On 13 May 2012, at 03:48, Pierz wrote:
I remember a kid back in secondary school saying to me that if
everything was determined - as seemed inevitable to him from his
understanding of physics - then you might as well give up and
despair, since that was inevitable anyway! I tried to explain that
this was a confusion of levels between the absolute and the
relative, the same point that Bruno is making. From an absolute
perspective, we may be completely determined (or partially random,
it makes no difference essentially), from *inside* that system, our
best way of acting is *as if* free will/responsibility etc were
real. Obviously, if I act as if determinism was not a cause for
despair, my life is going to look a lot better than if I did, and
seeing as the absolute determinism of things does not tell me which
way to decide the issue, I'm forced to use my relative local wisdom
to decide on the former.
OK.
John Clarke seems to be saying that the law is an ass, not because
of human-level failures of reasoning/justice etc, but because the
criminal was predestined to act the way s/he did, or behaved
randomly, and in either case no reponsibility can be assigned. But
the mistake here is the same as the one made by my high school friend.
Yes. It is the same error, or quite related, to miss the difference
between 1-view and 3-view, despite free will and 1-indeterminacy are
related to different form of indeterminacy. But in both case Clark
abstracts himself from the local situation, like if the local
situation did not add and hide some (personal, local) information.
The absolute perspective has nothing useful to say about the local/
relative one.
Right.
If we were to follow this philosophy, the courage of heroes such as
Nelson Mandela would be no cause for Nobel Peace Prizes,
OK.
(BTW, since Obama get the Nobel prize of peace, for no reason, and
since he made Guantanamo into US laws), I think the Nobel prize has
lost a lot of its possible appeal, imho).
and the acts of villains such as Anders Breivik no cause for
censure, because such of their inevitability in the absolute scheme
of things.
The problem is that *not* censuring or *not* awarding prizes are
also evaluative acts, about which determinism and the absolute
perspective have nothing to say. And I believe that no-one, not even
JC himself, can escape the human perspective. When he loads derision
and sarcasm on other contributors' arguments, he is acting as if
they had a choice in what they believed. There can be no fools in
the abolute perpective, as there can be no criminals.
Good point.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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