So, Veeky Forums...

Not OP here, just curious. Why do people in general think that hard determinism is juvenile? I will admit that the way OP started this thread was quite obnoxious, but whenever I mention that I think there is no free will, I always get the "babby's first metaphysics" reaction.

...

>to detect particles that have no possible practical application
They said the same thing when the neutron was discovered.

Jimmy Neutron is a cartoon character you cuntsmuggler

It's true, what the comic says, but why should it change my opinion? The best guess I have is that the universe is deterministic, and I aknowledge that that might not be true, for the reasons the comic states. But how is it "fighting" to pretend I have freewill, when I don't believe I have. How is accepting what I believe to be true "perishing like a dog"?

Oh, I am "perishing like a dog", because I accept a fact that has absolutely no impact on how I live?

While you strive for something more than materialist nihilism

Also, you can be a determinist and still value shit, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from enjoying and treasuring stuff as a determinist.

>While

Will*

intrisic value is different
Donald: there's nothing to be recognized outside chemicals
Mickey: there is value in recognizing that chemicals cannot be recognized

Please expand, I must admit that I am not very well read philosophically. What is material nihilism?

Striving for something more than "materialist nihilism" or implying that there is something more valuable than "materialist nihilism" is meaningless from the POV of "materialist nihilism" since for the "materialist nihilist" all moral statements are equal in their meaninglessness.

Hence, is baby-tier bait. It gives no evidence whatsoever that a chemical whole like you and I, telling ourselves that we are made of chemicals leads to absurdities, inconsistencies, etc. It is not a coherent objection, nor is it justified. It's just sentimental rhetoric.

Nihilism in contemporary analytic metaphysics is a thesis that states that nothing except the material exists. "Material" here is meant whatever physics says there is; but in a nutshell: the fundamental particles, among other things, and whatever objects they are capable of composing (your table, your pc, your body, whatever). It implies that there are no ethical facts, mental events, and abstract objects, as OP already remarked.

Neutrons can be liberated at non-insane energies and have non-negligible lifespans. Also quarks are never found outside of mesons or hadrons because of confinement so you can't actually do anything with quarks.

it's a single-panel comic. if that changes your "opinion," your conviction in hard determinism wasn't strong to begin with. if you're actually interested in the topic, instead of philosophizing on Veeky Forums and expecting people to feed information to you, why not actually read the literature on free will? surely that would be more productive than typing long comments that imply we care about your personal unlearned beliefs in response to a meme.

If you make the choice for nihilism sure. But you don't have to.

What you can't do as a human being is make a choice for both value and a nihilist worldview since the hypocrisy weighs on you. The nihilist is often inclined to think it won't being a nihilist but is in error.

So, my table doesn't exist, because my table is merely a concept we as humans form around some matter aligned in a specific way, is this correctly understood? And therefore thoughts, memories etc. also do not exist?

>only logical conclusion to metaethics
for even this setup to be true there has to be space for concepts and argumentation ("logical conclusion"), which are categorically different than physical material, unless you want to argue how we get them from atoms and molecules and "their processes"

Also, Einstein predicted lasers before they were invented. Name me one predicted application of elementary particles, and don't be a smart ass and say something about electrons or photons.

>Also quarks are never found outside of mesons or hadrons because of confinement so you can't actually do anything with quarks.
That's actually what might make them useful. Look into string theory, the theoretical basis is a material you can pull apart and repair itself thanks to the strong force.

>Neutrons can be liberated at non-insane energies and have non-negligible lifespans.
Depends on when we're talking about and really hasn't that much bearing on their usefulness.

Getting this triggered over someone just wanting to chat about stuff.

I don't even understand the point of that post. Reminder I pointed out the neutrons were thought useless until it turned it they weren't.

sorry user it's just... I had a rough week. Tracy been going at me to find a new appartment, she says the mattress is doing her back in and the new baby takes up all her time so she can't do all the chores. Plus now I work full time with fucking idiots in a loud warehouse at ungodly hours. My only solace is browsing a vietnamese cooking forum and even then I can't fully decompress. Sorry again.
-greg

Hey OP, not sure what you're on about, but as a condensed matter physicist let me tell [or remind you of] something: the things you have described (abstractions, mental events and "facts", but I couldn't define "facts" precisely in my head) mostly arrive from conciousness. Now, whatever we mean by the word "conciousness", it is actually still undecided if it is a mere effect of atomic configurations, or something else. More specifically, things like conciousness arise statistically through emergence (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence) and, as you probably know, emergent effects (of which a simple example would be the vortex shape and energy behavior of a hurricane) do not show if you isolate a single element of the system (e.g a subatomic particle).

Of course, you could just tell me this is merely the combination of a configuration of atoms and a process which depends on all of them at once. But, as any physicist knows by heart (and you probably do too), many-body theory is heavily inconsistent - we do not really know if our systems would actually demonstrate the emergent effect if we were able to solve them - we can only do this (solving) with approximations (very bad ones mind you, like summing and subtracting infinities and claiming we did nothing), and our approximations are, invariably, a mere sum of individual processes and configurations, hardly the actual (collective) thing.

Richard Feynman, Stephen Wolfram and others developed amazing methods to deal with systems with emergence, but they never really pinpoint the definite "yeah, this single term here is the emergence" answer. Interactions are an open problem and you'd be dishonest to claim the processes and configurations are everything there is, if you don't even know every process and every configuration to begin with.

Thus, we can't REALLY demonstrate, straight from set theory (much less from the quantum field theory we use to butcher set theory daily), that "all there is" (I had problems thinking of this too, do you mean a universal set of sorts?) only contains subatomic particles and their processes and configurations - for we can't relate these configurations and processes to *causing* emergent effects, we can only guess they always exist together from observation (i.e they merely correlate, at best, we don't know if there's causality chains there).

Nevertheless, I have not fulfilled all of your rules: I am not familiar to contemporary metaphysics. What do people do with that nowadays, and can you recommend some sources?

Not necessarily. Of course I can make a choice for both value and a nihilistic worldview; it's just that I might choose to interpret "value" to mean "I have a belief that P" and interpret *that* to mean something like "such-and-such subatomic particles interact in such-and-such way such that ...". In other words, the final translation is a purely physicalistic description of what goes on when I value something. Non-nihilists, on the other hand, interpret "value" as some kind of abstract thing which--the process of you valuing it--may or may not involve mental events aka your psychology.

Basically there two choices for the nihilist: either he denies any value judgement or moral fact as meaningful, or he simply reinterprets "value" or "valuing" as a physical process. In the latter case what the nihilist means by "value" is inconsistent with what a non-nihilist means by "value": so we have to be careful here and distinguish the two.