On 8/10/2012 7:23 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
The modern positivist conception of free will has no scientific meaning. But all modern rephasings of old philosophy are degraded.
Or appear so because they make clear the deficiencies of the old philosophy.
Positivist philosophy pass everithing down to what-we-know-by-science of the physical level,
That's not correct. Postivist philosophy was that we only know what we directly experience and scientific theories are just ways of predicting new experiences from old experiences. Things not directly experienced, like atoms, were merely fictions used for prediction.
that is the only kind of substance that they admit. this "what-we-know-by-science" makes positivism a moving ground, a kind of dictatorial cartesian blindness which states the kind of questions one is permitted at a certain time to ask or not. Classical conceptions of free will were concerned with the option ot thinking and acting morally or not, that is to have the capability to deliberate about the god or bad that a certain act implies for oneself
One deliberates about consequences and means, but how does one deliberate about what one wants? Do you deliberate about whether pleasure or pain is good?
and for others, and to act for god or for bad with this knowledge. Roughly speaking, Men have such faculties unless in slavery. Animals do not.
My dog doesn't think about what's good or bad for himself? I doubt that.
The interesting parts are in the details of these statements. An yes, they are questions that can be expressed in more "scientific" terms. This can be seen in the evolutionary study of moral and law under multilevel selection theory: https://www.google.es/search?q=multilevel+selection&sugexp=chrome,mod=11&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 which gives a positivistic support for moral, and a precise, materialistic notion of good and bad. And thus suddenly these three concepts must be sanctioned as legitimate objects of study by the positivistic dictators, without being burnt alive to social death, out of the peer-reviewed scientific magazines, where sacred words of Modernity resides. We are witnessing this "devolution" since slowly all the old philosophical and theological concepts will recover their legitimacy, and all their old problems will stand as problems here and now. For example, we will discover that what we call Mind is nothing but the old concepts of Soul and Spirit.
After stripping "soul" of it's immortality and acausal relation to physics.
Concerning the degraded positivistic notion of free will, I said before that under an extended notion of evolution it is nor possible to ascertain if either the matter evolved the mind or if the mind selected the matter. So it could be said that the degraded question is meaningless and of course, non interesting.
But the question of their relationship is still interesting. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
