On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote: Everyone except free will deniers know exactly what free will is.
I am NOT a "free will" denier anymore than I am a burp denier, and I can assure you I don't know what "free will" is supposed to mean and neither do you. > > It needs no description unless you are bending over backward to pretend > it doesn't exist. > I neither pretend that "free will" exists (except as a ASCII sequence) or does not exist because the term means precisely nothing. > Are you claiming then that it both does not exist and does not not exist? > Yes and there is only one thing in the universe that has both those characteristics, gibberish. > So just standard bigotry. "Whoever disagrees with me about anything is a > crazy idiot.". > Politeness aside I have no hesitation whatsoever in saying that whoever continually insists that X is not determined and X is not not determined is a idiot speaking gibberish. >> What the hell are you talking about?? If it's teleological then its >> mechanistic >> > > > No. Mechanistic means can be employed to teleological ends but teleology > but teleology itself need not have anything to do with mechanism. > What the hell are you talking about?? A action is teleological if it happens for a reason, in particular a advance toward a goal. So a computer acted in a teleological way when it moved to the next line in its program because it was a advancement toward its goal of finding the billionth digit of PI. > You think people should be held responsible for random events and events > which they were powerless to stop? > Yes because everybody is powerless to stop the laws of physics and because the only legitimate reason for punishing anybody for anything is to prevent similar atrocities from happening in the future. Perhaps a person is a moral monster and enjoys inflicting pain on others because he had a bad environment as a child, or maybe he had bad genes, or maybe a random cosmic ray scrambled his brains; it doesn't matter because none of those possibilities would make him one smidgin less of a monster. And monsters cannot be ignored, they need to be dealt with. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.