A Shadow of the Former Self

Moral Responsiblity

Moral responsibility is a core aspect on discussion of free will. We are held accountable for the things we do, even though we may not be the cause of what we do.

I think it is a simple matter to understand how we can be morally responsible if we have free will. To have a free will is the premise that we have some faculty that is able to be a cause without being restrained or forced. Essentially a strictly free will is an uncaused cause. So if nothing forces a free will to act, then that will is solely responsible for its acts.

How can I be morally responsible for what I do if I don’t have free will?

A person will never be solely responsible for an act without free will; everything about a person would be initially caused by something external to themselves. Still, they can be held morally responsible for their habits and patterns. For example, a serial killer would not be excused of murder because of their genetics/culture/childhood/etc even though there may have been some combination that culminates in the killings. They would be held morally responsible for those patterns that caused them to kill, because the collection of every pattern in that person, is that person.

I know the example is extreme, but I hope it illustrates that free will is not necessary for moral responsibility.

The Cheerful Cynic: One teacher's approach to preventing gender bullying in a classroom

On Ontology: Anselm

Ontology is the branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature of being, in this case the existence of God.

Saint Anselm of Canterbury had a famous argument on this topic. He claimed that God is “something than which nothing greater can be conceived,” and his argument continues as follows:

• Something that can be conceived exists in understanding.
• Something that exists in reality is greater than that which exists in understanding alone.
• Something that can’t be conceived not to exist is greater than one which can be conceived not to exist.
• Therefore, God exists necessarily and it is impossible to conceive otherwise.

I think the problem here is that the argument begs the question. In defining God as the greatest of all beings it is already assumed that God exists. This may be clearer if I put it in terms of omnipotence.

Nothing can be more powerful than something that is all-powerful, and if something has the power to exist, then an all-powerful being must have infinite power to exist. We could define and concieve of a being who has an infinite capacity for existence. By Anselm’s reasoning, any such being would necessarily exist.

It makes me wonder how someone would go about arguing for or against the existence of such a being without making any assumptions about it’s existence or capacity to exist in the first place.

Monism and movement

I tried reading the Ethics at first but it was obvious to me that I was not comprehending it well at all, so I decided to read the Cambridge Companion to Spinoza in the hopes that reading about Spinoza’s Ethics will allow me to understand the Ethics better when I read it proper.

As far as I understand about Spinoza’s substance monism, thought and physical extension are simply attributes in a single substance, which he called God, and what we think of as distinct objects are modes of substance. The mode is of the substance, so it exists in both thought and extension. In this way the body is the “object of” the mind in extension, and the mind is the “idea of” the body in thought.

For example, if I fill a region of space, it would be said that region would be me-like in mode, rather than that I exist there. If I were to move, the previous region would cease to be me-like and another region would become me-like. Essentially this is like the pixels on a monitor. The pixels do not move, but the colour each pixel holds changes and creates the illusion that that particular colour pixel is moving.

This illusion of motion echoes that of Zeno’s paradox of the arrow in flight. It essentially asserts that at every instant of time any object is motionless and since time is comprised of instants, motion is impossible.

These challenges may sound ludicrous, but they challenge assumptions that we make about the world that are so easy to take for granted. I suppose that is why I am so interested in them.

On Omnipotent

Can God create a stone that he cannot lift?

If god cannot lift a stone, then how can he be all powerful? The same goes for a god that could not create such a stone. This question and others like it are often asked as a counter-argument to an omni-potent god. One problem with arguments along these lines is that they put forward a logical impossibility and demand that it be solved, as if the inablility of the person being asked to solve this impossiblitiy is proof that an omnipotent, omniscient being cannot exist.

Another problem I have is that the argument is often nonsensical and pretends to be without scope. For example, if there were to be a stone the size of the entire universe: what would it be to lift? Usually when something is lifted, it is moved from the point of zero potential in the gravity well, but in the case of this universe sized stone it IS the zero point. The stone would somehow have to be lifted out of itself. If it were to mean simply move it, even the smallest impact would achieve that. But then expand this stone even further to infinite mass, an omnipotent god should be able to generate infinite force required to move it.

So, can God create a stone that he cannot lift?

Mu.

Why

I decided that I should use this tumblr as an opportunity to engage with my self-directed philosophical study and an excuse to continue writing in a routine manner. However, some of the topics that will come up have the potential to deeply offend people, so I shall endeavour to engage with topics in a charitable manner. I am still wholly ignorant in philosophical matters, so I will undoubtedly misuse and misinterpret concepts I come across, but this is part of the learning process.

Another thing that may show through are my beliefs. I do not have any proof for my beliefs, nor can I rationalise them, nor do I yet have the ability to follow them through and see if they are logically consistent, but they persist. So when I say what I believe, it’s in a weak agnostic sense and I hope that I will develop the tools to improve them as I go.

Laconic at best

Several weeks ago I was waiting in a hospital common area. On one wall there were two white squares that people had scrawled messages over and read them out of curiosity. It seemed me that most of the messages on the left square seemed to be insights from people who had learned valuable lessons from tough times, while the ones on the right contained more hateful ramblings, often with a religious slant. On one wall separate from all the other writing was a string of words and I recognised some of them from having read about Thelema, but thought it could have just been a string of names of Egyptian god-forms that someone had felt fit to write. My brother had dismissed them all as drug-addled rambling but I understood where at least half of it was coming from.

It made me wonder if we are all one step from maddness.

The Other

When you know a person, all you can have is a representation of them in mind. Their actions and words are measured against your own experiences and biases. You cannot know what they think, for they cannot know if their words accurately portray what they think. In the same way, you cannot know all of your self, since you cannot see how you portray yourself, especially not in the same way another person sees you.

So then any act towards someone else will come from your perception of them, and of yourself, which gives birth to your intent. This becomes problematic because there is no external reference point to check against and it then becomes easy to assume your reference point of self-perception as objective and take it for granted. An automatic self-reference allows for a much higher, or lower, view of yourself and your intent than your actions should allow you to have. Of course, any response that does not fit with one of these self-formed illusions will be ignored, or cause a painful dissonance.

While anyone is limited to their side of the phenomenalistic veil, it is more accurate to act with this uncertainty than to act with any certainty and to be mindful that any response is shadowed by the other’s veil as well.

True Free Will

Any act of true free will would be an act for which there is no antecedent conditions, an act that does not depend on anything that came before it and so cannot be determined a priori. However, such an independence also makes this act a logical necessity and so it holds over all possible worlds and could not be otherwise. So, if this act of true free will could not have been otherwise, can this act still be considered truly free?