Determinism Addendum
I do not want to burden you with more material this week, given the length of complexity of this week’s articles (which I hope you read), particularly yesterday’s on the limits of biological (genetic) determinism.
But I thought a short note summing up determinism might be useful. Here is the gist:
In all organisms, strict biological determinism holds up to a point (think, e.g., oxygen exchange in blood platelets), and it constrains or limits past that point, and disappears when rational thought, hence freedom, begins.
The less complex the life, the more determinism holds, though never completely on the whole of a life, where there is always in every organism somewhere constrained flexibility. The less complex the organism, the tighter those restrictions are, and vice versa. Because conditions, and limitations, vary greatly, figuring what is biologically caused can be difficult; the difficulty grows with organism and environmental complexity.
Only man has rationality.
None of this should be taken, at all, or even as a hint, that Equality holds in any organism. Neither in man. At the least, people, and thus peoples, have different limitations or constraints because of different biologies. There is no Blank Slate.
Intellect, which is non-material and so not subject to horizontal causation (as Wolfgang Smith would have called it) is found only in man and drives some behaviors. Nobody knows for any behavior in man (excepting perhaps fundamental chemical reactions) how much is biology, how much is conditions, how much is limitations, and how much is intellect.
There have been attempts, of course, such as crude measures of intelligence in “IQ scores”, and in others in correlating these to genes (in the ways outlined yesterday; see also blog/Substack and this). But these are crude and overstated. Notice I say the measurements suffer these faults: it has always been obvious that intelligence varies.
It should not seem overly odd to suppose that intellect is non-material. After all, if you accept quantum weirdness (which, given current events, perhaps our ruling class now reject), this is not different in kind. That is the point. Here lies a vast region ready for new minds to discover. Finding what these might be is the goal of this Reenchantment & Rectification series.
Get out and enjoy summer while it is still here.
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One problem of the latter-days medical science we all suffer is the pretension of determinism. The "fear" is that human doctors will be replaced by algorithms. For decades now, doctors have been trained to classify things like a computer would, and the so called "science" has been tweaked to fit the non-existent thinking abilities of a computer.
What people should fear is that most "facts" of the managerial state and its corrupt science are simply made up. They should be as afraid of a computer diagnosing them as of a real human diagnosing them, because diagnostics are corrupt by the infallible Expert class.
But fear not, because we know computers reliably repeat the errors of judgment of humans faster and more deeply than any real human, we can simply disregard computers, and computer programmers, and any insurance company who tyrannizes its clients with the latest sustainable nonsense. There is no reason to fear them, just stop smoking the dope they push on you.
Real health practitioners focus on discerning the reality at hand the best they can, and they reject acting as bean counters.
Dark humor joke for today: If the doctor looks like an accountant, the patients are going to get archived very soon.
Lol I barely resisted commenting the first time. As a fan of both 'determinism' and your work, I suppose I'm in a funny place. This, from first article, is where I can not follow along:
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In any case, what follows from our being rational (homo sapiens was chosen for good reason), is that our intellects cannot be material. And if our intellects are not material, then they cannot be caused by genes, which are material.
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Sure, the "experience of" our intellects, rationality, "wanting and choosing and doing stuff", etc is not material, but that doesn't mean that experience itself can't have material causes. That it does is one of the easiest things to prove. And even if it didn't have a material cause, as something that changes, it must still have some cause, which still implies determinism. As best I can tell you want to save room for our consciousness to be a sort of "first cause", without a prior cause, which would mean something from nothing (aka 'chance'). Something I suspect you would deny is possible if we were talking about the ultimate first cause, yet seem to want it for us in order to preserve freedom. We are indeed free, as we can do whatever we want. But why do we want it in the first place?
I'm sure any specific theory of how it all happened, involving genes and so forth, is full of problems. Still, it happened somehow, just the way it had to given all the causes in play.
Fun stuff, looking forward to the next one!