You've related that you grew up poor and went on to get good grades. That doesn't entail that you are no longer poor. Good grades alone aren't enough to guarantee success. I'll bet there's a good chance that despite your good grades, your poor background has still kept you back from the success you might otherwise have achieved, if you'd had the resources to risk and the familial safety net to afford to take risks without losing absolutely everything should you fail.
Wow, $50K a year is "only the bare necessities" to you?
That's about my annual income (and about the mean income, I should note), and I only spend about a quarter of that on things I actually consume (the rest goes to taxes, rents, and savings to eventually escape from those rents), and I feel like I spent pretty carelessly on whatever I feel like. And you realize most people in this country live on less than half of that? (The median personal income is around $25K). "Bare necessities" is more like $6K/year, or about $100/week, and it's possible to live on half of that (I should know, my disabled mom does).
$50K/year of consumption is living the fucking high life.
No but then I also don't want to carry around lethal force and have people legally compelled to obey me under threat of such force, and for people who do want that, sacrificing their privacy on the job for that kind of authority seems reasonable.
This(ish). Until you are completely out of debt — meaning, until you own your own house free and clear, because rent is a kind of debt (you're borrowing a shelter directly, rather than borrowing money to pay for one) — you are lower-class and should be focusing on being able to take care of even yourself before you start worrying about taking care of other people.
(Yes, this includes having children in the category of "taking care of other people". Most people are too poor to have kids and should not, both for their own sakes, and the potential kids').
I have an email username "nobody" at one of my own domains that I use for things that I don't want connected to me. It's a perfectly functional normal email account just like the ones I actually use, it just happens to be named "nobody".
When I was forced to sign up for a Facebook account for a development project that integrated with Facebook, I signed up using that email address. Facebook refused with a message that was tantamount to "ha ha no but really, what's your email address?" Fuckers, that IS a real fucking email address...
Sorry, after writing that I realized there's a much shorter and easier way to illustrate the possibility of an absolute political spectrum. It still varies based on how you construct the spectrum, so I'll use mine to illustrate:
On a spectrum of liberty to authority, there are very easily defined objective extremes. At the extreme of liberty, you have people who say that nobody is ever allowed to force anybody to do anything else, even to the extent that I can't force you to stop trying to murder me. (You also can't murder try to murder me, but under this extreme viewpoint, you trying to murder me doesn't excuse any violence in return on my part). At the extreme of authority, you have people who say that there is some strict set of rules set by someone outlining all the things you must do and the things you must not do, and everyone has to do those things and not do the other things and there's no choice in the matter about anything. Bam, a well-defind objective spectrum between two extremes. The obvious moderate point between those two is to say that you can only force people to do things when it comes to acting upon you, but not acting upon themselves or anyone else; you can make the murderer stop trying to murder you, but you can't make him stop drinking booze or eating trans-fats. Anything more to one extreme or another from that moderate point is objectively on that side of the spectrum.
On a spectrum of equality to hierarchy, there are also easily defined objective extremes. At the extreme of equality, everything belongs to everyone equally and even your own bed or toothbrush isn't "yours", you can't exclude anyone from using anything, even if that means that you get de facto excluded from using it yourself (since we can't all use the same toothbrush or sleep in the same bed at once). At the extreme of hierarchy, some subset of people own absolutely everything and nobody but them has their own bed or toothbrush in the first place, they have to borrow them from the ones who own everything, on the owners' terms. Bam, another well-defined spectrum between two extremes. The obvious moderate point between those two is to say that you can own things for your own use, but you can't leverage your unused excess to control or exploit other people; you can have your own bed and toothbrush and house and car, but not a tract of extra houses that you lend out to generate rental income. Anything more to one extreme or another from that moderate point is objectively on that side of the spectrum.
And as it happens, basically every position in the mainstream debate is somewhere on the authoritarian and hierarchical sides of those spectra. Objectively. Given that, we could recalibrate the spectrum and call the moderate positions the liberal/egalitarian extremes. But you'd still have an objective spectrum on which to place different positions between those moderate "extremes" and the authoritarian-hierarchical extremes.
There is an absolute sense of political spectrum as well. Different constructions of political spectra will have different senses of absolute, but that's based on the criteria you use to define the spectrum, not relative to one political viewpoint on the spectrum.
On the political spectrum as I would construct it, with two axes of liberty and equality, all the mainstream points of view fall into one quadrant of that spectrum, but that doesn't mean that my point of view is somewhere far off in another quadrant. I think everybody in the other quadrants are all crazy too, and I try to state in the moderate areas around the center of the spectrum; it's just that the mainstream debate seems to agree on a certain kind of illiberal and unequal flavor of crazy, and so don't see it as crazy at all, and see everything outside of that quadrant, a full three quarters of the possible positions, as collapsed down to one end of the other of their little myopic view of the possibilities. It's hard to even describe my position in that parochial framework of Democrats and Republicans...
"I'm somewhere between a libertarian and a European-style social liberal, but not a 'moderate' anywhere between Democrats and Republicans, and not actually directly between Euro-liberal and libertarian either... I'm more like a libertarian socialist, no that's not a contradiction in terms that's what anarcho-socialists usually call themselves, except I'm not actually one of them because I'm propertarian and they're not... no that doesn't make me an anarcho-capitalist either... I'm like between an anarcho-socialist and an anarcho-capitalist... no anarchism doesn't mean that..."
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I'd say that the person who has conflicting strong desires to the point that they have difficulty deciding between them is someone who doesn't have a clear will. It's not that their decisions aren't the guiding force in their behavior, it's that they're having a hard time making a decision. (I suppose that does entail that their behavior meanwhile is guided by something else, like habit or instinct, in the absence of a decision that's able to guide it).
People whose decisions are influenced by other people aren't necessarily weak of will as I would characterize it. The second person you describe especially: he just seems to value the happiness (or freedom maybe) of his significant other highly, and makes decisions to go along with her decisions. So long as it's not like she's conditioned him, in a pavlovian way, but just that it seems to him the right thing to do to go along with her most of the time, then I wouldn't characterize that as any weakness of will. I'm not so sure about the religious person though. If she thinks that following certain rules is what she ought to do, and her final judgement is that following those rules is right, even in the face of what might be called the counter-evidence of her unhappiness (maybe she's got some counter-argument that allows her to dismiss or overrule the prescriptive force of her unhappiness), and her behavior follows from that reasoning (however faulty it might or might not be), then she still has free will. If however she only follows those rules out of habit, tradition, conditioning, indoctrination, etc, because her church has trained her like you'd train an animal to behave certain ways without thinking about it, and if she did think about it she would conclude that her behavior is wrong but still be unable to change it -- or if she's just unable to think about it at all -- then her free will has been compromised.
Harry Frankfurt, who popularized a conception of free will very similar to my own, uses an example of three different kinds of addicts, none of whom have free will: the wanton addict, who takes drugs because of his addiction without even questioning the addiction; the unwilling addict, who takes drugs because of his addiction, knows he shouldn't, but is unable to stop anyway; and the willing addict, who takes drugs because of his addiction, and thinking about it, has no problem with that, but who still wouldn't be able to change his behavior even if he changes his mind. They've all got different wills with respect to their taking of the drugs (one doesn't care, one doesn't approve, one does approve; though technically the first one doesn't have any will on this matter at all), but none of their wills are free, because their behavior wouldn't change regardless of what they actually willed to do, because the addiction is stronger than their wills.
It's the reflexiveness of self-judgement which makes willing an inherently moral thing. You're just just asking yourself what do you feel like doing; you're asking yourself what should you feel like doing, which of the different things you do or don't feel like doing should be the one you actually act on. You're judging your own behavior, the way you would judge another person's, and evaluating it as the way you ought to behave, or not; and that "ought"-ness, prescriptivity, is the defining feature of moral judgement.
When you buy groceries from the store, you do get an asset. You then consume that asset. As living beings we have to consume so we need an influx of resources to consume, sure. But I'm not consuming the land that I live on. It's still there. The only reason I need to pay to live on it is because someone else (the owner of that land) is in an advantaged position to me and they can extract money from me in that way. Yes, some degree of housing is consumables just like groceries (wear and tear demands repair), but the vast majority of what one pays in rent is not going toward replenishing the consumption of the building.
In my case, I own the physical building I live inside (a manufactured home), and literally only pay (in rent) for the right to let it exist somewhere. I pay for all the "consumption" of the building myself, any repairs it needs and such, and that's fine. But way above and beyond that, way more money is going to just paying the lord to let me live on his land, which I only have to do because he owns it and I don't so he can demand money from me, not because of any intrinsic cost of being on the land. The cost exists only because of the unequal distribution of assets; it is not a natural cost that has to be paid no matter what, it is one person exploiting his advantage over another.
In other cases of rent (the usual room or apartment or house for rent, not just land), the landlord does indeed perform some services to maintain the property he's renting out, but in no way can the case be made that the rental income he receives is payment for those services. In a sane world without exploitative rent, those kinds of "landlords" (not really any more) could still make some money actually selling those service, to people who wanted them; but not nearly as much as they can make now leveraging their advantaged position, and not everyone who currently have no choice but to rent would be forced to pay for those services.
Also I think you have my income and the income statistics confused. I make about the mean personal income, i.e. GDP per capita. That is also, coincidentally, about the median household income, because most households have about two income-earners, and the median personal income is about half the mean. And until very recently and for most of my life I was making that median personal income (i.e. half the median household income) or less, and after housing expenses it is not enough to live a comfortable modern lifestyle; and I feel terribly bad for all the people who have huge student loans and other debts they have to service on top of that, pushing their actual net income available to spend on their own consumption down even further.
As I said in my first post, the fact that the median income is so far below the mean is a problem in its own right. The rest was pointing out that, even if that problem were fixed and the average (median) American really did get an average (mean) income, to live a comfortable modern life while also paying to borrow necessary assets from the rich means that such an average person is still working at least twice as much as he needs work to cover his own consumption, for no reason other than that some people have all the assets and can charge everyone else to borrow them.
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There's a bit of a debate about something called internalism vs externalism that I'm ignoring here, but on my point of view, judging something to be moral is exactly equivalent to deciding that that is what you ought to do, that that's the best course of action; it's the process of intending something. It's not just an assessment of some descriptive state of affairs like "this will make people happy" or "this will keep me out of trouble" -- a judgement like that isn't enough for it to be a moral judgement, unless it also comes with a further moral judgement that "I ought to make people happy" or "I ought to keep out of trouble". It's basically the is-ought problem; no "is" will ever get you an "ought" without another "ought" tacitly included in there, so any "ought" judgement includes somewhere in there (amongst judgements of the relevant descriptive facts) some judgement that is intrinsically prescriptive, a judgement which is not a "yeah, I believe that to be, that is the case", but rather a "yeah, I intend that to be, make that the case".
To then fail to do what you've intended to do, to act in ways contrary to how you've decided you should act, is an inherent weakness of will. You're not in control of yourself. Something else besides your rational decision-making process is directing your actions, if you do something that you think you shouldn't be doing.
To praise the ability to act in ways you yourself have decided that shouldn't act would be akin to praising the ability to believe something despite convincing evidence to the contrary -- convincing to you, mind you, like someone presented an argument, and you found the entire thing completely sound and convincing and it seems like, yes indeed, their conclusion is correct, that's the truth... but you choose not to believe it anyway, even though it seems true to you.
The "convincing to you" and "what you think" parts are important here. I'm not saying free will is the ability to do what's actually right. I'm saying free will is the ability for your judgement of what's right to control your actions. If someone else's judgement of what's right is controlling your actions, even if they're actually more correct about the matter than you are, then your will is not free. But at the same time, if you have no or little or weak or poorly-defined ideas about what's right or not, then your judgement can hardly be completely in control of your actions, so a stronger capacity for moral judgement will give you more rigorous ideas about what you ought to do and strengthen your will. At the same time, that better moral judgement will also make you more likely to be correct about what's right and wrong. So freedom of will and morality of choices do correlate, but not perfectly until you get to the point (probably impossible) where you have absolutely perfect moral judgement and the right thing to do is as transparently obvious as the sum of 2 + 2; just like anyone with half a brain will always decide to put 4 for the answer there and that's not some kind of weakness, that's a strength, so too someone with perfect moral judgement and perfect strength of will (and consequently perfectly free will, its strength overpowering any constraining influences) will make perfectly predictable decisions. Until that point, however, there's always the possibility that your moral reasoning had flaws in it, so you might still choose to do the wrong thing, but if you thought it was the right thing, and did it because you thought it was the right thing, then your will is free.
In short: choosing something is precisely the same thing as deciding that it's right, so choosing something other than what you've decided is right is incoherent nonsense (like believing something you've decided is false), and doing something other than you've decided is right means your choices aren't directing your actions and your will is weak.
I feel bad for getting pulled into an OT political tangent, but...
The wealthy ruling class of any civilization have never wanted the unwashed masses of peons to die. They don't care if any individual peon dies. But they want there to be huge, unwashed masses of peons constantly on the verge of death, but not as a class dying out, because then they have a desperate source of labor who will do almost anything for almost anything just to cling to the meager excuse for a life they've got, and that is where the ruling class's power comes from: people desperate to serve them in exchange for any scraps that might get thrown their way.
If the lower classes died out completely, you'd have an egalitarian utopia left over, which would be terrible for the ruling class and they'd immediately scramble to destroy it and establish a class division for themselves to be on top of again. One of the best things you can do to fuck The Man, if you're a desperate poor peon with little hope of ever escaping that fate like most of us, is not have kids, so you're not perpetuating the existence of a class of servants for the super-rich.
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You're right about agnosticism being orthogonal to atheism, but "we just don't know" is a weak form of agnosticism still. You've got believers, non-believers, and (a subset of the second) believe-not-ers on one axis, and can't-knowers, can-knowers, and (a subset of the second) do-knowers on a second axis.
That would be nine different positions, except that if you think you do know you're obviously not in the middle of the belief axis (the don't-believe-or-not-believe column), and if you think we can't know you obviously aren't in either the believe or believe-not columns, so you are necessarily in the middle of that belief axis.
Put another way: hard agnostics are all soft atheists; soft agnostics can be anything, theists or soft atheists or hard atheists; and gnostics (not to be confused with Gnostics) are either theists or hard atheists.
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Socrates was killed for insufficient piety to the state gods (and for "corrupting the youth" with his philosophical jibber-jabber and really, only killed for not kowtowing to the court that was trying him for those things), but he repeatedly spoke of a singular personal god that was his philosophical muse of sorts. Not that he claimed this to be the only god, not that he was a monotheist; just that he clearly believed in at least some gods, even if he wasn't properly reverent to the ones he was supposed to worship.
Owning a house is necessarily financially better than rent. Rent is an infinite debt; you owe someone money forever. And rent necessarily exceeds the actual cost to the rentier of maintaining the property, otherwise they wouldn't be renting it out. The ability to rent out a property also artificially increases the value of it (it's not only desired for its use, but as a source of free money from renters), so people who already have enough money to buy properties beyond their own home will do so as an investment, pricing it out of the range of those who would love to buy if only they could save up for a down payment except that everything they would be saving has to go to rent instead.
Mortgages are also a form of rent, only now on money instead of on property; I did mention interest as well in my first post, and that I am fortunate not to have other debts to be servicing unlike many other Americans, who are throwing even more money down a hole paying people who already have more than them. That's my whole point here: the fact that a small group of people hold all the assets and everyone else has to borrow from them means that everyone else is constantly paying an enormous amount of their income on rent and interest (and trying to escape from rent and interest by buying their fair share of those assets themselves), and without that preexisting asset disparity, everyone could afford to work much less without any change of lifestyle. It's exactly like feudalism: the serfs pay the lords a big chunk of their crop for the privilege of using the lord's land to grow those crops and to live on, and if instead the serfs had their own little plots of land to live and work, they could work a whole lot less, since they wouldn't need to grow enough to pay the lords. A huge amount of the work that we do is not to maintain our own lifestyles and normal levels of consumption, but to allow a small fraction of the population to live in idle opulent luxury.
And no, I don't expect to be given anything for free. (Though given the preexisting disparity we have now, I would not be opposed to a redistributive tax in proportion to distance from the mean... which would mean about 75% of the population who are below that mean would get at least a little something back, people close to the mean like me would see no notable difference, and only the uppermost fractions of the remaining 25%, those who can easily afford it, would actually have to pay anything significant). All I expect is to get some property to my name for every dollar I spend on it, instead of permanently losing money in exchange for the temporary use of something, while the other party makes permanent gains with no commensurate loss. I expect that living a live of idle leisure will come at the expense of gradually losing your wealth, and that a life of hard work will be rewarded with the accumulation of wealth, rather than wealth breeding more wealth and poverty perpetuating itself. What I really expect is for this to have always been the case, so that wealth hadn't been in a runaway cycle of concentration for most of human history, so that the family I was born into had already had something close to a mean share of the assets of the country, so that I could just live in a house that was already in my family, or inherit the value of a fraction of a house that was in the family if the family had grown over the generations, so that by now in the middle of my life I would own a place of my own and not pay for anything except what I actually use, not just to pay to line the pockets of someone who already has so much more than me that he has more land than he even needs for his own use and can lend it out for profit at the expense of people like me who don't even have enough for their own use.
And I said already that I don't want to argue about the particulars of taxes. Even if we ignore that completely, the point still stands, just with 4 hour days instead of 2 hour days, which is still a drastic reduction from the status quo.
You seem to miss my point completely. The very first thing I said in this discussion was to agree that syntax isn't enough for semantics.
The rest is about how that doesn't mean that computers can't do anything but syntax. You need more than syntax, sure. And you can have more than syntax. A computer can have more than syntax. So proving that syntax isn't enough for semantics proves nothing about whether computers can understand semantics at all. It just proves they need programs for doing more than responding to text with more text. Which we have, and can make more of.
It's like you're saying "You can't build a deck out of nothing but 2x4s! You need something more to hold them all together!" and concluding that wooden decks cannot exist; and I'm replying that yes, you do indeed need something more than 2x4s, so it's a good thing we have this box of nails too.
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I am vehemently anti-religious, "religion" broadly construed as any system appealing to faith or authority, theism not required; so I take offense at my views being called "an atheist religion". I'm not writing a paper here, so I'm free to express my strong feelings against incompatibilism as incoherent, and its negation (compatibilism) as consequently the "sane" alternative. I am vehemently NOT a hard determinist, which position would deny the existence of free will at all. I am a compatibilist (specifically after the likes of Wolf or Frankfurt), which you might have noted if you'd paid closer attention to my assertion about the possibility of determinism and free will coexisting. (Not that it's relevant to free will for a compatibilist, but I do happen to deny determinism as well, because of quantum mechanics; but the macroscopic world is deterministic enough for our purposes).
"Natural evils" are absurd in the absence of a god, sure, but we're discussing them in the context of the hypothesis that there is a god. Supposing there's a god, who's all good and all knowing and all powerful by definition, we would expect to find the natural world, being completely under his control, to be a gentle and caring place for sapient beings like us, because that's what a good god would want and thus would make. But the natural world is cruel and harsh and full of pain and misery instead, so such a god can't exist. In the absence of such a god, that state of affairs can hardly be evaluated like the actions of a moral agent could be, sure; but supposing a god existed, it could be, and would then disprove the existence of such a god by contradiction.
I'm not going to bother with a full argument against moral nihilism here because it's philosophically bankrupt and I don't want to bother, but I will say this: moral relativism is incoherent and collapses to either moral nihilism or a liberal form of some moral universalism (usually consequentialism).
I never said "free will is theodicy". That sentence isn't even grammatically correct. I merely named the appeal to free will in argument against the Problem of Evil as "the free will theodicy". Any argument against the Problem of Evil is a theodicy; that's what the word "theodicy" means, though you appear to think it means something else, I can't tell what. A theodicy appealing to free will is, by simple definition, a free will theodicy. And all such theodicies employ an incoherent incompatibilist conception of free will. On a compatibilist account of free will, you don't need indeterminism to have free will, so such excuses for why a supposed god might have to allow evil to protect free will fall flat on their face. Free will, properly understood, is entirely compatible with a universe in which a God built all humans to always choose the morally correct way, so saying "but but but free will so maybe God might still exist despite evil" loses all argumentative force. If a God existed, he could have built a universe with free will and guaranteed no evil with no problems (in fact, a universe with guaranteed no evil would require being with stronger free will), and it's only a broken idea of what "free will" means that makes anyone think that's not possible.
Free will is not just random noise introduced into our decision-making process. Quite the opposite: free will is responsiveness to moral reasoning. Free will is self-control, the ability to direct one's behavior according to what one judges to be right, rather than just whatever one happens to feel like doing. Free will is almost exactly synonymous with moral judgement, and beings with more perfect moral judgement, better able to correctly discern right from wrong, plus the ability to bring their own behavior into accordance with that, would have stronger free will, not weaker.
Your talk about Calvinism continues to assume incompatibilism and try to paint me as a hard determinist. Yes, free will is not necessarily theistic, and I never said it was. (Incompatibilism
Then show me a complex of nested boolean functions that is logically equivalent to addition; one that takes actual numbers as input and outputs their sums, not merely something that emulates addition if we interpret the atomic propositions fed in and out of it as representing digits of a binary number. Something that looks like "(2 or 3) only if (3 and not (2 nand 2))" (but not that obviously, that's a random set of operations and parentheses I just pulled out of my ass) and gives "5" as an output. It can't be done.
Not that I'm saying that there's anything deficient about such emulations; the whole crux of my argument is that for all intents and purposes that works just fine, it's fine to say computers can add. But strictly speaking, when a computer "adds" it's just doing something that looks like adding if the bools it's performing truth-functions on are interpreted as representative of numbers. And if that's good enough, something that looks like understanding when such are interpreted as representing observable phenomena should be good enough too.
This was addressed by Searle in the original 1980 paper. I recommend you read it.
I have a degree in philosophy. I've read the original paper and I'm not impressed by its arguments or those purporting to defend it. It successfully proves that syntax is not all it takes to have consciousness, sure, you need more than syntax; but it doesn't prove that all an artificial intelligence can ever do is syntax.
Put simply, it's a weak attempt to smuggle semantics in through the back door. Replace the photos, sounds, and smells with some equivalent in the form of symbols and you'll find that nothing changes.
There is no "equivalent" of actual phenomenal experiences in terms of just more texts. This (quite tangentially) relates to the Mary's Room problem: Mary can stay locked in her black in white room and study every bit of written information about color she wants and there is still something she will be permanently missing from her understanding until she actually sees colors. There is no substitute for actual experience, and what the man in the Chinese Room lacks that makes him not actually speaking Chinese, but just playing a symbol manipulation game, is actual experiences to connect to the symbols he's manipulating. Give him that, and he will actually understand Chinese.
You're just still connecting symbols to other symbols. Consider this for a moment: I give you a unilingual dictionary and an exhaustive corpus of texts written in the same language. You have all you need to identify relationships between the symbols. The most you could hope to produce would be a grammar. You'd never be able to determine the meaning of any of the words.
Sure. But how exactly would you actually teach me the meaning of any of the words, if that (as I agree) isn't enough? How does a child learn what the word "duck" means? You point at a duck and say "duck" over and over and they eventually pick up the pattern: that symbol signifies that pattern of phenomena. Texts are not enough, yes, that's true. You need more than texts. Humans need more than texts. Machines need more than texts. Thankfully humans and machines both can have access to more than texts. We have eyes and ears, machines have cameras and microphones, and with those the symbols can be connected to the real world and understood.
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That's basically the free will theodicy, and it hinges entirely on a broken concept of free will and moral responsibility. On a sane understanding of what free will means (and what moral responsibility means), it is entirely possible to have beings that can reliably be counted upon to freely choose never to do evil, and be morally praiseworthy for that free-but-still-wholly-predictable choice.
And none of that even touches on the problem of "natural evils", i.e. the hardships of just existing in the world, regardless of the actions or inactions of our fellow humans.
Of course if there isn't any such thing as objectively good / bad / evil / right / wrong / etc, all of this becomes nonsense on stilts, but then godhood is also reduced to nothing but relative knowledge and power, and by that standard we are gods to ants, and whether or not gods relative to us exist is reduced to the question of whether there are sufficiently advanced aliens or not.
And boolean logic is strictly insufficient for arithmetic (try as you might, no combination of nor()s will ever amount to the strict equivalent of an add()), and yet somehow computers do something that seems to everyone exactly like arithmetic via nothing but boolean logic.
The problem with the Chinese room (the deficiency in the imaginary construct, the guy in the room with the manuals full of symbol-manipulation rules, that makes that system fail to process semantics; not the problem with the argument employing said construct) is that it can't do things like respond to a photo of a duck on a lake and the question "What kind of bird is on the water?" correctly. It can answer all kinds of verbal questions about ducks and lakes and birds and water and their relations to each other and to other concepts encapsulated in words, but it cannot connect those words to any kind of real-world phenomenal experience. It has no idea what the hanzi symbol for "duck" actually corresponds to, in terms of the world of phenomena; it's just an empty symbol.
But give the man in the room a bunch of photos and sound recordings and scratch-and-sniff panels and so on, properly correlated with the hanzi symbols, so that he can match non-verbal phenomena to the appropriate symbols and then process the symbols according to the rules and then be able to answer such questions like "what kind of bird is on the water?", and you've basically got a man in a room with a complete how-to-learn-Chinese instruction set. If he memorized all the symbols and rules for manipulating and the phenomena that they corresponded to, nobody would doubt that the man in the room had actually learned Chinese.
The Chinese Room as given by Searle is not functionally equivalent to a native Chinese speaker. It cannot do things native Chinese speakers can. Yes, those functional differences mean that the Chinese Room is only processing syntax, not semantics. But if we correct those functional differences as above, and get a room that actually can do everything a native Chinese speaker can do with the Chinese language, then that modified room would be processing semantics as well.
As we have ever-improving image-recognition algorithms for computers. We have computers that can observe empirical phenomena and connect them to verbal symbols. In principle, we very well can build a computer that can answer a question like "What kind of bird is on the water?", and in fact I'd be surprised if somewhere out there there's not an expert system that can do that already. Yes technically, at an obtuse, obstinately pedantic level, all those image-recognition algorithms are actually just doing a lot of really complicated manipulation of symbols... but those masses of symbols are encoding phenomenal experiences, and the complex manipulations are emulating semantic understanding, the same way that a string of boolean values can encode a number and a bunch of nested NORs can emulate addition. So to the same extend that a properly-programmed computer can "do arithmetic", so too a properly-programmed computer can "understand what words mean", semantically, not just syntactically.
If you're appealing to a Searle type argument here: proving that semantics doesn't reduce to syntax doesn't prove that semantics is no something that can be achieved by computation.
For an analogy: on a fundamental, overly-pendantic level, computers "don't know how to add". They know how to perform boolean logic operations like NOR and NAND, and they can perform complex nested series of such operations on ordered series of boolean values into which we can encode "numbers", and such complex operations can be constructed so that the series of boolean values that come out the other end properly encode the number you should get when you add the two numbers encoded into the two series of boolean values you started with. But the computer has no idea what a number is or what addition is; it just did a bunch of NOR or NAND operations on a bunch of TRUEs and FALSEs and spat out some more TRUEs and FALSEs. Any of that representing numbers or addition is all human interpretation of the process. But we nevertheless happily say that computers add numbers together, and to most people most of what computers do is so transparently adding together of numbers that to appeal to the fact that it's really just a bunch of clever boolean logic kind-of-sort-of emulating numbers and arithmetic would be appallingly over-pendantic. For all intents and purposes, computers know how to add.
There's no reason that, with proper image and sound recognition and control of robotic mechanisms, a computer that at an overly-pendantic level "only processes syntax" cannot emulate semantic understanding so thoroughly that to claim that it cannot understand semantics would be as ridiculous as claiming that it can't add.
We could easily be living comfortable modern lives on hardly any work if the bulk of us didn't have to pay such a huge percent of our incomes to borrow assets hoarded by the wealthy. Rent and interest, the modern-day vestiges of feudalism, and the desperate struggle to escape from them and achieve middle-class independence, are what keep so many of us working so much harder than we would need to be.
I make almost exactly the mean personal income for the US. Setting aside for a moment the problem that more than half the country make less than half of that (the median is about half the mean) and imagining we had a normal distribution of incomes, so the average (median) American really did have an average (mean) income like I do: only about 25% of my income goes to actually paying for things that I consume, and I feel like I live quite comfortably without worrying about being able to afford things that I reasonably want. (I can't travel around the world on vacation every other week, but I don't worry about having enough food/clothes/entertainment/etc). Another 25% goes to taxes, and I guess you could argue that I consume some of the product of that, but a lot of it is waste that I would never choose to spend it on... but lest this diverge into a debate about what to tax and spend, let's give that a pass. Another 25% of my income goes to bribing someone into allowing me to live on their land, i.e. rent. And the last 25% goes to desperately saving up for the chance to eventually, decades down the road, escape from having to constantly bribe someone to allow me just to exist somewhere. And I'm very fortunate not to have other huge debts (e.g. student loans) that I have to service in addition to that.
If the average American made an average income like me, and had an average division of the assets (e.g. land, or cash to buy land i.e. a mortgage) and didn't have to borrow them from the tiny fraction of people who hold all those assets hostage, and thus only had to pay for things they consumed, then such an average American like myself could live a comfortable modern lifestyle on about 2hrs a day of work.
Re:Say Good By to the Rainforests ....
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If that were the case (not that it is) then everything would be "blind faith" and "religion or not" would be a meaningless distinction; "religion" wouldn't mean anything.
Also, there would be no hope of ever knowing anything and you may as well be a complete nihilist, which is really all fideism amounts to in the end anyway: hypocritical self-denying nihilism clinging to happy thoughts in the face of despair rather than getting off your ass and doing the hard work to figure out what's actually true and false, good or bad, etc, the hard way.
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Maybe they CAN, but on average, they make about one-tenth of that.
You've related that you grew up poor and went on to get good grades. That doesn't entail that you are no longer poor. Good grades alone aren't enough to guarantee success. I'll bet there's a good chance that despite your good grades, your poor background has still kept you back from the success you might otherwise have achieved, if you'd had the resources to risk and the familial safety net to afford to take risks without losing absolutely everything should you fail.
Wow, $50K a year is "only the bare necessities" to you?
That's about my annual income (and about the mean income, I should note), and I only spend about a quarter of that on things I actually consume (the rest goes to taxes, rents, and savings to eventually escape from those rents), and I feel like I spent pretty carelessly on whatever I feel like. And you realize most people in this country live on less than half of that? (The median personal income is around $25K). "Bare necessities" is more like $6K/year, or about $100/week, and it's possible to live on half of that (I should know, my disabled mom does).
$50K/year of consumption is living the fucking high life.
No but then I also don't want to carry around lethal force and have people legally compelled to obey me under threat of such force, and for people who do want that, sacrificing their privacy on the job for that kind of authority seems reasonable.
This(ish). Until you are completely out of debt — meaning, until you own your own house free and clear, because rent is a kind of debt (you're borrowing a shelter directly, rather than borrowing money to pay for one) — you are lower-class and should be focusing on being able to take care of even yourself before you start worrying about taking care of other people.
(Yes, this includes having children in the category of "taking care of other people". Most people are too poor to have kids and should not, both for their own sakes, and the potential kids').
Hah! "Apartment!" Luxury! Only rich people get apartments all to themselves!
He'll have to rent a bedroom in someone else's house like all the other poor schmucks^W^W^W^W everybody else.
I have an email username "nobody" at one of my own domains that I use for things that I don't want connected to me. It's a perfectly functional normal email account just like the ones I actually use, it just happens to be named "nobody".
When I was forced to sign up for a Facebook account for a development project that integrated with Facebook, I signed up using that email address. Facebook refused with a message that was tantamount to "ha ha no but really, what's your email address?" Fuckers, that IS a real fucking email address...
Sorry, after writing that I realized there's a much shorter and easier way to illustrate the possibility of an absolute political spectrum. It still varies based on how you construct the spectrum, so I'll use mine to illustrate:
On a spectrum of liberty to authority, there are very easily defined objective extremes. At the extreme of liberty, you have people who say that nobody is ever allowed to force anybody to do anything else, even to the extent that I can't force you to stop trying to murder me. (You also can't murder try to murder me, but under this extreme viewpoint, you trying to murder me doesn't excuse any violence in return on my part). At the extreme of authority, you have people who say that there is some strict set of rules set by someone outlining all the things you must do and the things you must not do, and everyone has to do those things and not do the other things and there's no choice in the matter about anything. Bam, a well-defind objective spectrum between two extremes. The obvious moderate point between those two is to say that you can only force people to do things when it comes to acting upon you, but not acting upon themselves or anyone else; you can make the murderer stop trying to murder you, but you can't make him stop drinking booze or eating trans-fats. Anything more to one extreme or another from that moderate point is objectively on that side of the spectrum.
On a spectrum of equality to hierarchy, there are also easily defined objective extremes. At the extreme of equality, everything belongs to everyone equally and even your own bed or toothbrush isn't "yours", you can't exclude anyone from using anything, even if that means that you get de facto excluded from using it yourself (since we can't all use the same toothbrush or sleep in the same bed at once). At the extreme of hierarchy, some subset of people own absolutely everything and nobody but them has their own bed or toothbrush in the first place, they have to borrow them from the ones who own everything, on the owners' terms. Bam, another well-defined spectrum between two extremes. The obvious moderate point between those two is to say that you can own things for your own use, but you can't leverage your unused excess to control or exploit other people; you can have your own bed and toothbrush and house and car, but not a tract of extra houses that you lend out to generate rental income. Anything more to one extreme or another from that moderate point is objectively on that side of the spectrum.
And as it happens, basically every position in the mainstream debate is somewhere on the authoritarian and hierarchical sides of those spectra. Objectively. Given that, we could recalibrate the spectrum and call the moderate positions the liberal/egalitarian extremes. But you'd still have an objective spectrum on which to place different positions between those moderate "extremes" and the authoritarian-hierarchical extremes.
There is an absolute sense of political spectrum as well. Different constructions of political spectra will have different senses of absolute, but that's based on the criteria you use to define the spectrum, not relative to one political viewpoint on the spectrum.
On the political spectrum as I would construct it, with two axes of liberty and equality, all the mainstream points of view fall into one quadrant of that spectrum, but that doesn't mean that my point of view is somewhere far off in another quadrant. I think everybody in the other quadrants are all crazy too, and I try to state in the moderate areas around the center of the spectrum; it's just that the mainstream debate seems to agree on a certain kind of illiberal and unequal flavor of crazy, and so don't see it as crazy at all, and see everything outside of that quadrant, a full three quarters of the possible positions, as collapsed down to one end of the other of their little myopic view of the possibilities. It's hard to even describe my position in that parochial framework of Democrats and Republicans...
Here, it's easier to draw you a picture.
"I'm somewhere between a libertarian and a European-style social liberal, but not a 'moderate' anywhere between Democrats and Republicans, and not actually directly between Euro-liberal and libertarian either... I'm more like a libertarian socialist, no that's not a contradiction in terms that's what anarcho-socialists usually call themselves, except I'm not actually one of them because I'm propertarian and they're not... no that doesn't make me an anarcho-capitalist either... I'm like between an anarcho-socialist and an anarcho-capitalist... no anarchism doesn't mean that..."
I'd say that the person who has conflicting strong desires to the point that they have difficulty deciding between them is someone who doesn't have a clear will. It's not that their decisions aren't the guiding force in their behavior, it's that they're having a hard time making a decision. (I suppose that does entail that their behavior meanwhile is guided by something else, like habit or instinct, in the absence of a decision that's able to guide it).
People whose decisions are influenced by other people aren't necessarily weak of will as I would characterize it. The second person you describe especially: he just seems to value the happiness (or freedom maybe) of his significant other highly, and makes decisions to go along with her decisions. So long as it's not like she's conditioned him, in a pavlovian way, but just that it seems to him the right thing to do to go along with her most of the time, then I wouldn't characterize that as any weakness of will. I'm not so sure about the religious person though. If she thinks that following certain rules is what she ought to do, and her final judgement is that following those rules is right, even in the face of what might be called the counter-evidence of her unhappiness (maybe she's got some counter-argument that allows her to dismiss or overrule the prescriptive force of her unhappiness), and her behavior follows from that reasoning (however faulty it might or might not be), then she still has free will. If however she only follows those rules out of habit, tradition, conditioning, indoctrination, etc, because her church has trained her like you'd train an animal to behave certain ways without thinking about it, and if she did think about it she would conclude that her behavior is wrong but still be unable to change it -- or if she's just unable to think about it at all -- then her free will has been compromised.
Harry Frankfurt, who popularized a conception of free will very similar to my own, uses an example of three different kinds of addicts, none of whom have free will: the wanton addict, who takes drugs because of his addiction without even questioning the addiction; the unwilling addict, who takes drugs because of his addiction, knows he shouldn't, but is unable to stop anyway; and the willing addict, who takes drugs because of his addiction, and thinking about it, has no problem with that, but who still wouldn't be able to change his behavior even if he changes his mind. They've all got different wills with respect to their taking of the drugs (one doesn't care, one doesn't approve, one does approve; though technically the first one doesn't have any will on this matter at all), but none of their wills are free, because their behavior wouldn't change regardless of what they actually willed to do, because the addiction is stronger than their wills.
It's the reflexiveness of self-judgement which makes willing an inherently moral thing. You're just just asking yourself what do you feel like doing; you're asking yourself what should you feel like doing, which of the different things you do or don't feel like doing should be the one you actually act on. You're judging your own behavior, the way you would judge another person's, and evaluating it as the way you ought to behave, or not; and that "ought"-ness, prescriptivity, is the defining feature of moral judgement.
When you buy groceries from the store, you do get an asset. You then consume that asset. As living beings we have to consume so we need an influx of resources to consume, sure. But I'm not consuming the land that I live on. It's still there. The only reason I need to pay to live on it is because someone else (the owner of that land) is in an advantaged position to me and they can extract money from me in that way. Yes, some degree of housing is consumables just like groceries (wear and tear demands repair), but the vast majority of what one pays in rent is not going toward replenishing the consumption of the building.
In my case, I own the physical building I live inside (a manufactured home), and literally only pay (in rent) for the right to let it exist somewhere. I pay for all the "consumption" of the building myself, any repairs it needs and such, and that's fine. But way above and beyond that, way more money is going to just paying the lord to let me live on his land, which I only have to do because he owns it and I don't so he can demand money from me, not because of any intrinsic cost of being on the land. The cost exists only because of the unequal distribution of assets; it is not a natural cost that has to be paid no matter what, it is one person exploiting his advantage over another.
In other cases of rent (the usual room or apartment or house for rent, not just land), the landlord does indeed perform some services to maintain the property he's renting out, but in no way can the case be made that the rental income he receives is payment for those services. In a sane world without exploitative rent, those kinds of "landlords" (not really any more) could still make some money actually selling those service, to people who wanted them; but not nearly as much as they can make now leveraging their advantaged position, and not everyone who currently have no choice but to rent would be forced to pay for those services.
Also I think you have my income and the income statistics confused. I make about the mean personal income, i.e. GDP per capita. That is also, coincidentally, about the median household income, because most households have about two income-earners, and the median personal income is about half the mean. And until very recently and for most of my life I was making that median personal income (i.e. half the median household income) or less, and after housing expenses it is not enough to live a comfortable modern lifestyle; and I feel terribly bad for all the people who have huge student loans and other debts they have to service on top of that, pushing their actual net income available to spend on their own consumption down even further.
As I said in my first post, the fact that the median income is so far below the mean is a problem in its own right. The rest was pointing out that, even if that problem were fixed and the average (median) American really did get an average (mean) income, to live a comfortable modern life while also paying to borrow necessary assets from the rich means that such an average person is still working at least twice as much as he needs work to cover his own consumption, for no reason other than that some people have all the assets and can charge everyone else to borrow them.
There's a bit of a debate about something called internalism vs externalism that I'm ignoring here, but on my point of view, judging something to be moral is exactly equivalent to deciding that that is what you ought to do, that that's the best course of action; it's the process of intending something. It's not just an assessment of some descriptive state of affairs like "this will make people happy" or "this will keep me out of trouble" -- a judgement like that isn't enough for it to be a moral judgement, unless it also comes with a further moral judgement that "I ought to make people happy" or "I ought to keep out of trouble". It's basically the is-ought problem; no "is" will ever get you an "ought" without another "ought" tacitly included in there, so any "ought" judgement includes somewhere in there (amongst judgements of the relevant descriptive facts) some judgement that is intrinsically prescriptive, a judgement which is not a "yeah, I believe that to be, that is the case", but rather a "yeah, I intend that to be, make that the case".
To then fail to do what you've intended to do, to act in ways contrary to how you've decided you should act, is an inherent weakness of will. You're not in control of yourself. Something else besides your rational decision-making process is directing your actions, if you do something that you think you shouldn't be doing.
To praise the ability to act in ways you yourself have decided that shouldn't act would be akin to praising the ability to believe something despite convincing evidence to the contrary -- convincing to you, mind you, like someone presented an argument, and you found the entire thing completely sound and convincing and it seems like, yes indeed, their conclusion is correct, that's the truth... but you choose not to believe it anyway, even though it seems true to you.
The "convincing to you" and "what you think" parts are important here. I'm not saying free will is the ability to do what's actually right. I'm saying free will is the ability for your judgement of what's right to control your actions. If someone else's judgement of what's right is controlling your actions, even if they're actually more correct about the matter than you are, then your will is not free. But at the same time, if you have no or little or weak or poorly-defined ideas about what's right or not, then your judgement can hardly be completely in control of your actions, so a stronger capacity for moral judgement will give you more rigorous ideas about what you ought to do and strengthen your will. At the same time, that better moral judgement will also make you more likely to be correct about what's right and wrong. So freedom of will and morality of choices do correlate, but not perfectly until you get to the point (probably impossible) where you have absolutely perfect moral judgement and the right thing to do is as transparently obvious as the sum of 2 + 2; just like anyone with half a brain will always decide to put 4 for the answer there and that's not some kind of weakness, that's a strength, so too someone with perfect moral judgement and perfect strength of will (and consequently perfectly free will, its strength overpowering any constraining influences) will make perfectly predictable decisions. Until that point, however, there's always the possibility that your moral reasoning had flaws in it, so you might still choose to do the wrong thing, but if you thought it was the right thing, and did it because you thought it was the right thing, then your will is free.
In short: choosing something is precisely the same thing as deciding that it's right, so choosing something other than what you've decided is right is incoherent nonsense (like believing something you've decided is false), and doing something other than you've decided is right means your choices aren't directing your actions and your will is weak.
I feel bad for getting pulled into an OT political tangent, but...
The wealthy ruling class of any civilization have never wanted the unwashed masses of peons to die. They don't care if any individual peon dies. But they want there to be huge, unwashed masses of peons constantly on the verge of death, but not as a class dying out, because then they have a desperate source of labor who will do almost anything for almost anything just to cling to the meager excuse for a life they've got, and that is where the ruling class's power comes from: people desperate to serve them in exchange for any scraps that might get thrown their way.
If the lower classes died out completely, you'd have an egalitarian utopia left over, which would be terrible for the ruling class and they'd immediately scramble to destroy it and establish a class division for themselves to be on top of again. One of the best things you can do to fuck The Man, if you're a desperate poor peon with little hope of ever escaping that fate like most of us, is not have kids, so you're not perpetuating the existence of a class of servants for the super-rich.
You're right about agnosticism being orthogonal to atheism, but "we just don't know" is a weak form of agnosticism still. You've got believers, non-believers, and (a subset of the second) believe-not-ers on one axis, and can't-knowers, can-knowers, and (a subset of the second) do-knowers on a second axis.
That would be nine different positions, except that if you think you do know you're obviously not in the middle of the belief axis (the don't-believe-or-not-believe column), and if you think we can't know you obviously aren't in either the believe or believe-not columns, so you are necessarily in the middle of that belief axis.
Put another way: hard agnostics are all soft atheists; soft agnostics can be anything, theists or soft atheists or hard atheists; and gnostics (not to be confused with Gnostics) are either theists or hard atheists.
Socrates was killed for insufficient piety to the state gods (and for "corrupting the youth" with his philosophical jibber-jabber and really, only killed for not kowtowing to the court that was trying him for those things), but he repeatedly spoke of a singular personal god that was his philosophical muse of sorts. Not that he claimed this to be the only god, not that he was a monotheist; just that he clearly believed in at least some gods, even if he wasn't properly reverent to the ones he was supposed to worship.
Owning a house is necessarily financially better than rent. Rent is an infinite debt; you owe someone money forever. And rent necessarily exceeds the actual cost to the rentier of maintaining the property, otherwise they wouldn't be renting it out. The ability to rent out a property also artificially increases the value of it (it's not only desired for its use, but as a source of free money from renters), so people who already have enough money to buy properties beyond their own home will do so as an investment, pricing it out of the range of those who would love to buy if only they could save up for a down payment except that everything they would be saving has to go to rent instead.
Mortgages are also a form of rent, only now on money instead of on property; I did mention interest as well in my first post, and that I am fortunate not to have other debts to be servicing unlike many other Americans, who are throwing even more money down a hole paying people who already have more than them. That's my whole point here: the fact that a small group of people hold all the assets and everyone else has to borrow from them means that everyone else is constantly paying an enormous amount of their income on rent and interest (and trying to escape from rent and interest by buying their fair share of those assets themselves), and without that preexisting asset disparity, everyone could afford to work much less without any change of lifestyle. It's exactly like feudalism: the serfs pay the lords a big chunk of their crop for the privilege of using the lord's land to grow those crops and to live on, and if instead the serfs had their own little plots of land to live and work, they could work a whole lot less, since they wouldn't need to grow enough to pay the lords. A huge amount of the work that we do is not to maintain our own lifestyles and normal levels of consumption, but to allow a small fraction of the population to live in idle opulent luxury.
And no, I don't expect to be given anything for free. (Though given the preexisting disparity we have now, I would not be opposed to a redistributive tax in proportion to distance from the mean... which would mean about 75% of the population who are below that mean would get at least a little something back, people close to the mean like me would see no notable difference, and only the uppermost fractions of the remaining 25%, those who can easily afford it, would actually have to pay anything significant). All I expect is to get some property to my name for every dollar I spend on it, instead of permanently losing money in exchange for the temporary use of something, while the other party makes permanent gains with no commensurate loss. I expect that living a live of idle leisure will come at the expense of gradually losing your wealth, and that a life of hard work will be rewarded with the accumulation of wealth, rather than wealth breeding more wealth and poverty perpetuating itself. What I really expect is for this to have always been the case, so that wealth hadn't been in a runaway cycle of concentration for most of human history, so that the family I was born into had already had something close to a mean share of the assets of the country, so that I could just live in a house that was already in my family, or inherit the value of a fraction of a house that was in the family if the family had grown over the generations, so that by now in the middle of my life I would own a place of my own and not pay for anything except what I actually use, not just to pay to line the pockets of someone who already has so much more than me that he has more land than he even needs for his own use and can lend it out for profit at the expense of people like me who don't even have enough for their own use.
And I said already that I don't want to argue about the particulars of taxes. Even if we ignore that completely, the point still stands, just with 4 hour days instead of 2 hour days, which is still a drastic reduction from the status quo.
They should have just switched back from whale oil tapes to good old-fashioned Nibblonian dark matter tapes.
You seem to miss my point completely. The very first thing I said in this discussion was to agree that syntax isn't enough for semantics.
The rest is about how that doesn't mean that computers can't do anything but syntax. You need more than syntax, sure. And you can have more than syntax. A computer can have more than syntax. So proving that syntax isn't enough for semantics proves nothing about whether computers can understand semantics at all. It just proves they need programs for doing more than responding to text with more text. Which we have, and can make more of.
It's like you're saying "You can't build a deck out of nothing but 2x4s! You need something more to hold them all together!" and concluding that wooden decks cannot exist; and I'm replying that yes, you do indeed need something more than 2x4s, so it's a good thing we have this box of nails too.
I am vehemently anti-religious, "religion" broadly construed as any system appealing to faith or authority, theism not required; so I take offense at my views being called "an atheist religion". I'm not writing a paper here, so I'm free to express my strong feelings against incompatibilism as incoherent, and its negation (compatibilism) as consequently the "sane" alternative. I am vehemently NOT a hard determinist, which position would deny the existence of free will at all. I am a compatibilist (specifically after the likes of Wolf or Frankfurt), which you might have noted if you'd paid closer attention to my assertion about the possibility of determinism and free will coexisting. (Not that it's relevant to free will for a compatibilist, but I do happen to deny determinism as well, because of quantum mechanics; but the macroscopic world is deterministic enough for our purposes).
"Natural evils" are absurd in the absence of a god, sure, but we're discussing them in the context of the hypothesis that there is a god. Supposing there's a god, who's all good and all knowing and all powerful by definition, we would expect to find the natural world, being completely under his control, to be a gentle and caring place for sapient beings like us, because that's what a good god would want and thus would make. But the natural world is cruel and harsh and full of pain and misery instead, so such a god can't exist. In the absence of such a god, that state of affairs can hardly be evaluated like the actions of a moral agent could be, sure; but supposing a god existed, it could be, and would then disprove the existence of such a god by contradiction.
I'm not going to bother with a full argument against moral nihilism here because it's philosophically bankrupt and I don't want to bother, but I will say this: moral relativism is incoherent and collapses to either moral nihilism or a liberal form of some moral universalism (usually consequentialism).
I never said "free will is theodicy". That sentence isn't even grammatically correct. I merely named the appeal to free will in argument against the Problem of Evil as "the free will theodicy". Any argument against the Problem of Evil is a theodicy; that's what the word "theodicy" means, though you appear to think it means something else, I can't tell what. A theodicy appealing to free will is, by simple definition, a free will theodicy. And all such theodicies employ an incoherent incompatibilist conception of free will. On a compatibilist account of free will, you don't need indeterminism to have free will, so such excuses for why a supposed god might have to allow evil to protect free will fall flat on their face. Free will, properly understood, is entirely compatible with a universe in which a God built all humans to always choose the morally correct way, so saying "but but but free will so maybe God might still exist despite evil" loses all argumentative force. If a God existed, he could have built a universe with free will and guaranteed no evil with no problems (in fact, a universe with guaranteed no evil would require being with stronger free will), and it's only a broken idea of what "free will" means that makes anyone think that's not possible.
Free will is not just random noise introduced into our decision-making process. Quite the opposite: free will is responsiveness to moral reasoning. Free will is self-control, the ability to direct one's behavior according to what one judges to be right, rather than just whatever one happens to feel like doing. Free will is almost exactly synonymous with moral judgement, and beings with more perfect moral judgement, better able to correctly discern right from wrong, plus the ability to bring their own behavior into accordance with that, would have stronger free will, not weaker.
Your talk about Calvinism continues to assume incompatibilism and try to paint me as a hard determinist. Yes, free will is not necessarily theistic, and I never said it was. (Incompatibilism
That's simply not true.
Then show me a complex of nested boolean functions that is logically equivalent to addition; one that takes actual numbers as input and outputs their sums, not merely something that emulates addition if we interpret the atomic propositions fed in and out of it as representing digits of a binary number. Something that looks like "(2 or 3) only if (3 and not (2 nand 2))" (but not that obviously, that's a random set of operations and parentheses I just pulled out of my ass) and gives "5" as an output. It can't be done.
Not that I'm saying that there's anything deficient about such emulations; the whole crux of my argument is that for all intents and purposes that works just fine, it's fine to say computers can add. But strictly speaking, when a computer "adds" it's just doing something that looks like adding if the bools it's performing truth-functions on are interpreted as representative of numbers. And if that's good enough, something that looks like understanding when such are interpreted as representing observable phenomena should be good enough too.
This was addressed by Searle in the original 1980 paper. I recommend you read it.
I have a degree in philosophy. I've read the original paper and I'm not impressed by its arguments or those purporting to defend it. It successfully proves that syntax is not all it takes to have consciousness, sure, you need more than syntax; but it doesn't prove that all an artificial intelligence can ever do is syntax.
Put simply, it's a weak attempt to smuggle semantics in through the back door. Replace the photos, sounds, and smells with some equivalent in the form of symbols and you'll find that nothing changes.
There is no "equivalent" of actual phenomenal experiences in terms of just more texts. This (quite tangentially) relates to the Mary's Room problem: Mary can stay locked in her black in white room and study every bit of written information about color she wants and there is still something she will be permanently missing from her understanding until she actually sees colors. There is no substitute for actual experience, and what the man in the Chinese Room lacks that makes him not actually speaking Chinese, but just playing a symbol manipulation game, is actual experiences to connect to the symbols he's manipulating. Give him that, and he will actually understand Chinese.
You're just still connecting symbols to other symbols. Consider this for a moment: I give you a unilingual dictionary and an exhaustive corpus of texts written in the same language. You have all you need to identify relationships between the symbols. The most you could hope to produce would be a grammar. You'd never be able to determine the meaning of any of the words.
Sure. But how exactly would you actually teach me the meaning of any of the words, if that (as I agree) isn't enough? How does a child learn what the word "duck" means? You point at a duck and say "duck" over and over and they eventually pick up the pattern: that symbol signifies that pattern of phenomena. Texts are not enough, yes, that's true. You need more than texts. Humans need more than texts. Machines need more than texts. Thankfully humans and machines both can have access to more than texts. We have eyes and ears, machines have cameras and microphones, and with those the symbols can be connected to the real world and understood.
That's basically the free will theodicy, and it hinges entirely on a broken concept of free will and moral responsibility. On a sane understanding of what free will means (and what moral responsibility means), it is entirely possible to have beings that can reliably be counted upon to freely choose never to do evil, and be morally praiseworthy for that free-but-still-wholly-predictable choice.
And none of that even touches on the problem of "natural evils", i.e. the hardships of just existing in the world, regardless of the actions or inactions of our fellow humans.
Of course if there isn't any such thing as objectively good / bad / evil / right / wrong / etc, all of this becomes nonsense on stilts, but then godhood is also reduced to nothing but relative knowledge and power, and by that standard we are gods to ants, and whether or not gods relative to us exist is reduced to the question of whether there are sufficiently advanced aliens or not.
And boolean logic is strictly insufficient for arithmetic (try as you might, no combination of nor()s will ever amount to the strict equivalent of an add()), and yet somehow computers do something that seems to everyone exactly like arithmetic via nothing but boolean logic.
The problem with the Chinese room (the deficiency in the imaginary construct, the guy in the room with the manuals full of symbol-manipulation rules, that makes that system fail to process semantics; not the problem with the argument employing said construct) is that it can't do things like respond to a photo of a duck on a lake and the question "What kind of bird is on the water?" correctly. It can answer all kinds of verbal questions about ducks and lakes and birds and water and their relations to each other and to other concepts encapsulated in words, but it cannot connect those words to any kind of real-world phenomenal experience. It has no idea what the hanzi symbol for "duck" actually corresponds to, in terms of the world of phenomena; it's just an empty symbol.
But give the man in the room a bunch of photos and sound recordings and scratch-and-sniff panels and so on, properly correlated with the hanzi symbols, so that he can match non-verbal phenomena to the appropriate symbols and then process the symbols according to the rules and then be able to answer such questions like "what kind of bird is on the water?", and you've basically got a man in a room with a complete how-to-learn-Chinese instruction set. If he memorized all the symbols and rules for manipulating and the phenomena that they corresponded to, nobody would doubt that the man in the room had actually learned Chinese.
The Chinese Room as given by Searle is not functionally equivalent to a native Chinese speaker. It cannot do things native Chinese speakers can. Yes, those functional differences mean that the Chinese Room is only processing syntax, not semantics. But if we correct those functional differences as above, and get a room that actually can do everything a native Chinese speaker can do with the Chinese language, then that modified room would be processing semantics as well.
As we have ever-improving image-recognition algorithms for computers. We have computers that can observe empirical phenomena and connect them to verbal symbols. In principle, we very well can build a computer that can answer a question like "What kind of bird is on the water?", and in fact I'd be surprised if somewhere out there there's not an expert system that can do that already. Yes technically, at an obtuse, obstinately pedantic level, all those image-recognition algorithms are actually just doing a lot of really complicated manipulation of symbols... but those masses of symbols are encoding phenomenal experiences, and the complex manipulations are emulating semantic understanding, the same way that a string of boolean values can encode a number and a bunch of nested NORs can emulate addition. So to the same extend that a properly-programmed computer can "do arithmetic", so too a properly-programmed computer can "understand what words mean", semantically, not just syntactically.
If you're appealing to a Searle type argument here: proving that semantics doesn't reduce to syntax doesn't prove that semantics is no something that can be achieved by computation.
For an analogy: on a fundamental, overly-pendantic level, computers "don't know how to add". They know how to perform boolean logic operations like NOR and NAND, and they can perform complex nested series of such operations on ordered series of boolean values into which we can encode "numbers", and such complex operations can be constructed so that the series of boolean values that come out the other end properly encode the number you should get when you add the two numbers encoded into the two series of boolean values you started with. But the computer has no idea what a number is or what addition is; it just did a bunch of NOR or NAND operations on a bunch of TRUEs and FALSEs and spat out some more TRUEs and FALSEs. Any of that representing numbers or addition is all human interpretation of the process. But we nevertheless happily say that computers add numbers together, and to most people most of what computers do is so transparently adding together of numbers that to appeal to the fact that it's really just a bunch of clever boolean logic kind-of-sort-of emulating numbers and arithmetic would be appallingly over-pendantic. For all intents and purposes, computers know how to add.
There's no reason that, with proper image and sound recognition and control of robotic mechanisms, a computer that at an overly-pendantic level "only processes syntax" cannot emulate semantic understanding so thoroughly that to claim that it cannot understand semantics would be as ridiculous as claiming that it can't add.
We could easily be living comfortable modern lives on hardly any work if the bulk of us didn't have to pay such a huge percent of our incomes to borrow assets hoarded by the wealthy. Rent and interest, the modern-day vestiges of feudalism, and the desperate struggle to escape from them and achieve middle-class independence, are what keep so many of us working so much harder than we would need to be.
I make almost exactly the mean personal income for the US. Setting aside for a moment the problem that more than half the country make less than half of that (the median is about half the mean) and imagining we had a normal distribution of incomes, so the average (median) American really did have an average (mean) income like I do: only about 25% of my income goes to actually paying for things that I consume, and I feel like I live quite comfortably without worrying about being able to afford things that I reasonably want. (I can't travel around the world on vacation every other week, but I don't worry about having enough food/clothes/entertainment/etc). Another 25% goes to taxes, and I guess you could argue that I consume some of the product of that, but a lot of it is waste that I would never choose to spend it on... but lest this diverge into a debate about what to tax and spend, let's give that a pass. Another 25% of my income goes to bribing someone into allowing me to live on their land, i.e. rent. And the last 25% goes to desperately saving up for the chance to eventually, decades down the road, escape from having to constantly bribe someone to allow me just to exist somewhere. And I'm very fortunate not to have other huge debts (e.g. student loans) that I have to service in addition to that.
If the average American made an average income like me, and had an average division of the assets (e.g. land, or cash to buy land i.e. a mortgage) and didn't have to borrow them from the tiny fraction of people who hold all those assets hostage, and thus only had to pay for things they consumed, then such an average American like myself could live a comfortable modern lifestyle on about 2hrs a day of work.
If that were the case (not that it is) then everything would be "blind faith" and "religion or not" would be a meaningless distinction; "religion" wouldn't mean anything.
Also, there would be no hope of ever knowing anything and you may as well be a complete nihilist, which is really all fideism amounts to in the end anyway: hypocritical self-denying nihilism clinging to happy thoughts in the face of despair rather than getting off your ass and doing the hard work to figure out what's actually true and false, good or bad, etc, the hard way.