Hi again, Joe --
On Saturday, 8/27/11 7:50 PM, Joseph Maurer" <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Ham and all, I will ask a couple of questions. Does the acceptance of a principle of evolution create a free-will?
No. Evolution has nothing to do with free will, whether as an intellectual "principle" or a process of nature. The only relevance I can see is its association with "causality", which has wrongly been used to support the idea that human preferences and decisions are determined by previous causes, and that free will is therefore a myth. Daniel Dennett and other philosophers have effectively argued that intent is a voluntary expression of the individual self which is not controlled by natural causes.
"On the contrary," says Dennett, " it's only when you understand life from an evolutionary point of view that you understand what our freedom really is. You realize that it's real. It's different and better than the freedom of other animals, but it's evolved. What you_want_ is freedom, and freedom and determinism are entirely compatible. In fact, we have more freedom if determinism is true than if it isn't. Because if determinism is true, then there's less randomness. There's less unpredictability.
"To have freedom, you need the capacity to make reliable judgments about what's going to happen next, so you can base your action on it. If the effect of our genes on our likely history of disease were chaotic, let alone random, that would mean that there'd be nothing we could do about it. It would be like Russian roulette. You would just sit and wait. But if there are reliable patterns -- if there's a degree of determinism -- then we can take steps to protect ourselves." [The complete interview from which these statements are extracted is accessible at
http://reason.com/archives/2003/05/01/pulling-our-own-strings.]
Does the morality of good, bad, indifferent, adhering in the manifestation of free will, highlight a reality of sentient behavior?
I'm not sure what you mean by "highlight a reality". Good, bad, or indifferent are subjective judgments derived from Value which is a uniquely human sensibility. They also identify gradations of Morality as it applies to specific cultural or social mores. Apart from the fact that experience is sequential in time, the process of evolution does not control or influence our preferences. It's my belief that Value is man's affinity (or "love") for the essence or source of his reality. It is relative, rather than "universal", in that it's proprietary to the individuated self. How we differentiate Value experientially varies for each person, so it's unlikely that any two individuals will have identical preferences or desires.
Although my views do not necessarily reflect the MoQ, I'll be happy to elaborate on them should you have any additional questions.
Always nice to hear from you, Joe. Valuistically speaking, Ham Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
