Hi Steve I've followed the Free Will thread for some months with interest. Now it seems obvious that both of you use a different static pattern behind the word determinism.
Thanks for writing anyway. I enjoy it. Jan-Anders 14 sep 2011 kl. 17.44 Steve wrote: > 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
