/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14229450]

1. Morality requires free will
2. Free will requires dualism
3. Perfect knowledge of any system of things will always solve them into a single thing
4. There is only the One
5. Morality is a spook

[Anonymous No.14229459]

>>14229450

1. No it doesnt, read Spinoza,

[Anonymous No.14229486]

>>14229459
I don't see Spinoza adequately refuting 3. but I have not actually read Ethics. I would greatly appreciate it if you could spoonfeed me on why I am wrong.

[Anonymous No.14229831]

>>14229486

not gonna spoonfed you, just clarifying that my response was solely to your number 1.
I would love to explain in detail but im not that eloquent. However, i would strongly recommend reading Ethics, in my opinion it is by far the single most important philosophical work ever written. Goethe and Einstein shares my taste uWu

[Anonymous No.14229891]

>>14229450
If free will doesn't exist, then morality is a matter of social engineering. Instead of expecting pedophiles to not rape kids because they suddenly become good people out of nowhere, we have to develop drugs and put them through therapy to make sure they don't rape kids.

[Anonymous No.14229910]

>>14229450
>Free will requires dualism

[Anonymous No.14229918]

>>14229450
>Morality requires free will
L.O.L. (Loling Out Loud)

[Anonymous No.14229920]

>>14229450
>3. Perfect knowledge of any system of things will always solve them into a single thing
I'm honestly not sure what would lead you to believe that. I guess the mathematical oversell, and the whole obsession with elegance. Suffice it to say, "perfect knowledge" (whatever that's supposed to mean) will more likely than not leave heterogeneous things heterogeneous.

[Anonymous No.14230035]

>>14229450
Free will is so muddled with Christian morality and creationist metaphysics that its best to just ditch the term entirely. I instead use self-creativity, and define this as one's ability to grow and change over time, as opposed to being "responsible" for any given instant of decision. Learning requires exposure to one's mistakes, being able to recognize them and deal with them in a way that truly does make one more able to respond to the ever-changing conditions of one's life.

TL;DR you are an evolutionary phenomenon.

[Anonymous No.14230060]

>>14229918
Deterministic "morality" is just an aesthetic judgment of matter, there can be no should without a capacity for choice.
>>14229920
There is nothing preventing any perceived object or trait of the universe from being thought of as just a feature of a single thing. Everything must be describable by a single function, reducing it to one thing.
A thing is either caused or it isn't and if it has causes then any combination of those causes must have either been sufficient or insufficient for it to happen. Therefore, causation is always reversible and you cannot believe in both causation and free will. Anything can be then mapped as a single predictable flow on the One. If there is no causation then there is only the entirety of the describable universe which is still best described as a monadic whole.
>>14229910
A single thing implies a single outcome, removing the possibility for choice and morality (if morality requires free will).

[Anonymous No.14230133]

>>14229450
http://esotericawakening.com/is-free-will-an-illusion

[Anonymous No.14230298]

>>14229450
Adi Shankara agreed with all of your points completely while maintaining that accepting the empirical validity and practical consequences of free will and morality is important for reaching spiritual enlightenment/liberation and is conducive for societies well-being, and that the enlightenment man would know them directly and intuitively to be totally unreal, but that the tendencies and austerities followed on the path to the enlightenment would still ensure moral behavior and avoidance of harm by that enlightened man. They are unreal but this only has validity for the man who has become a possessionless monk and renounced the world.

http://www.advaita-academy.org/freedom-of-will-and-action-in-shankaras-philosophy/

>1. Morality requires free will
>2. Free will requires dualism
Advaita holds that Brahman (or God or the One) alone is absolutely real while everything else within the world (except our changeless witnessing consciousness which is the very same Brahman) is ultimately unreal, the world is conditionally real in the sense that there is an external world of elements through which we interact, but that this itself appears in the limitless consciousnesses of Brahman as an illusion caused by His power of maya, while in absolute reality Brahman alone is. As Brahman is eternal, unchanging, unconditioned, limitless, formless non-dual Bliss/Awareness there can ipso facto be no "will" or "dualism" in absolute reality.

[Anonymous No.14230303]

>>14230298
>3. Perfect knowledge of any system of things will always solve them into a single thing
"The Advaita tradition puts forward three lesser tests of truth: correspondence, coherence, and practical efficacy. These are followed by a fourth test of truth: epistemic-nonsublatability (abādhyatvam orbādhaṛāhityam). According to the Vedānta Paribhāṣa (a classical text of Advaita Vedānta) “that knowledge is valid which has for its object something that is nonsublated.” Nonsublatablity is considered as the ultimate criterion for valid knowledge. The master test of epistemic-nonsublatability inspires a further constraint: foundationality (anadhigatatvam, lit. “of not known earlier”). This last criterion of truth is the highest standard that virtually all knowledge claims fail, and thus it is the standard for absolute, or unqualified, knowledge, while the former criteria are amenable to mundane, worldly knowledge claims. According to Advaita Vedānta, a judgment is true if it remains unsublated. The commonly used example that illustrates epistemic-nonsublatabilty is the rope that appears as a snake from a distance (a stock example in Indian philosophy). The belief that one sees a snake in this circumstance is erroneous according to Advaita Vedānta because the snake belief (and the visual presentation of a snake) is sublated into the judgment that what one is really seeing is a rope. Only wrong cognitions can be sublated. The condition of foundationality disqualifies memory as a means of knowledge. Memory is the recollection of something already known and is thus derivable and not foundational. Only genuine knowledge of the Self (Ātma), according to Advaita Vedānta, passes the test of foundationality: it is born of immediate knowledge (aparokṣa jñāna) and not memory (smṛti). Six natural ways of knowing are accepted as valid means of knowledge (pramāṅa) by Advaita Vedānta: perception (pratyakṣa), inference (anumāna), verbal testimony (śabda), comparison (upamana), postulation (arthapatti) and non-apprehension (anupalabdhi). The pramāṅas do not contradict each other and each of them presents a distinct kind of knowledge. Nonfoundational knowledge of Brahman cannot be had by any means but through Śruti, which is the supernaturally revealed text in the form of the Vedas (of which the Upaniṣads form the most philosophical portion)."

https://www.iep.utm.edu/adv-veda/

>4. There is only the One
"Brahman is not of this world; nothing in reality is, but Him. If anything appears to be other than Him, it is but a vain show, like a mirage in the desert.", - Shankara, Atma-Bodha
>5. Morality is a spook
Everything other than Atma-Brahman is ultimately a spook

[Anonymous No.14230511]

>>14230303
This is perfect, I'll start reading through the upanishads tonight. I don't actually believe that morality is a spook but I'm having trouble justifying my fidelity. Do you also notice a strange coincidence between monism and poetry?

[Anonymous No.14230517]

>>14229450
>5 premises
>none of them support any of the others
>no conclusion
wow this is some deep shit right here

[Anonymous No.14230538]

>>14229450
> 1. Morality requires free will

Moral responsibility might requires free will, not morality. Morality does not require action, it can be judgement or even can be recognition of good/bad in conditional scenerio.

> 2. Free will requires dualism

There's like billion different position on what free will requires or means, you've taken one such position. But what if free will requires dualism, who told you dualism is wrong ?

> 3. Perfect knowledge of any system of things will always solve them into a single thing

What ? You talking about determinism ? How do you know the world is deterministic ? How do you get perfect knowledge of system within the system ?

> 4. There is only the One

One what ?

> 5. Morality is a spook

Does not follow from anything

[Anonymous No.14230539]

>>14229459
Got anything better lmao

[Anonymous No.14230554]

>>14229891
Or accept them as our greatest allies and the chosen people of God

[Anonymous No.14230614]

>>14230538
>>14230517
I didn't go into much detail in the op,
>>14230060
should answer your issues but to be more specific,
>Moral responsibility might requires free will, not morality. Morality does not require action, it can be judgement or even can be recognition of good/bad in conditional scenerio.
Ought is meaningless without a can. Judgment of that sort would be just that, judgment and not a prescribed course of action.
>There's like billion different position on what free will requires or means, you've taken one such position. But what if free will requires dualism, who told you dualism is wrong ?
Like you said, free will is anything other than determinism. I intend for 3 to intuitively prove determinism but you can look at my other post for more detail.
>One what ?
The monadic whole that would be implied by a deterministic universe

[Anonymous No.14230631]

>>14229450
hopeless

[Anonymous No.14230637]

>>14229450
>Free will requires dualism
why

[Anonymous No.14230648]

>>14230511
>This is perfect, I'll start reading through the upanishads tonight.
If you're interested in Shankara and the system of Advaita that he refined, you couldn't do better than to read through the commentaries that the man himself wrote on 10 Upanishads which have all been translated. You can read them online here, it's best to start with Volume 1 of the 8 Upanishads and then read both volumes. The Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya Upanishads are much longer and denser and it would be best to read Shankara's commentaries on them only after you've read the 8 Upanishad commentaries. These translations include the full text of the Upanishad passage followed by his commentary so you are able to read the whole Upanishad along with his writing. If you are having trouble understanding anything download on lib-gen and use as a reference "Advaita Vedānta: a philosophical reconstruction" by Eliot Deutsch, you might be able to get along just with looking up words online though. I hope that you enjoy his commentaries, I find them to be sublime.

https://estudantedavedanta.net/Eight-Upanisads-Vol-1.pdf
https://estudantedavedanta.net/Eight-Upanisads-vol2.pdf
https://www.holybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad.pdf
https://archive.org/details/Shankara.Bhashya-Chandogya.Upanishad-Ganganath.Jha.1942.English

>I don't actually believe that morality is a spook but I'm having trouble justifying my fidelity.
Well according to him the notion that it's a spook should be and is totally irrelevant to someone who is living as a householder with a profession etc anyway. It's not necessary for you to accept it as unreal until you become a monastic and undergo spiritual instruction.
>Do you also notice a strange coincidence between monism and poetry?
Yes I do. Advaita is more properly referred to as 'non-dualism' which is a more accurate label than monism (to which it is related nonetheless). There is a vast array of wonderful non-dualist/monist ecstatic and mystic poetry from India, the Islamic world and elsewhere. There is something about it that lends itself to wonder and inspiration. Hinduism has some great poet-saints like Jnanadeva (pic related is him), Kabir, Ramananda, Tulsidas etc. Many of the most famous Sufis like Rumi, Sanai, Hafez, Attar, Sanai etc used poetry as their medium of choice.

[Anonymous No.14230653]

>>14230060
>Deterministic "morality" is just an aesthetic judgment of matter
But a judgement nonetheless, therefore it's still morality.

[Anonymous No.14230869]

>>14229831
>Einstein shares my taste
imagine my shock

[Anonymous No.14231302]

>>14229459
cringe

[Anonymous No.14231307]

>>14229450
>1. Morality requires free will
wrong on the first premise, impressive

[Anonymous No.14231354]

3.) perfect knowledge requires of any system of things will always solve them into a single thing

this is a very debatable / contestable statement.

Also even physicists don't believe in determinism anymore bro

[Anonymous No.14231395]

>>14230614
yikes
when you grad highschool come back and try again

[Anonymous No.14231784]

>>14231354
do you have any arguments why it might be wrong?

[Anonymous No.14231916]

>>14229450
1. Wrong
2. Wrong
3. Wrong
4. Sounds like a spook
5. Wrong