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Q_the_Enchanter
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The Comedy of Behaviorism
Q_the_Enchanter17y00

The redefinition of folk concepts or archaic philosophical coinages so that they denote things that are real (per our current understanding) is a fun game. 'God exists' is true, for example, if God is (say) the whole of reality. 'We have free will' is true, for example, if free will is reasons-responsiveness. 'The mind exists' is true, for example, if minds are what brains do.

I'm sure 'intentionality' exists too. In some sense.

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Math is Subjunctively Objective
Q_the_Enchanter17y00

That was me at July 25, 2008 at 02:15 PM.

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Touching the Old
Q_the_Enchanter17y00

I lived in Regensburg, Germany for awhile, in which there is a hunk of stone wall that dates back to just after the time of Christ. If I recall, it wasn't far from a McDonald's.

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Existential Angst Factory
Q_the_Enchanter17y10

If life is great and then you die, there's no existential problem: nothing needs to be redeemed.

On the other hand, if life sucks and then you die, the prospect of an omni-delightful life after death might be the only thing to take the edge off. In that case, rationality is a real downer.

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Could Anything Be Right?
Q_the_Enchanter17y00

Kip Werking says: "[T]here seems to be no principled reason for regarding one [type of moral precept], and not the other, as non-arbitrary. In both cases, the moral content is discovered, and not chosen, one just happens to be discovered in our DNA, and not in a tablet."

Though there's a question whether moral dispositions exist encoded in our DNA that can ground some properly moral norm or set of norms, such dispositions would be far less arbitrary than a norm inscribed on a tablet. These dispositions might be "arbitrary" in the sense that evolution might have gone differently. But given it went the way it went, our genetic dispositions have a de facto, if not de moralitas (hope that Latin's right), claim on us that a tablet doesn't: I can't abjure my own operating system.

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Lawrence Watt-Evans's Fiction
Q_the_Enchanter17y130

My bête noire in the fictional mistreatment of rationalism is that fictional rationalists refuse to update. The f*ing poltergeist (or whatever) will be wreaking all sorts of plainly observable havock -- objects floating in the air, demons materializing and vanishing before our eyes, people's faces melting off, etc., etc. -- and the "rationalist" will inevitably be standing there with a dumb look on his face, saying something like, "Well, there has to be some natural explanation..." Before he gets killed, of course.

Stupid, stupid minds!

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The Ultimate Source
Q_the_Enchanter17y00

Eliezer, on your construal of free will, what content is added to "I chose to phi" by the qualification "of my own free will"?

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Causality and Moral Responsibility
Q_the_Enchanter17y30

If "moral responsibility" is just moral response-ability, then sure, no problem. But I'd be careful to distinguish that sense of the term from the more common notion of moral responsibility as being morally praise- or blameworthy.

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Timeless Control
Q_the_Enchanter17y00

"Having established that there is no such thing as a free will, the practical thing to do is to go on and pretend there was."

The thing to do is go on and ignore the question altogether. When I deliberate, I'm not wracked with anxiety about whether I have Free Will. I just go about deliberating. "I deliberate" means I deliberate -- whatever else that means; thinking about the else won't make me a more effective deliberator.

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