On Feb 8, 6:45 am, 1Z <peterdjo...@yahoo.com> wrote: > On Feb 7, 12:52 pm, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > It depends if you consider biology metaphysical. Free will is a > > > > capacity which we associate with living organisms, > > > > rightly or wrongly > > > There may not be a rightly or wrongly. > > Neither rightly nor wrongly? Yes. There may not be an absolute correlation between living organisms and free will so much as a relative expectation of free will in things which are similar to the (any) observer. My hunch is that there probably is a correlation between what we think of as having free will and it's actual capacity for it, but who knows, we don't seem to be a very good judge of that kind of thing. > > > Free will, as an aspect of > > consciousness, may be subjective. > > The degree to which we infer the > > other as having the capacity for free will may be directly > > proportional to the perception of similarity to oneself. > > That doesn;t affect my point. if we are mistaken > in attributing FW to ourselves ITFP, we will be mistaken > in attributing to others on the basis of similarity to ourselves. It think the possibility of falsely attributing FW to ourselves ITFP fails since it entails making a distinction between FW and determinism, which would not be conceivable without FW ITFP. It would be like trying to make a distinction between air and the shadow of an invisible palm tree. The whole idea of having an opinion of whether or not we have FW rests on our capacity to have and change an opinion, which would be meaningless under determinism. > > >Judged from a > > distant scale and perspective, there is nothing about our patterns of > > civil construction on this planet, or the patterns of our molecules > > and cells that demands to be associated with free will from an > > objective point of view. > > Hence the "maybe wrongly". Which you have disputed on > grounds that are not clear to me. I dispute it on the grounds that dispute is only possible with FW to begin with. We can only doubt the depth of the freedom of our will in relation to our 3p view of our behavior - which is why I say there is a direct proportion relation there; the further we focus outside of ourselves in microcosm, macrocosm, or unfamiliarity (as when we confront another culture for the first time), the less we are able to identify personally, and the more we focus on the logic of the behavior. Logic is impersonal, not by accident, but ontologically: Logic is the personal experience of the inversion of personal experience. It elides the 'show' of the universe into a description of the patterns underlying the show. Living with only logic would be paralysis (there was a study of a patient who lost part of his limbic system so that he had limited emotional capacity...he would stand frozen the cereal aisle in the grocery store because he couldn't figure out what his preference is). Contrast this with your imagination. Here we are most interior and here, not coincidentally, our will is most free. My idea then is that the experience of free will is the same thing as the feeling of subjectivity, and the deeper subjectivity you have, the more freedom you can exercise, both internally and potentially externally. > > > > > > > particularly if > > > > they have some kind of system of self-directed propulsion. With the > > > > ability to move freely comes the opportunity for more sophisticated > > > > forms of intentionality to develop. This is not to say that a plant > > > > doesn't not have some measure of free will, but it seems that the true > > > > potential of will is tied up in control over location. Like many other > > > > biological qualities (feeling, desire, etc), free will doesn't > > > > translate meaningfully into the language of physics. > > > > That might mean it never existed, and our "association" was wrong. > > > What's the counterargument? > > > We would have to explain the existence of the possibility of any > > association to begin with. > > Fine. Then mind exists on order to make associations, right or wrong. > That doesn't entail FW exists. No, but the universality of the association says something consistently true either about the mind (or the brain, individuals, culture, species, scale of body, etc) or about the reality which the mind is considering. > > > What purpose would such an association > > serve and why is it (nearly) a human universal? > > There are plenty of answers to those questions. Some of them > are Error Theories. Errors is an interpretation made on the association, the association itself can't ultimately be an error. That's why I say rightly or wrongly we still have to explain why most everyone on Earth feels that they have free will (whether or not they have chosen to interpret it as an illusion of mechanism) and why they also feels that inanimate objects do not have free will (whether or not they choose to interpret that as illusion of spirituality). > > > This doesn't prove the > > validity of the association, but it makes sense of the failure of > > defining 1p free will in 3p mechanistic terms. > > I don't think that has failed: I am a naturalistic libertarian. What is your 3p definition of 1p free will? Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
