u/Jackson_Lamb_829

I’m reading Frankfurt’s introduction to his essay collection, The Importance of What we Care About. In it, he says “in the seventeenth century, mechanism became established as the dominant worldview of our culture. It has since that time come to seem obvious that either references to final causes are entirely illicit or they are no more than convenient ways of speaking designed to avoid clumsier (albeit strictly more accurate) formulations in terms of efficient causation.”

I take mechanism here to mean that causal determinism became dominant in a way that loops humans into it, rather than everything outside of us, which of course has had significant implications on the discourse of free will. Was there a specific event or philosophical work during that timeframe that shifted the common discourse among philosophers?

They’re virtual machines. I have transit hubs in all of my systems with planets but they’re not migrating from worlds with excess population. Is it because I have utopian abundance?

I have the complete works of Plato. Where should I start?

If someone’s second-order volition is to be fit, but in a given moment their first-order desire is to stay in bed, and they force themselves to work out anyway, hating every second of it including the anticipation, motivated by guilt or by wanting to *have done* it rather than actually wanting to do it, is their will free in that moment? Or must one actually desire the action itself, rather than desiring an outcome, or having an aversion to avoiding it?

Bonus points if they’re co-op

Most of the philosophers I'm interested in happen to be white men. I'd like to make my understanding of philosophy more diverse.

For the garden, I’ll be getting some Zapotec pleated tomato seeds and maybe some sorrel for Tolucan style salsa verde and heirloom chile seeds. What other plants would you recommend for a garden?

And, do I need to know basic logic to get the most out of spotting logical fallacies?

Title, apparently Sapiens isn’t a very good book and is quite reductionist. I find the history of the human species fascinating, but I want a book that’s, you know, good

I’m watching Widow’s Bay on Apple TV, which is excellent so far. Very much maritime, lovecraftian horror. What books hit this theme? I’ve never actually read lovecraft, but is the call of Cthulhu like that? And are there any great modern books with a similar maritime vibe?

And is the biggest distinction between most compatibilists and hard determinists merely that compatibilists tend to think we keep some moral responsibility despite lacking a capacity to do otherwise?

I’ve seen people use it and omit it. What do you do?

This is a technical post. I know Epictetus advises not giving these questions much thought, but lately I’ve just been really interested in the free will versus determinism debate as a whole, and so I’m curious what someone like Chrysippus would say.

When most people talk about free will, they usually mean libertarian free will. The capacity to do otherwise given identical antecedent conditions, where the choice isn’t fully determined by prior causes.

The Stoics seem to reject this. Their compatibilism appears to rest on the nature of assent as a proximate (principal) cause. The will is fully part of the causal chain, but actions flow *through* it rather than around it, and that’s what makes them ours. Cicero, summarizing Chrysippus’s response to the lazy argument in De Fato, says “calling in a doctor is just as much fated as recovering.”

My understanding, and I may be wrong, is that scholars like Susanne Bobzien have argued Chrysippus accepts the full causal determination of assents and character, and that what he’s defending is closer to eph’ hēmin (“what depends on us”) than to free will in the modern sense. The suggestion seems to be that mapping the modern free will debate onto Chrysippus is somewhat anachronistic.

So, we don’t have libertarian free will over even assent or the capacity to break the causal chain, and what makes the will free is that some things only happen through the will, like how an object’s path, like a cylinder, depends on its shape.

Is this view accurate? Is there anything missing?

Hard determinists reject libertarian free will and deny that compatibilism successfully grounds moral responsibility. But they generally accept that deliberation is causally efficacious and that people’s lives can change for better or worse.

So, what advice would hard determinists give to someone trying to improve their behavior, character, or wellbeing? Does the practical recommendation differ from what the compatibilist view, or does the disagreement live entirely at the level of metaphysics while the practical advice converges? Are there hard determinists who have written about the practice of self-change rather than about responsibility and institutions?

Do you work out more story ideas/pitches? Work on existing stories? Side gigs? Work on the story not knowing if someone will take it?

Currently waiting to hear back on a pitch with no immediate idea on what I should be doing in the meantime.

My understanding is that the dissent from Stevens argued that under a plain-text reading, 2A would not automatically grant the right to bear arms to civilians, because the prefatory militia clause is no longer met.

I’ve included a few excerpts from his dissent, and I find it compelling. It was a close ruling after all, and if there had been one more liberal on the court, it probably would have ruled in the other way. Was the liberal reading from the conservative justices correct, or were Stevens and the other liberals right?

From the dissent:

> The Second Amendment was adopted to protect the right of the people of each of the several States to maintain a well-regulated militia. It was a response to concerns raised during the ratification of the Constitution that the power of Congress to disarm the state militias and create a national standing army posed an intolerable threat to the sovereignty of the several States. Neither the text of the Amendment nor the arguments advanced by its proponents evidenced the slightest interest in limiting any legislature’s authority to regulate private civilian uses of firearms. Specifically, there is no indication that the Framers of the Amendment intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution.

...

> The parallels between the Second Amendment and these state declarations, and the Second Amendment’s omission of any statement of purpose related to the right to use firearms for hunting or personal self-defense, is especially striking... It confirms that the Framers’ single-minded focus... was on military uses of firearms.

...

> In 1934, Congress enacted the National Firearms Act, the first major federal firearms law.1 Upholding a conviction under that Act, this Court held that, “[i]n the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a ‘shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument.” Miller, 307 U. S., at 178. The view of the Amendment we took in Miller—that it protects the right to keep and bear arms for certain military purposes, but that it does not curtail the Legislature’s power to regulate the nonmilitary use and ownership of weapons—is both the most natural reading of the Amendment’s text and the interpretation most faithful to the history of its adoption.

...

> Since our decision in Miller, hundreds of judges have relied on the view of the Amendment we endorsed there;2 we ourselves affirmed it in 1980. See Lewis v. United States, 445 U. S. 55 , n. 8 (1980).3 No new evidence has surfaced since 1980 supporting the view that the Amendment was intended to curtail the power of Congress to regulate civilian use or misuse of weapons. Indeed, a review of the drafting history of the Amendment demonstrates that its Framers rejected proposals that would have broadened its coverage to include such use.

I keep wrestling with hard determinism, because it seems like it’s just logically true that everything is causally determined, yet it feels like we have some kind of agency. But if our lives are causally determined and we have no free will, at least in the libertarian sense, how do hard determinists reconcile that with a lack of something like libertarian free will?