Hi Andre. > Andre: > Hi Steve, I'll clarify some more where my confusion lies: When the artist in > front of the canvas goes: "There"...that's where the brush goes...I get the > sense that you still argue that that action is (pre)determined.
Steve: I understand causality as an intellectual pattern of value, therefore the question of determinism for me is not an issue of whether or not mechanistic laws of cause and effect are written into the cosmos and whether or not humans have some capacity to occasionally override these laws. That's why I think the old debate gets dissolved in the MOQ. Such laws are aesthetic creations of the intellect rather than objects which come prior to thought such that we would need to worry if these laws _control_ our thoughts. For me, what is left of determinism once we subtract the S/O picture is the pragmatic issue of the extent to which can can get control over our environment through getting better at making predictions. Our actions become more meaningful when we can predict what their effects will be. Therefore the more "determinism" we can find in the universe the better as far as human freedom is concerned. Being able to choose one course of action over another can only be a freedom worth having if there is a lot of predictability. As for the final location of the brush stroke being determined, of course I think of it that way. It must be determined by _something_ for it to be at all meaningful. The only alternative would be to shrug and say it is just some random twitch of the artists hand. I would say that usually the most apprpriate level of description for our purposes with regard to situations like this is that "where the brush goes" was determined by the painter. It's there because the artist wanted to put it there. We can certainly continue looking for causes on other levels of description if we think they may shed some light on the issue. Art critics of course do just that. "So and so paints the way he paints because he grew up in such and such a neighborhood where he was exposed to blah, blah, blah." We might also go looking for causes in terms of psychology or neural function or physics or whatever. I can see no end to where we might go to try to find more causes that may or may not help us predict future events and no reason to think that we have ever exhausted the possibility for coming up with more explanations for a given event in terms of causality. This view of "determinism" in a way is a sort of "indeterminism" not in the Jamesian description of it as chance but in that there is never a final word on just what determines what. Events never exhaust description in terms of causes or in lots of other sorts of terms. In the MOQ, one of the functions of DQ is as a conceptual placeholder for indeterminacy and as the bottomless well from which we draw determinacy as we become able to predict what we couldn't predict before. 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
