(January 10, 2018 at 7:03 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote:(January 10, 2018 at 6:29 am)Agnosty Wrote: In your reasoning, you may not be considering that ALL possibilities will repeat infinitely. That means it doesn't matter what you choose to do because you will do all of them (if it's possible and if you're causally determined - ie no freewill).
If you have freewill, then it's all moot because freewill isn't causally determined. But then you have to explain where the freewill came from (ie something from nothing because freewill cannot be caused).
We can escape all those problems by simply dismissing causality. There are no things, events and there is just the 1 thing and the 1 now, both of which last eternally because we've dismissed causality as ridiculous.
What I meant was more along the lines of this:
Quote:In the aftermath of Nehamas (1985), an influential line of readings has argued that the thought to which Nietzsche attributed such “fundamental” significance was never a cosmological or theoretical claim at all—whether about time, or fate, or the world, or the self—but instead a practical thought experiment designed to test whether one’s life has been good. The broad idea is that one imagines the endless return of life, and one’s emotional reaction to the prospect reveals something about how valuable one’s life has been, much as ... a spouse’s question about whether one would marry again evokes—and indeed, fairly demands—an assessment of the state of the marriagehttps://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietz...erRecuSame
So, in one reading, the eternal recurrence is a thought experiment through which one might assess the state of one's own life. You can read it as a metaphysical postulate, as many have done. But I think more value lies in taking it as a thought experiment.
I believe choices have causes, so I tend toward hard incompatibilism. If that's not true then it's probably compatibilism. Contemporary libertarianism is confused hogwash. I'm not sure how the free will debate factors in to all this, though. I don't think that libertarianism denies causality per se.
I liked the stuff about dismissing causality. But I'm one to dismiss such a staple of my everyday existence.
That's interesting but I suppose I'm missing the significance of the thought experiment. How does contemplating an eternal return enable one to assess his own life? For me, it's the opposite in that thinking that I'll return infinite times subtracts meaning. Doing something once is special, but repeating it infinitely is lackluster.
Nietzsche didn't introduce me to this; rather it was the result of my own thinking while bantering with some guys about eternal causality. Later, I discovered Nietzsche reasoned along the same lines and from then on I knew I was screwed up
I've given the subject of infinity a great deal of critical thought over the past few years and as time moves on, the less sensible the idea becomes and the more difficult to articulate why. There can't be an eternal line of causality. There just can't. First, if everything is determined and therefore infinitely causative (because there can be no beginning to causality), then it's still self-causal. I'm at a loss for words for how to get that idea from my head into someone else's. If one thing causes another... like pushing a domino and it knocks the next one and so on, then where did the line of dominoes come from? If one thing causes another thing, then the whole line of causality is a thing by virtue of being deterministic. What's the point of splitting it up into events when it always plays-out the same way? So, if it's always existed, then it had no time to come into existence and is therefore self-causal.
Let's say there is a rock and the rock has always existed. It has been sitting there forever and ever. Well, that still doesn't explain where the rock came from. Knowing what we know about geology and astronomy (rocks came from exploding stars), how could a rock have eternally existed? But my problem isn't restricted to rocks.... how could any 'thing' have eternally existed? Therefore, if anything has eternally existed, it cannot be a determined thing. The only thing that can exist eternally is the thing which can have no cause.
Now quantum mechanics says we can't know where an electron is until we look for it. Ok, there it is.... we've located it. Now, what caused it to be there? Nothing. It was completely random and it's an event that had no cause (it's not really an event, but part of a continuum, but anyway..).
Randomness is deeper than just happenstance. There is no information in this string: 0000000 and it's completely ordered. This string: 01010101 has information, but it's repetitive: repeat(01). This string carries more information: 10101110 and it can't be reduced and looks random, so there is some link between information and randomness. Check out this video for more on that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMb00lz-IfE
How to tie it all together, I'm not sure, but it's fun to mull it over. There is some connection with randomness and freewill.... I just can't quite draw it out yet. Obviously, neither of them can be determined or caused, but how does a random quantum event give the sense of freewill? What is the mechanism?
