How often do you see a cartoon like this?
(From the New Yorker’s “Cartoon photos” Facebook page; h/t: Vincent)
Incompatibilism makes The New Yorker
March 30, 2015 • 6:54 am
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
heh.
Very topical 🙂
Hm. The question is what the cartoonist is trying to say by putting the incompatiblist claim onto the sign of a conspiracy nut. This could surely, intentionally or not, be read as poking fun at the claim that the environment controls us in the same sense as a shadowy conspiracy would control politics.
(Does control matter to anybody, or does the term control even apply, if what ‘controls’ is not another intelligent agent like oneself, perhaps not even a thing?)
He had no choice but to draw the cartoon that way.
I do find it highly significant that the particular philosophical view that evokes this sort of amusing ridicule is that of incompatibilism.
Randomly…
Hmmmm but the “random”.
Predetermined events appear random because they remain unpredictable to our limited faculties. Since the artist accepts the non-existence of free will, the sign rates at most one half of a Pinocchio.
Contingencies are effectively random for the casual observer.
The topic is consistent. because in the end it turned out that Pinocchio had no tree will.
XLNT!
And thus the story turns out just as he nose it wood.
You are just stringing us along with your punny post.
There’s no strings on me: I’m a real boy!
Indeed, there was nothing yesterday that was random…no miracles, no events outside physical possibilities, once examined.
Random is the future, and only a tiny bit of that.
Yeah, I get up every morning, eat, go to work, come home, read WEIT, go to bed. Not a whole lot of randomness going on.
It might not be random, but it is chaotic. Chaotic systems can be entirely deterministic yet completely unpredictable.
Every day (once I pin this to the notice board in my office).
/@
Not often enough
If events remain unpredictable, our limited faculties notwithstanding, then they cannot be said to be predeterminable [or predetermined]. That they appear random is because they are unpredictable.
Control is an illusion.