9/25/2023 0 Comments Mindless automaton meaning![]() If I decide to cultivate someone as a friend, it is important to me that it is me making that decision and also that their friendship is voluntary. Without agency, none of those things are possible. We develop friendships, engage in self-chosen projects, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes and act differently next time, and we fall in love and have children. Some suggestions from the past are that a good life is a flourishing life where we realize our human potential. What makes a good life good is a far-reaching topic.Lower achievement levels seem obvious, since why make an effort if the outcome is predetermined? A belief in determinism is inherently disempowering and counterproductive, as any fatalistic attitude will be. In other words, determinism predictably gives rise to antisocial fatalistic nihilism, contrary to RP’s assertions. They involve an increase in antisocial attitudes and behaviors, increases in deceitfulness, aggressive behavior, selfishness, lower achievement levels and increased susceptibility to addiction. Iain McGilchrist in The Matter With Things points to studies concerning the negative effects of believing in determinism.We didn’t decide what we experience as good or bad, but we still DO experience. Whether or not we make actual choices, we still experience good or bad. The argument continues with a quotation from me: “What on earth would “a good life” mean for a mindless automaton with no free will? Or, if it has a mind, a mind that is trapped within the automaton with no ability to alter a single thing about its life?” Again, experience matters. And anything bullet-pointed is my reply to RP’s criticisms. It might not matter if physicists are bad philosophers, but it matters if philosophers are bad philosophers! Paragraphs in quotation marks are quotations from me to which RP is responding. When philosophers adopt determinism, and free will and determinism are a decidedly philosophical topic, they have failed at the only thing they are supposed to be doing philosophy. If it is not, then at least their physics has value. This failure of logic on their part – in fact – rejection of the existence of logic as a causally efficacious meaningful thing, hopefully is not reflected in their physics. Without agency there are only “sequences of events” and no one is arguing with anyone and persuasion is an illusion. And then the “person” he is persuading, from his point of view, likewise follows its programming and is being buffeted by mechanical and physical processes from which he is metaphysically indistinguishable. According to the tenets of a determinist, he has no choice but to believe what he believes and thus is behaving identically to a mindless machine. Without agency, at best the determinist is simply a machine following its programming, as RP happily and continually asserts, with no ability to assess the value of his arguments or to change them if they are deficient. In engaging in argument on this topic at all, agency is implicitly assumed by the determinist both on the part of the person doing the (not so) rational persuading and on the part of the person who is supposed to be rationally persuaded, in direct violation of the determinist’s beliefs. Determinists are forced into their untenable and reflexively self-contradictory positions by their assumption of materialism and a belief in a mechanical universe. Since these asides add nothing to the debate and are simply ad hominem, I have removed them. ![]() RP is a polemicist and likes to pepper his arguments with snide comments directed at me personally. This article is a continuation of an interaction with a blogger calling himself Robot Philosopher.
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