Hi Jan-Anders, On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:33 AM, Jan-Anders Andersson <[email protected]> wrote: > That fashion of the day was anyway 130 years ago.
Steve: Yeah, I thought it was an interesting historical note to see what sort of rhetorical position James saw himself in. The Determinists had claimed the word "freedom." Inspite of dmb's "look, Steve, it's simple..." the issue of whether freedom needs to be thought of as in opposition to determinism is an old one. It is not a new fashion for Parfit and Dennett to take a compatibilist view. James mentioned that in his time some dude named Hudgson unabashedly called himself a "free will determinist." Jan-Anders: > The MOQ view upon free will says that there are no such thing as TOTAL > determinism nor TOTAL indeterminism. Steve: I think that everyone one all sides of the modern debate sees it that way too. What James called determinism, people today would call fatalism. Modern day determinists don't believe in TOTAL determinism of the sort where everything that ever happened was inevitable from the beginning of time and nothing we do could ever change it. Dennett: "Going to happen" is a very misleading phrase. Say somebody throws a baseball at your head and you see it. That baseball was "going to" hit you until you saw it and ducked, and then it didn't hit you, even though it was "going to." In that sense of "going to," Kennedy's assassination was by no means going to happen. There were no trajectories which guaranteed that it was going to happen independently of what people might have done about it. If he had overslept or if somebody else had done this or that, then it wouldn't have happened the way it did. Dennett: Fatalism is the idea that something's going to happen no matter what you do. Determinism is the idea that what you do depends. What happens depends on what you do, what you do depends on what you know, what you know depends on what you're caused to know, and so forth--but still, what you do matters. There's a big difference between that and fatalism. Fatalism is determinism with you left out. If I accomplish one thing in this book, I want to break the bad habit of putting determinism and inevitability together. Inevitability means unavoidability, and if you think about what avoiding means, then you realize that in a deterministic world there's lots of avoidance. The capacity to avoid has been evolving for billions of years. There are very good avoiders now. There's no conflict between being an avoider and living in a deterministic world. There's been a veritable explosion of evitability on this planet, and it's all independent of determinism. 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
