[Spacemonkey]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

It is not incompatible. There is a definite compulsion to choose whichever choice is made. Each person is different, and we cannot know in advance if the choice will be Obama or another President (as an example), but that doesn't change the fact that compulsion is involved even though you claim it's tautalogical because either choice is the right choice.

This has nothing to do with prediction. Your claim that there is definite compulsion involved flatly contradicts your admission that his principle is tautological. Tautologies are true in all conceivable scenarios and thus rule out nothing. Compulsions rule out certain possibilities in favor of others, and therefore must rule out something.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

The choice someone makes is contingent on his life circumstances, which only he knows. He is under a compulsion to choose that which is the most preferable. It's not an equal choice, and yet the necessary truth of this law is not predicting or stating what that choice will be. But that doesn't make it meaningless. All that this knowledge is meant to convey is that the choice that is made is the only choice that could have been made, after the fact.

What? I didn't ask you anything about a contingent choice. I am asking you for the conclusion of Lessans reasoning which you were referring to when you said it was not a contingent one.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

No. We're not inferring any conclusion from a necessary premise. We cannot infer that Obama is going to be elected.

You're all over the place here, Peacegirl. I'm not asking whether you can infer anything about Obama. Lessans obviously is inferring a conclusion from a necessary premise, because his satisfaction principle is the basis of all of his subsequent reasoning, and you've just agreed that this premise is necessary and tautological.

Do you believe that it is possible to validly infer a contingent conclusion from a necessary premise?

Originally Posted by peacegirl

It is provided. We can describe what the moon looks like from observation. He is not inferring anything. He is describing what he sees, which is not as obvious as looking at the moon, but is just as accurate.

You are still confusing making an observation with supporting what one says. Observation or not, he doesn't provide any support at all anywhere in his book for the alleged innate potential perfection of conscience which his argument relies upon. Firstly, it isn't possible to directly observe something like that, as it isn't something that can be perceived via the senses (like looking at the moon), and would have to be inferred in some manner. And secondly, being an observation doesn't make it supported. Support would be a reason, in the form of evidence or argument printed in the words of his book, for believing that conscience has some such innate potential for perfection. You have ZERO support for this. You have only your unshakeable faith that anything he asserted without supporting was something he must have been in a position to reliably 'observe' in some manner.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

The definition comes after the observation. He didn't create a definition with a goal in mind. Compabilists had a goal; they tried to make two opposing principles to fit neatly together, but if you look deeper, it does not fit. They are trying to make it appear that one kind of compulsion is forced, and another kind is not forced. That's 100% false. Compulsion is compulsion regardless of its strength. There is so much confusion with this word it is no wonder everyone is mixed up.

Nothing you've said here about compatibilism is even remotely accurate. Nor does any of this address the point you were replying to. Lessans failed to even consider the relevance of compatibilism for his argument, and showed no signs of even being aware of what is the dominant position on the issue he was discussing.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Just remember that every bit of empirical evidence to prove that dogs can recognize their master from a picture is not conclusive whatsoever. So don't tell me that scientists have support for this belief. It is completely unsupported and their statistical significance is nil. Not only that, his explanation is strongly supported because it takes language for human beings to identify differences in substance. A child will not be able to distinguish a fox from a dog until he learns the differences by means of words. My grandchild use to call big dogs lions because he didn't yet understand the characteristics that separate a lion from a dog, until he developed a picture of that difference which involved language. This is so clearly explained in the chapter that I have no doubt that the only people who are fighting me on this are the people who don't want him to be right.

Sorry, but you don't get to decide that all of the evidence supporting canine facial recognition counts for nothing at all just because you don't like it. But let's reverse engineer your father's sound reasoning based on astute observations and see what we've now got.

Humans allegedly can't distinguish between dogs and foxes without language, and cannot be conditioned to foods in a way that involves physically changing the taste buds. Therefore language affects vision in such a way as to make the projection of values possible, but this allegedly cannot be explained with afferent vision. Therefore the alleged (yet contrary to all actual experimental evidence) lack of facial recognition in dogs can be best explained by efferent vision plus their lack of language. Therefore humans have eyes which can see in real time thanks to photons which appear instantaneously having come from the Sun at which they were never located.

If this makes any kind of sense to you, then you are quite literally insane.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

You don't even understand the first thing about what he means when he says "projecting a value onto substance", so don't even go there. We cannot be conditioned in the way we are conditioned with the eyes. I don't know where everyone's been but I explained the difference. Association is not true conditioning. I am not inventing facts. Admit that you may be wrong on all counts, and I will respect your humility. Otherwise, I believe you have an agenda and that is to be right at all costs.

Regardless of whatever Lessans may have meant about projection as he described it, he was obviously completely ignorant of the existing actual knowledge on the subject if he thought value projection was impossible given afferent vision and could only be explained in the way that he claimed.