Reply to Terra - On The Reductionists Trap

A couple points I wanted to make in response to your earlier entry:

"If we are determined beings, then issues such as love and faith have no bearing
. . . and thus power wins and we are forced to recognize that life truly is
"nasty, brutish and short" (Hobbes)."

This claim [that an ontology of power wins] would not follow from the premise [of any hypothetical truth of determinism] . Nor would it follow that under a deterministic reading of reality issues like faith and love need necessarily lose bearing. If Determinism is true if would follow that all actions and propensities are predetermined and fated from some unimaginably complex mathetmatical formula. Under this world-view, discourses of power also become totally flacid. It would follow that mechanisms of power (eg. Fox News, The Bush Administration, the term 'terrorist', market economies) are themselves also predetermined and subject to the grand math of chaos. This does not reveal that life is nasty and brutish or even meaningless however, even if the course of our lives was predetermined - we still experience lives in which we are swayed by different causal forces. The only thing that the truth of determinism would force us to admit is that [a] no one is a distinct and independant self from the rest of the world in which they exist, and that [b] our reality is the product of an intertwined and inter-related soup of cyclical influences and relationships. This would throw out the notion of free-will in an independant sense, and render the assignment of moral culpability, responsibility and credit out the window (which I think is the case anyway), but it wouldnt change the fact that we experience a world in which our actions are indeterminate to us. Therefore, we would still be able to defend a policy wherien people choose certain forms, values, behaviors etc. that they deem worthwhile - and try to promote and live those forms. The idea is that we may be predetermined, but this doesnt suggest that there is no meaning or worth in pursung social justice or global equality for example.

Within the same framework there is ample room for the subjective experiences of faith and love. The point is that while reality may be noumenologically [according to a God's-eye objective view] predetermined , from a phenomenological or subjective perspective, we don't experience reality this way. We may recognize (and rightly so) the logical necessity of things being predetermined from an objective stance, but in life- we have no direct access to any such objective gaze.

However, those arguing for power fail to understand the nature of their
opponent, for, as Amy noted, emotions exist outside of determinism. Surely Deep,
Bobby and Jason would not defend Hobbes’ cold concept of love when he says:

To show any sign of love, or fear of another, is to honor; for both to
love, and to fear, is to value. To contemn[belittle], or less to love or fear,
than he expects, is to dishonor; for it is undervaluing. (Hobbes 60).

The claim that emotions exist outside of determinism is an unfounded assertion, so long as we want to maintain the value of logic/reason, determinism imho is a much more intelligble/sensical notion than agent causation [that we birth some things, like emotions, from within us without them being brought about through some external influence. I think free-will, like the existence of God, cannot be defended sucessfully in rational discourse...it seems they have to be established upon faith, and when they are, are arguably more powerful than reasoned arguments.

We could conduct a rather improbable thought experiment: take a consciousness, like a new-born, and bring it into being in a reality wherein there is nothing external to its self-as-consciousnes to influence it. This would be a pure and isolated self. Now, could we find any reason to imagine that this mind, floating in a universe which consists only of that immmaterial mind, could have any attitudes, desires or emotions, any propensities whatsoever? I highly doubt it... all this demonstrates is that the individual in and of itself, without any external influence would not seem to have any content. What would then follow from this is that the sum total of all of the content of any individual identity derives purely from external input. The self then is like a computational machine that is fed input in the form of influences, and generates output from their combinations in the form of behavior.

I don't want to sound like my world-view is coldly scientific and devoid of any wonderment, cause its not - however, I think in terms of reasoning, and philosophical discourse goes ... Hobbes is bang on. However, I can still say this while errecting the pillars of values which depart from, ignore, or even contradict these notions on top of them. Basically I think everything Hobbes says is more or less essentially valid, but a comparativel poor precursor to Hegel's somewhat more sensitive and more foundational articulation of the same sort of relationships in "Phenomenology of Spirit". I think a valid Ontology [the experience, understanding, meaning and nature of reality] can be best established by starting with the basic fundamental experiences and notions that minds encounter. I think without a doubt, the first thing that any sentient being understands is somekind of distinction between that which is "self" and that which "other". However, the meaning and content of each of these catergories can only be filled through their interplay and contrast.... meaning that self only has meaning in virtue of the articulation or understanding of the other - which is not it... and that also, the self obtains its content through the selective appropriations of various forms of otherness (ie: we buy into our identities, associate ourselves with different notions, consume social roles and relationships, and also consume the meanings and contents of different truths.

Also, I agree that "Love is a living, strong and potent force", but this does not change or negate or even relate to the fact that emotions including love - absolutely boil down to processes of value (this doesnt even build in that they're determined... but liking or loving someone is a process of assigning value to them). To value something simply means that the given thing has a meaning to you, Love would then neccesarily need to be understood in terms of a value relationship, so would any other emotive condition. However, I do think it's a bit more complex than this ... In any case, though I may not be of sound mind - I would certainly argue that a marriage, friendship etc. is experienced in terms of a value relationship. A friendship, foundationally, when we apply Ockham's Razor, is a relationship in which a self defines a certain sense or meaning or value in another, and moreover - in which, as I suggested earlier, that self - invests the meaning[or value] into his friend that the friend is in some sense akin to the experiencing self: a sort of metaphorical bridge of unity between the usual/self other.

Love is a living strong and potent force, because despite any determinism - Love, and life itself encapsulates the presence or 'thisness' of any subjective reality. Love and life comprise the dialectical motions of the churning of causes in their present and creative states as they are actively experienced by us, the beings that populate it/them. So while on objective rational grounds I think one would have to concede that determinism definately has a lot more evidence and logical cogency going for it, from within a present and lived state there need be no real sense in which anything is determined as such. If I'm making sense? I don't know. I believe reality is predetermined, but I live every day believing I am actively and freely making choices, and though those choices may well be actually determined in the grand theory of it all. It doesn't really bother me. Cause I only experience this subjective reality, in which I am free and create. Even the notion of being a mechanism in some incredible, but determined, cosmis gyre, causally connected to all the rest of being isn't soo terrible a thought either. Though if I were to internalizise it in my life i probably wouldn't do too well