“What is the fruit of these teachings? Only the most beautiful and proper harvest of the truly educated-tranquility, fearlessness, and freedom. We should not trust the masses who say only the free can be educated, but rather the lovers of wisdom who say that only the educated are free.” -EPICTETUS
Most people who are fans of stoicism generally don't care much for the metaphysics of it. In the works of stoics like Aurelius and Seneca there is very little talk about metaphysics, and there's mostly a conversation about practical affairs. So I can understand why a lot of the commenters think this blog post isn't an accurate criticism of stoicism. That said, it's also a testament to how the idea of "schools of philosophy" is generally lost in our contemporary times. Stoicism is one of the oldest schools of philosophy that ever existed, and it's quite clear from anyone who did a moderate amount of research would find that stoicism had a deterministic metaphysics. That said, I think this is a testament to the problems that Objectivism constantly has to deal with, with Post-Kantian philosophy and the tendency to view philosophy as a critique of itself, rather than as explanation of man's relation to reality itself.
Additionally one of the tenets of Objectivism is that knowledge is contextual and hierarchical. Which means ethics can't be divorced from metaphysic nor epistemology. If you watch the History of Philosophy course by Leonard Peikoff he states this. At the end of it when they talk about select problems in philosophy he explicitly says that Objectivism holds that to answer any one problem one would have to expound a whole systematic philosophy. Now days many people of all philisophical stripes hold the opposite view that everything is fragmented and unrelated.
I would also add to the discussion that people who believe in free will can be much more predictable than people who do not. Phrases like “I know her, she would never do that” encapsulate this by meaning that while she can choose to do otherwise, my experience of who she is means it is very unlikely she would break the pattern. So in a weird way the more you believe you have a choice, the more likely you are going to be predictable, while if you believe you are determined then the less likely you would be predictable. As for reducing determinism to elements outside awareness, which I shall call here as “imperfect determinism”, then as much as it is possible to reevaluate your decisions once the elements enter your awareness, the determinism is not real. Remember that even Objectivists believe in physical, deterministic limits to free will, like the physiological effects of say drinking where your ability to judge will be outside your control to some degree. (i.e., free will is not a matter of magical willpower). Therefor for true or perfect determinism to exist, it has to be based on more than just the ignorance or the incapacity of the human mind in question, but is best tested against states of maximum awareness and maximum focus. The main argument I know of for determinism remains that the chemical reactions which life is based on are themselves determined, and yet for one reason or another people believe that our actions are not. So how can this contradiction, if it exists anyway, be solved, I don’t know. To summarize, the identity of chemical objects makes them deterministic, yet the identity of the mind is free will, and the two are linked.
Concerning what we believe, we have free will. For instance: rather than Jews converting to Christianity, many chose to stay faithful to Judaism, and die as being martyrs, as they were being murdered in the name of Jesus, (the Jewish Rabbi) by the Christians. However, I suggest that the Jews would rather have used their free will to stay alive, and also be allowed to be faithful to Judaism.
Why can't we have control and also be determined at the same time... control just means application of rationality, and that's where consideration and choice between possible actions becomes viable. Why maintain that control implies indeterminism.
What you described is pretty close to the Objectivist notion of free will, or volition. However, what you described is also wholly incompatible with the idea that our every thought is determined by antecedent events. The very application of rationality is, according to determinism, determined by antecedent events. In determinism, there is never a moment where you *choose* to engage the process of rational, deliberate thinking.
@@pavlova717 That makes no sense, that's not what the concept of choice implies. Choice is using one's volition. Choice is 100% impossible to a deterministic being, whose every action is the nothing more than a result of antecedent events. Once again, volition is causal yes, but not in the deterministic sense. Choice implies options, does it not? To choose is to choose between options, options that are open to you, that are possible for you to choose. Within deterministic theories of mind, no such choice can ever take place, there is never an option to choose differently. Choice is just an illusion according to determinism, and so is control (including the choice to control one's mind, which is what Objectivists understand free will to be. Mate, you seem to have figured out what free will actually is, now you just need to realize that it's free and that the control you experience yourself as actually having is incompatible with determinism. Control and choice are not compatible with determinism. Which is why determinists say that consciousness and free will are illusions. A tumbleweed does not choose it's direction nor control it's tumbling because it's completely deterministic - are we like the tumbleweed or not?
@@DinkSmalwood How are you sure that a simple concept we use in our ordinary language, namely choice, necessitates this deep metaphysical position about the universe being indeterministic? As far as I can see, choice simply implies that we select among possible futures according to some selection criteria. AI programs and other animals also do this. It's just that humans experience it consciously, and we use reason as our standard of selection. In fact, rationality cannot be anything except deterministic according to its own conceptualisation. Volition is when we ask ourselves whether we have reasons to do certain things. It is paradoxical to say that we can volition that we are not using our volition, or that we can use our volition to do something less than volitional, something less than doing what we deem most rational. So I don't even understand how Objectivists can explain in their own terms how we can use our free will wrongly. In order to make sense of free will, we would have to add all these additional layers of explanation that seem unnecessarily bewildering for what we are talking about. Explanations about indetermininsm and a metaphysics of free will, what it means to be an essentially good or bad person, an idea of ultimate responsibility, what it exactly means to choose wrongly and what is wrongness, how is it that we have a moral character that determines that we are good or bad people without this moral character itself being deterministic of our behaviour.
@@pavlova717 From my perspective there are so many things that are off in what you just wrote that I don't know where to begin - so I won't. But you take care mate, and I wish you all the best in your philosophical inquiries.
What determines a person's ability to use their mind to the fullest extent? Again, this is one of the few things I disagree with ARI about: Compatablism is a thing to support. Causality is a metaphysical property of the universe. Determinism is the epistemological understanding of that property. Free will is the Ethical understanding of our own actions/observations/thoughts and reapplying it to our future action/thoughts.
But why do you disagree with Rand that causality is a consequence of identity which I take to be not what you believe when you say “causality is a metaphysical property of the universe”?
@@RashadSaleh92 I don't... Both Rand's work's and the ARI have made it clear (and somewhat vague in this video) that they are NOT Compatablists. Which strikes me as strange how they don't see the fallacy in that.
“What is the fruit of these teachings? Only the most beautiful and
proper harvest of the truly educated-tranquility, fearlessness, and
freedom. We should not trust the masses who say only the free can
be educated, but rather the lovers of wisdom who say that only the
educated are free.”
-EPICTETUS
Another term for stoicism might be "resignationism" - an adherent to this point of view is resigned to fate, and tries to make the best of it.
Most people who are fans of stoicism generally don't care much for the metaphysics of it. In the works of stoics like Aurelius and Seneca there is very little talk about metaphysics, and there's mostly a conversation about practical affairs. So I can understand why a lot of the commenters think this blog post isn't an accurate criticism of stoicism. That said, it's also a testament to how the idea of "schools of philosophy" is generally lost in our contemporary times. Stoicism is one of the oldest schools of philosophy that ever existed, and it's quite clear from anyone who did a moderate amount of research would find that stoicism had a deterministic metaphysics.
That said, I think this is a testament to the problems that Objectivism constantly has to deal with, with Post-Kantian philosophy and the tendency to view philosophy as a critique of itself, rather than as explanation of man's relation to reality itself.
Additionally one of the tenets of Objectivism is that knowledge is contextual and hierarchical. Which means ethics can't be divorced from metaphysic nor epistemology. If you watch the History of Philosophy course by Leonard Peikoff he states this. At the end of it when they talk about select problems in philosophy he explicitly says that Objectivism holds that to answer any one problem one would have to expound a whole systematic philosophy.
Now days many people of all philisophical stripes hold the opposite view that everything is fragmented and unrelated.
Never discourage anyone... who continually makes progress, no mattr how slow.
I would also add to the discussion that people who believe in free will can be much more predictable than people who do not. Phrases like “I know her, she would never do that” encapsulate this by meaning that while she can choose to do otherwise, my experience of who she is means it is very unlikely she would break the pattern. So in a weird way the more you believe you have a choice, the more likely you are going to be predictable, while if you believe you are determined then the less likely you would be predictable.
As for reducing determinism to elements outside awareness, which I shall call here as “imperfect determinism”, then as much as it is possible to reevaluate your decisions once the elements enter your awareness, the determinism is not real. Remember that even Objectivists believe in physical, deterministic limits to free will, like the physiological effects of say drinking where your ability to judge will be outside your control to some degree. (i.e., free will is not a matter of magical willpower). Therefor for true or perfect determinism to exist, it has to be based on more than just the ignorance or the incapacity of the human mind in question, but is best tested against states of maximum awareness and maximum focus.
The main argument I know of for determinism remains that the chemical reactions which life is based on are themselves determined, and yet for one reason or another people believe that our actions are not. So how can this contradiction, if it exists anyway, be solved, I don’t know. To summarize, the identity of chemical objects makes them deterministic, yet the identity of the mind is free will, and the two are linked.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.
Concerning what we believe, we have free will. For instance: rather than Jews converting to Christianity, many chose to stay faithful to Judaism, and die as being martyrs, as they were being murdered in the name of Jesus, (the Jewish Rabbi) by the Christians. However, I suggest that the Jews would rather have used their free will to stay alive, and also be allowed to be faithful to Judaism.
Free will is real. Read Robert Nozick. And also, the 1984 book Elbow Room, by Daniel Dennett.
Why can't we have control and also be determined at the same time... control just means application of rationality, and that's where consideration and choice between possible actions becomes viable. Why maintain that control implies indeterminism.
What you described is pretty close to the Objectivist notion of free will, or volition. However, what you described is also wholly incompatible with the idea that our every thought is determined by antecedent events. The very application of rationality is, according to determinism, determined by antecedent events. In determinism, there is never a moment where you *choose* to engage the process of rational, deliberate thinking.
@@DinkSmalwood choice is an application of rationality which is deterministic.
@@pavlova717 That makes no sense, that's not what the concept of choice implies. Choice is using one's volition. Choice is 100% impossible to a deterministic being, whose every action is the nothing more than a result of antecedent events. Once again, volition is causal yes, but not in the deterministic sense. Choice implies options, does it not? To choose is to choose between options, options that are open to you, that are possible for you to choose. Within deterministic theories of mind, no such choice can ever take place, there is never an option to choose differently. Choice is just an illusion according to determinism, and so is control (including the choice to control one's mind, which is what Objectivists understand free will to be.
Mate, you seem to have figured out what free will actually is, now you just need to realize that it's free and that the control you experience yourself as actually having is incompatible with determinism. Control and choice are not compatible with determinism. Which is why determinists say that consciousness and free will are illusions. A tumbleweed does not choose it's direction nor control it's tumbling because it's completely deterministic - are we like the tumbleweed or not?
@@DinkSmalwood How are you sure that a simple concept we use in our ordinary language, namely choice, necessitates this deep metaphysical position about the universe being indeterministic?
As far as I can see, choice simply implies that we select among possible futures according to some selection criteria. AI programs and other animals also do this. It's just that humans experience it consciously, and we use reason as our standard of selection.
In fact, rationality cannot be anything except deterministic according to its own conceptualisation. Volition is when we ask ourselves whether we have reasons to do certain things. It is paradoxical to say that we can volition that we are not using our volition, or that we can use our volition to do something less than volitional, something less than doing what we deem most rational. So I don't even understand how Objectivists can explain in their own terms how we can use our free will wrongly.
In order to make sense of free will, we would have to add all these additional layers of explanation that seem unnecessarily bewildering for what we are talking about. Explanations about indetermininsm and a metaphysics of free will, what it means to be an essentially good or bad person, an idea of ultimate responsibility, what it exactly means to choose wrongly and what is wrongness, how is it that we have a moral character that determines that we are good or bad people without this moral character itself being deterministic of our behaviour.
@@pavlova717 From my perspective there are so many things that are off in what you just wrote that I don't know where to begin - so I won't. But you take care mate, and I wish you all the best in your philosophical inquiries.
What determines a person's ability to use their mind to the fullest extent? Again, this is one of the few things I disagree with ARI about: Compatablism is a thing to support. Causality is a metaphysical property of the universe. Determinism is the epistemological understanding of that property. Free will is the Ethical understanding of our own actions/observations/thoughts and reapplying it to our future action/thoughts.
But why do you disagree with Rand that causality is a consequence of identity which I take to be not what you believe when you say “causality is a metaphysical property of the universe”?
@@RashadSaleh92 I don't... Both Rand's work's and the ARI have made it clear (and somewhat vague in this video) that they are NOT Compatablists. Which strikes me as strange how they don't see the fallacy in that.
@@markellison2152 So you don’t disagree with Rand? I am confused now.
@@RashadSaleh92 Yes I do agree with that statement she made.
Ayn Rand and Daniel Dennett: both great philosophers.
People who do not believe in free will will predictably act based on that conviction.
This is has nothing to do with Stoicism!!