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I just finished my BA-Honours in Philosophy. My thesis defence was today. Afterward the deliberations with the rest of my panel, my supervisor came out and said "We've decided. There were some concerns about clarity but in the end the originality of your ideas trumped them. You're getting an A. And I'm going to give you a hug." Then I hugged my supervisor and all of my schoo work to this point melted off of me and it hit me that I'm finished. Not just finished, but with an A on my final thesis. I'm so bloody relieved and happy right now. WHOOOO!

Awesome. Why aren't you down the pub? :tup:

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Tonight is nice civil dinner with girlfriend and champagne (as for why I'm not with her, she's writing an exam of her own for the next hour and a half). This weekend, crazy times.

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:clap: Does your thesis have anything to do with promiscuity and/or realism?

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Congrats Miffy. Now you can join the work fork force ford four physics forces, and get up early every day.

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Thanks very much, all!

Kingz, unfortunately the promiscuous realism thing is from philosophy of science, which I find interesting but am only marginally good at. What I wrote about was an attempt to patch an ethical hole in determinist theory. One of the common beliefs is that if you are an incompatible determinsit (believe that determinism and free will can't possibly coexist), as I iincidentally am, you would be commited to believing in a pure form of ethical consequentialism, which I find troubling. So my efforts were devoted to finding a way that one could justify a punishment or reward on a basis of more than simply efficacy while still not having to concede a belief in free will. As I said, originality got me pretty far, and my panel believes my solution to both be effective and totally new. I'm very happy. I may try and polish it even further for eventual publication one day.

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Miffy, that stuff is ultra-interesting to me, although at an uninformed, layman's level. Still, I would really like to read your thing.

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Holy shit! I was just in the shower, naked, taking a shower, when suddenly, in the corner of my eye, I saw something coming at me. For a split second I was sure I was about to shower-fight a cat or maybe a huge rat, but it turned out it was just my nose.

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Holy shit! I was just in the shower, naked, taking a shower, when suddenly, in the corner of my eye, I saw something coming at me. For a split second I was sure I was about to shower-fight a cat or maybe a huge rat, but it turned out it was just my nose.

Are you sure it wasn't Miffy?

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Definitely not Miffy. I've become really nose-aware now, so I keep seeing this ghost-nose hovering in my field of view wherever I turn. I hope it'll go away before tomorrow (the awareness of the nose, not the nose itself), or it'll affect my work.

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If I took one thing away from studying philosophy at university it's that the traditional concept of free will (at least how I understood it) doesn't actually make any sense. Either something has a cause, or it's random (or some combination of the two: it's random, within causally determined bounds, for example). People instinctively find the idea of determinism incompatible with free will, but, if anything, the alternative is even less like it: how is it free will to act at random? That's more like insanity.

What is free will even meant to be? If the conscious agent doesn't exist in a causal system, in what context does it exist, and why, and how? The idea seems to deny causation without proposing any alternative.

Sometimes stuff like that is troubling to me, but really it's fine. Why should I be so adamant that the source of my decisions somehow lie outside the deterministic universe? Perhaps it's an example of our somewhat arrogant insistence that we must be something more than mere worldly entities.

I don't know, I kind of bluffed my way through university with personal musings rather than proper research and work, so this is all probably crap. I'd be interested to read your thing, though, Miffy.

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If I took one thing away from studying philosophy at university it's that the traditional concept of free will (at least how I understood it) doesn't actually make any sense. Either something has a cause, or it's random (or some combination of the two: it's random, within causally determined bounds, for example). People instinctively find the idea of determinism incompatible with free will, but, if anything, the alternative is even less like it: how is it free will to act at random? That's more like insanity.

What is free will even meant to be? If the conscious agent doesn't exist in a causal system, in what context does it exist, and why, and how? The idea seems to deny causation without proposing any alternative.

Sometimes stuff like that is troubling to me, but really it's fine. Why should I be so adamant that the source of my decisions somehow lie outside the deterministic universe? Perhaps it's an example of our somewhat arrogant insistence that we must be something more than mere worldly entities.

I don't know, I kind of bluffed my way through university with personal musings rather than proper research and work, so this is all probably crap. I'd be interested to read your thing, though, Miffy.

Sounds like an incompatibilist thought process to me. That's pretty much how I think about free will. People who demand that their choices be outside a determined system (ie: libertarian free will) never really struck me as coherent. There's compatibilist free will, which pretty much says that if a choice is unrestrained but still determined we may as well call it free, but that's not a satisfying answer to me. Seems more like we're just redefining the terms so that we don't have to say something we don't like. Personally, I call what the compatibilists call free will "agency," and have no trouble accepting that we all have agency. In my mind though, an agent would still have made the same choice in a given situation no matter how many times you wanted to give it a do-over, so I'm not willing to call it free will. I ended up coming to the conclusion that the concept of free will and my view of the world are just not compatible with one another. As for why I chose determinism, I'm willing to admit that it's mostly that I'm more comfortable with that than the randomness that the alternative seems to imply.

What I ended up writing turned out to be less an argument for incompatibilism as it was a response to the most convincing compatibilist arguments I'd seen, which came from Peter Strawson's work. Still, for an undergrad thesis, I'm proud of what I did. If you're interested, I'd be happy to PM you and 'blix a copy. I'm on my desktop right now, and my writing is on my laptop, but next time I'm forum-hopping from the lappy, I'll send it along.

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I came to pretty much the same conclusion as JamesM a year or two back. I guess I'm an incompatible determinist. High five.

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Personally, I call what the compatibilists call free will "agency," and have no trouble accepting that we all have agency. In my mind though, an agent would still have made the same choice in a given situation no matter how many times you wanted to give it a do-over, so I'm not willing to call it free will.

One description I liked, was that the brain does not make choices; it makes judgements. You just weigh up which option is the best, then you take it.

Although there is some evidence that our brains work on a quantum level, with eigenstates and all that, two states at once that collapse upon interaction. Early days on that research though.

In any case, many congratulations Miffy; we are proud to call you a Thumb :tup::clap:

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I'd love to see a copy too, Miffy.

I used to believe in free-will, funnily enough when I was at my most bound by an ideological system*. Determinism has come to seem a much more reasonable idea, but I see it as insanely complex determinism.

The number of scales from subatomic through cellular to cosmic is itself bewildering, let alone the number of interactions going on in them at any given time. A major event may determine something almost entirely, but little things also build up to become big over time, i.e. my emotional responses from second to second all contribute to my general temperament and personality over a span of years.

It's led me to think that every little thing matters, because they all contribute to a gestalt. That belief has become an influencing factor in my choices, even if I didn't really choose to believe it.

I didn't even study anything related at university though, all I've fed into this are introspection, drunken and non-drunken conversations and bits of philosophy and fiction :getmecoat

* I believe that at the time, free-will was not just something nice to believe in, but that believing in it was an actual counter-reaction to being controlled and existing within a really poisonous self-isolating community.

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I've already said it, but well done Miffy.

As for me I have had a pretty good day, other than destroying my brain with too much maths. I have a place to live next year, no more coursework until next year.I just packed my bag for today which is full of fun toys.

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