(September 1, 2026 at 1:11 pm)Angrboda Wrote:(September 1, 2026 at 1:07 pm)Jal Wrote: "It only compels us to make the attempt." I don't think you're getting the point. Your words seem to imply:
1. We feel hunger.
2. Based on that hunger, we change our present course of direction. We INITIATE an attempt to procure food.
Again, that's like the third domino in a rightward fall saying, "I think I'll go left" - and than manages to do it!
The truth is, dominos do not INITIATE anything. Blind causality forces them to fall in a particular direction, whether they like it or not.
A deterministic Natural Selection is doomed to failure. I see no remedy for this problem. If you can't acknowledge this problem, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
As opposed to "our hunger initiates a food seeking behavior?" What informs your preference for one over the other?
It sounds like you have a definition of initiate that requires that initiating an action requires incompatibilist free will, aka libertarian free will. There is no such implication in the word. That's a you problem. I scheduled a cron job to run some SMART tests on my NAS. At 12:00 A.M. this morning, my NAS initiated those tests. No free will required. It seems that a great deal of your beliefs and errors are self-caused by you assuming meanings or principles which weren't necessitated by anything other than your own predilections and mistakes. Instead of being open-minded enough to realize that there are perfectly acceptable choices that differ from yours, you have dug yourself in under the ostensible rule of my way or the highway. This is the closed-mindedness you are infected with.
Points 1 and 2 that I wrote about, do indeed describe the real world:
1. We feel hunger.
2. Based on that hunger, we change our present course of direction. We INITIATE an attempt to procure food.
Yes, correct, I read this as an act of libertarian free will. Now let's compare this with your scheduled cron job. You observed:
"At 12:00 A.M. this morning, my NAS initiated those tests. No free will required."
Yes no free will required. Nor hunger! Those tests ran due to a domino effect, unregulated by hunger.
Hunger is superfluous. Even if your NAS felt hunger, it wouldn't change the outcome of those tests.
That's the nature of a deterministiic system - hunger is irrelevant.
In real life, hunger IS relevant and DOES influence/ change/ impact our direction and the outcome of our activities.
Therefore my libertarian summary above is the correct view of the world.
No one is denying that deterministic processes (i.e. chains of dominos) transpire. But if that's ALL that transpires, mammals would have died of starvation long ago.
