sethoflagos

A priori (deduced) determinism demands no empirical evidence and is compatible only with faith based points of view. A posteriori (induced) determinism takes on board the empirical evidence. So it could be either. There are many different flavours of determinism.

What if your neurologist was so competent that he became a Laplace's Demon and provided you with a scheduled listing of all your actions for the next 24 hours? Wouldn't a compatibilist's belief in determinism conflict with his freedom to deviate from the Demon's prediction only to fall foul of some time reversed Grandfather paradox? Even if you claim that predictability has nothing to do with free will it appears from the above that compatibilism requires the future to be unknowable for free will to remain meaningful. The macroscopic diversity and non-linearity I mentioned were intended to suggest that there may be profound reasons why that future is indeed unknowable; we do not and never will know exactly the point where lightning will next strike, and that seems a necessary condition for the very existence of free will. They give free will 'elbow room'. When you talk about the predictability of your behaviour are you not not really just talking about trust? The habitual repetitive patterns of behaviour that you have developed over a lifetime in defiance of random external stimuli? Those patterns that a wife may find reliably secure and comforting, in contrast to an archetype impulsive free spirit like Peter Pan? How would we ever know that a Peter Pan had any free will at all? It surely takes an effort of free will curb one's impulses and train oneself to be a person a life partner could trust. This seems to be Spinoza's vision of free will While initial urge may arguably be deterministic, the development and regular practice of 'good habits' further distances action from external influences. Having made elbow room for some definition of free will: As a philosophical construct that definition of free will must be an idealised perfect form. One issue I might raise here is that evolution doesn't habitually create perfect forms. It strongly prefers 'sufficient' forms. Given a choice of multiple alternative means to an end, it invariably seems to go the recurrent laryngeal nerve route. However, evolutionarily desirable free will may be to the survival of a species, I suspect that the most economic structure to build from readily available materials would be some merely sufficient simulation. Your decision to engage in a sensible diet was a result of logical deduction. Logic transcends the boundaries of the universe and is therefore an uncaused cause.

Where I come from, the leftover contents of the roasting dish become the spread on the next day's bread and drip sandwiches.

This evening in London was dark, clear, still, and not too chilly (~80C -ish) with a day-10 moon quite high in the southern sky. It was surrounded by quite a bright diffuse pale disc about 10 lunar diameters across with a chestnut-coloured fringe. Google tells me that this is typical of a Lunar Corona. However, what was even more striking was a rainbow halo (indigo to red outer) surrounding the corona maybe another 3 moon diameters wide which was quite intensely coloured for several minutes before it began to fade. It's a long time since I had regular views of a northern sky so forgive me if this is commonplace, but can a luna corona and halo occur simultaneously?

One of my favourite childhood memories is that of pea and ham soup based on a 4lb ham shank slow-cooked in 1lb of marrowfat peas. I found a recipe at https://foodnetwork.co.uk/recipes/lancashire-pea-and-ham-soup which is very much how my mother and grandmothers used to make it. Having said that, I roast a cheap ham shank we'd picked up at Tesco's a couple of weeks ago. The resulting ham and mustard sandwiches were gorgeous!

That's a better proposition. I did seem to execute that side step in my subsequent post. Is the gulf between Dennett & Kane so vast? For me, the immediate macroscopic environment contains more than enough entropy and non-linearity to stimulate ideas of as many alternate courses of action simultaneously in the mind as any compatibilist could wish for, which seems to place me somewhat in the Dennett camp. But strangely, for much the same reasons, I have more sympathy for Kane's self-forming actions than Dennett does. Yes. If ultimate personal responsibility didn't exist, then I think it might be necessary to at least pretend that it did. Might have to dwell on that for a month or two.

Thanks for that. Are they worth minding? I'd got sort of comfortable with TI.

Except no one worth minding doubts the existence of photons. Though in passing, last time I asked @Mordred advised me that it was an invalid frame of reference. There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach'ya bout the raisin of the wrist. Or so I heard. I thought Spinoza's line was that since his god was the only causeless being, his was the only truly free will. Did I get him confused with someone else? Very long time since I read into this stuff. The point is that we seem to lack undisputable evidence of conscious choice that is not wholly contingent on prior events. The major benefit of understanding free will and therefore one answer to your OP, would be definitive evidence of its existence.

Western philosophy has failed to produce concensus on either the definition of, or even the existence of free will since at least the time of Aristotle. Therefore the premise is false. Because we need some prior concensus on a working definition of free will before we say anything meaningful about it. Where did I say the search for understanding is futile? Far from it. Your deduction is false (arguably lazy and insultingly dismissive) Quite the opposite. In an increasingly godless world It appears that the role of an all-powerful, omniscient being is being usurped by materialist determinism. Scientific determinism succeeds theological predeterminism and whether or not they are flip sides of the same coin, the assault on the existence/reality of free will appears identical. Says who? Spinoza says no. wtf?

Could also try https://www.google.com/search?q=clipping+circuit

Since 2010, this has been anything but true in the UK

The effectiveness of carbon sequestion via weathering of basalt etc. is ultimately limited by actual reaction rates. One only has to consider the rather slow disappearance of such basalt structures as eg the Giant's Causeway (and essentially the entire surface lithosphere of Northern Ireland), Fingal's Cave, Iceland to understand that these carbonation reactions are not lightning fast. Even in finely divided form, a visit to a basaltic black sand beach is scarcely seething with chemical activity. But that does not make it a factor to be ignored. It cannot be a solution to all our problems but it can help. EDIT: I see @studiot has just made the very same point (simulpost) I found quite a useful summary of its global relevance at https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.2138/am-2019-6884/html?lang=en. I've wondered for a while whether weathering of the calcium silicate content of concrete had a similar effect, and found an interesting Caltech article at https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/weathering-cement-important-overlooked-sink-carbon-dioxide-53134 ... which I found quite interesting.

Does that observation increase our understanding of what free will actually is? Personally, I would reject @Eise's Quantum Decision Maker as an agent of free will not on the grounds that it (potentially) confounds determinism, but that it is indistinguishable from taking actions based on false premises. The popular understanding of the concept would be along the lines of choosing to get out of bed when you felt like it, not when someone else told you to. Do we have any more sophisticated definition to work with? If not, then such a decision is arguably just a balance of pleasure/pain responses and no more an example of free will than a peckish amoeba wandering off in search of its next meal. Easy prey for the determinist camp. I'm tempted toward an atheist position on both free will and determinism, though remain open to harder definitions of free will and less evangelical revelations of determinism. If free will does not exist, then the validity of the OP is moot. Kind of like asking what unicorns prefer for breakfast.

This is a form the Young-Laplace equation as I understand it. Your earlier version with 1/(h/2) instead of 1/r was incorrect for the diagramme given. But note that the usual form is dP= -T(1/r + 1/R). It only becomes the form quoted above AFTER you have performed algebraic manipulation of the signs. I suggest you apply more focus to distinguishing between the standard forms of equations and expressions lifted from part-completed calculations.

Merely a futile attempt to establish some mutual understanding of what you mean by 'free will'. I invested some time in it, but lesson learnt.

Hint: can you express r in terms of h & theta?

What are the benefits of understanding our free will? I suspect the quick answer is that a true understanding of the nature of free will would take us close to a true understanding of the nature of consciousness which would be no small achievement. One of the major challenges seems to be determining the sphere of influence of free will to which end it may be helpful to identify where free will has no observable scope of application. So if you will bear with me... Practically the entire Tree of Life outside of clade Holozoa (and many members of Holozoa) arguably thrive without any recourse to free will. Their activities can perhaps be simplified to a set of spontaneous reactions to stimuli (both external and internal) ultimately mediated by their genetic preprogramming. A great diversity of viable ecosystems could be constructed of such purely impulsive communities that we would see as being dominated by plants and fungi. Within such communities the following hierarchy of advantageous evolutionary development can be considered: a) development of a nervous system to communicate stimuli and response by faster means than chemical diffusion/convection. b) development of a centralised brain to better coordinate communication between sensory and endocrine systems. c) expansion of the brain to facilitate development of learned responses (ie those not easily built into genetic coding). These seem to be sufficient for the evolution of phenotypes capable of language and the ability to observe a written code of conduct (among many other behavioural characteristics). To this extent, free will is not necessary. A societal training programme based along the lines of 'spare the rod and spoil the child', has historically been more or less sufficient to persuade individuals to resolve conflicts between subconscious impulse and social code in favour of the latter levering on natural fight or flight and pleasure/pain responses. If we want to isolate free will, I think we need another level in the developmental hierarchy: d) further develop the brain to generate reasonable, novel responses to novel stimuli. This is clearly distinct from level c) as the response cannot be explicitly specified in advance of the experience - on post hoc ergo propter hoc grounds. Specific types of training (eg the scientific method) may provide an approach to dealing with novelty when encountered, but this doesn't strike me as enough to guarantee a good outcome. Deduction has to be augmented with imagination I think. It is the imagination, free of dogmatic constraints, that generates the variety of possible responses in the mind of the individual. And I would tentatively propose that it is in the evaluation of those imagined possible responses that free will can be found. If free will is so intimately connected with imagination, then is it not an expression if not the primary expression of consciousness? I could develop this further, but enough for now.

Not entirely clear on what you mean by 'pumping rod'. Bottle jacks have two pistons: a pumping piston to generate hydraulic pressure and a ram piston to actuate the hydraulic ram. This is reasonable for a x-section ratio of pumping piston : ram piston and indicates that 1kgf applied to the pumping piston will generate 21.4 kgf lifting force at the ram in theory (there's always going to be a little leakage of hydraulic fluid). But the load applied to the pumping piston is also subject to the leverage (mechanical advantage) of the handle which is the ratio of overall length to the distance from the pivot to the shaft of the pumping piston. Using the handle extension supplied, you may get a mechanical advantage of perhaps 20 : 1 which would give you an overall mechanical advantage of 20 x 21.4 = 428 : 1. So a force of 1 kgf at the handle should generate a theoretical lifting force of 428 kgf. The jack maximum load rating is set by an internal pressure relief valve that limits the pressure difference between the pumping pressure and low pressure reservoir. In principle you can measure this by extending the ram and then gradually increasing the load on it until the safety valve lifts and the ram lowers.

By being explicitly non-local, Cramer's Transactional Interpretation is immune to Bell's inequality test while being entirely consistent with counterfactual definiteness. Which is somewhat interesting given its rooting in (explicitly) the relativistic form of the Schrodinger equation and its consistency with (though not a dependency on) an Einsteinian block universe (so I have been led to believe). This seems to make it a particularly interesting viewpoint from which to consider determinism and the relationships between past, present and future in general. I'd be interested in your thoughts on this perspective.

Given a free neutron in whatever initial boundary conditions you care to set, in what sense could its instant of decay into a proton and W- be understood to be '(pre)determined' prior to the actual event? If there is none then it would seem to me that dterminism in any real sense is dead on its feet. Otherwise we would appear to have the mother of all hidden variables theories and I'd be interested to hear how this squares with the 2nd Law (where's all the information stored?) Perhaps I'm missing something (yet again).

I bow to your greater experience in this area, but I think we're saying the same thing aren't we? In passing, I don't see the cases for the falsity of b) and d) being quite so clear cut. Does b) fall on the isothermal constraint and d) on catalyst dependency, or am I barking up the wrong tree(s).

a) is correct by definition. dG = RT ln(Keq) so dG=0 implies Keq=1 Remembering that Keq is also by definition the ratio of reaction rate constants for forward and reverse reactions, we have to remember that the rate constants are functions not only of the concentrations of chemical species (either reactants or products respectively) but also the reaction mechanisms. In general the mechanisms for the forwards and reverse reactions will be different, and therefore simultaneous equality of both reactant and product concentrations and forwards and reverse reaction rates could only occur under very special conditions (if ever in real life). Therefore, in general, statement c) is incorrect. I hope this is what you were looking for. Your question isn't perfectly phrased in English.

Nigeria mostly.

Another possibility might be from opening a buoyancy tank that had been sealed for long enough for SRBs to poison its air contents. During my apprenticeship in the paper industry we had several fatal incidents due to personnel entry into poorly ventilated secondary water tanks without appropriate breathing apparatus. Concentrations as low as 0.1% v/v are often immediately lethal. It doesn't take much in a confined space.

About as much as you would expect of an organisation under the direction of someone like Therese Coffey I guess. I can see what the written responsibilities of these organisations are, but a non-resident is perhaps not best placed to judge whether or not they meet those obligations,