUS or I change the level of abstraction to explain why what your demand can never be, you holler that we're evasive.

Farfetched hypotheticals and outright making shit up, are two varieties of abstraction, these are strawmen you want me to recognize as bulls - I recognize it as bull shit.

"...change the level of abstraction to explain why what your demand can never be".

Try restating this in English: I haven't the time or energy to pick through your screed to figure out what the hell you're talking about - what demand?

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

XSSVE

You demand that oxen be bulls.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Farfetched hypotheticals and outright making shit up, are two varieties of abstraction, these are strawmen you want me to recognize as bulls - I recognize it as bull shit.

"...change the level of abstraction to explain why what your demand can never be".

Try restating this in English: I haven't the time or energy to pick through your screed to figure out what the hell you're talking about - what demand?

The demand that Ami answers the actual questions he's been asked.
"Change the level of abstraction" indeed. What bullshit!

 

[Pure]

Question: What was Ayn Rand's greatest (at least semi original) thought or insight?

I've been thinking.

It can't be that unfettered capitalism and 'minimal government,' esp. minimal govt interference with business and property related issues., is the greatest institution on earth, a basis for a great and prosperous society of virtuous individuals.

That's rather close to Adam Smith, not to say, Von Mises, Hayek.

so what else?

===
a brief survey from www.mises.org
[start excerpt]
Mises was born on Sept 29, 1881, in the city of Lemberg (now Lvov) in Galicia, where his father, a Viennese construction engineer working for the Austrian railroads, was then stationed. Both Mises’s father and mother came from prominent Viennese families; his mother’s uncle, Dr Joachim Landau, served as deputy from the Liberal Party in the Austrian Parliament.

Entering the University of Vienna at the turn of the century as leftist interventionist, the young Mises discovered Principlesof Economics by Carl Menger, the founding work of the Austrian School of economics, and was quickly converted to the Austrian emphasis on individual action rather than unrealistic mechanistic equations as the unit of economics analysis, and to the importance of a free-market economy. [...]

Mises developed the article into his book Socialism(1922), a comprehensive philosophical and sociological, as well as economic critique which still stands as the most thorough and devastating demolition of socialism ever written. Mises’s Socialism converted many prominent economists and social philosophers out of socialism, including Hayek, the German Wilhelm Ropke, and the Englishman Lionel Robbins.

In the United States, the publication of the English translation of Socialism in 1936 attracted the admiration of the prominent economic journalist Henry Hazlitt, who reviewed it in the New York Times, and converted one of America’s most prominent and learned Communist fellow-travelers of the period, J.B. Matthews, to a Misesian position and to opposition to all forms of socialism.

Socialists throughout Europe and the United States worried about the problem of economic calculation under socialism for about fifteen years, finally pronouncing the problem solved with the promulgation of the “market socialism” model of the Polish economist Oskar Lange in 1936. Lange returned to Poland after World War II to help plan Polish Communism. The collapse of socialist planning, in Poland and the other Communist countries in 1989, left Establishment economists across the ideological spectrum, all of whom bought the Lange “solution”, mightily embarrassed.

Some prominent socialists, such as Robert Heilbroner, have had the grace to admit publicly that “Mises was right” all along (the phrase “Mises was Right” was the title of a panel at the annual 1990 meeting of the Southern Economic Association at New Orleans).

If socialism was an economic catastrophe, government inter*vention could not work, and would tend to lead inevitably to socialism. Mises elaborated these insights in his Critique of Interventionism (1929), and set forth his political philosophy of laissez-faire liberalism in his Liberalism (1927).

[end]
====

Hayek, student and associate of Von Mises; Nobel prize winner, from wiki.

[start excerpt] It was during this time [WW II] that The Road to Serfdom originated. Hayek was concerned about the general view in Britain that National-Socialism was a capitalist reaction against socialism, and the book was to be the popular edition of the second volume of a treatise entitled "The Abuse and Decline of Reason".[4]

It was written between 1940-1943 and the title came from the French liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville's writings on the "road to servitude".[5] It was first published in Britain by Routledge in March 1944 and was quite popular, leading Hayek to call it "that unobtainable book," also due in part to wartime paper rationing.[6]

The book was favorably reviewed by George Orwell among others. When it was published in the United States by the University of Chicago in September of that year, it was far more popular than it had been in Britain, though it was not better received by critics. The American magazine Reader's Digest also published an abridged version in April 1945, enabling The Road to Serfdom to reach a far wider audience than academics.
[end]