On Thu, May 31, 2012 meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > Look up 'teleology'. >
Why? I already know it means things happen for a purpose, although it is never made clear who's purpose were talking about or what his purpose is supposed to be. One thing is clear, they had a purpose for a reason or they had a purpose for no reason, there is no third alternative. > Almost any reason a person will give > If he has a reason then he is deterministic. > for their actions will be a reference to some future state. > I did it because I desire to be in state X and I believe my present action will bring that about; and my desire and my belief have a cause or they do not have a cause, there is no third alternative. > In a deterministic world all physics is time reversible > Not necessarily, in a deterministic world X and Y will always produce Z, but Q and T could also always produce Z, so if you detect the existence of Z you can't reverse things and figure out what the world was like in the past, you don't know if it was a world of X and Y or a world of Q and T. In a universe like that you could predict the future but you wouldn't know what happened in the past. Of course this is really moot, we probably don't live in a deterministic world, some things happen for no reason, some things are random. > the question is whether this reason in terms of future purpose had a > *physical* cause. > I don't understand your emphasis, even information is physical, it determines entropy and takes energy to manipulate. I don't know what on earth would a non physical cause be like but I do know that the non physical cause would itself have a cause or it would not have a cause, there is no third alternative. > Believers in 'contra causal free will' suppose that it did not, that my > 'soul' or 'spirit' initiated the physical process without any determinative > physical antecedent. A belief that was enormously popular during the dark ages and led to a thousand years of philosophical dead ends; not surprising really, confusion is inevitable if you insist on trying to make sense out of gibberish. > they think some events are physically uncaused > So they think it had no cause > but not-random > So they "think" it happened for no cause and didn't happen for no cause and once again we enter into the merry world of gibberish. > because they are purposeful. > Then the purpose is the cause, and the purpose exists for a reason or the purpose exists for no reason, there is no third alternative. > it is hard to eliminate the possibility that a 'spirit' might influence > the distribution of these random events > Then of course they would not be random but determined by the spirit, and the spirit influenced those things for a reason or for no reason, there is no third alternative. > I think the apparent markers of 'free will', unpredictability and > purposefulness, are easily explained without invoking 'spirits'. > Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string "free will" means and neither do you. John K Clark -- 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.
