Hi dmb,
> dmb said: > If the dictionary says free will is the ability to make choices but you say > making choices has nothing to do with freewill, then you are misusing the > terms "free will" and "choice". You do that a lot. > > Steve repled: > As I have said many times, both free will and determinism acknowledge the > fact that we make choices. The traditional dilemma is about whether choices > are only somewhat or completely determined by external factors. > > dmb says: > There you go again. I suppose that what you really means to say - or what you > should be saying - is that determinism acknowledges that we SEEM to make > choices, but they say that appearance is an illusion because we are in fact > determined whether we see past that illusion or not. Steve: This is a perfect example of the metaphysical baggage I was talking about in the OP of this "baggage" thread. You think free will can survive jettisoning its metaphysical baggage, but at the same time you insist that determinism is married to its metaphysical baggage. You insist that we can't talk about choice with respect to determinism without bringing in an appearance-reality distinction and "illusion." As I said before, If we are going to consider determinism in its most absurd metaphysical form then we should do the same with free will. Likewise, if we are going to try to rescue the notion of free will by freeing it of its metaphysical baggage, we ought to do the same for determinism. This is precisely what James did in his "The Dilemma of Determinism" talk... James: "The principle of causality, for example,--what is it but a postulate, an empty name covering simply a demand that the sequence of events shall someday manifest a deeper kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary juxtaposition which now phenomenally appears? It is as much an altar to unknown gods [compare to Pirsig's 'ghosts'] as the one that Saint Paul found in Athens. All our scientific and philosophical ideals are alters to unknown gods ["every last bit of it"]. Uniformity [determinism] is as much so as is free-will. If this be admitted, we can debate on even terms. But if one pretends that while freedom and variety are, in the first instance, subjective demands, necessity and uniformity are something altogether different, I do not see how we can debate at all." Steve: If we are going to compare free will and determinism "on even terms," then we ought to see them both as "ghosts" (just as Dan and Horse dealt with them as illusions) rather than see one as making metaphysical demands on the true nature of things and the others as just a conventional view. They are both intellectual patterns of value. The MOQ denies both horns of the _traditional_ free will-determinism metaphysical dilemma, but as patterns of value they can coexist peacefully just as polar and rectangular coordinates do. They are both just paintings, and we don't need to decide which is the REAL painting. Now personally I see these both of these terms as dug so deep into SOM that wielding either one of them as though they had no metaphysical baggage will either require a lot of qualification or will result in a lot of misunderstandings (i.e. sneaking the Cartesian self or the Laws of Nature in the back door), so I think it would be far better to pick different terms in talking about freedom (such as Arlo's "agency" and "structure"). What I think we don't get to do (if we are playing fair) is to put up a metaphysically unladen version of free will against a metaphysically laden version of determinism to define free will as the opposition to such a version of determinism. We can equally come up with an metaphysically unladen version of determinism to put up against a metaphysically laden version where mechanistic cause and effect is replaced by an understanding of causality as patterns of preference emerging inexhaustibly from the well of DQ, or as James put it, a metaphysically "empty name covering simply a demand that the sequence of events shall someday manifest a deeper kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary juxtaposition which now phenomenally appears." A causes B can be understood as a value relationship where B has a stable pattern of preference for precondition A. I can see not wanting to use the term "determinism" at that point (I wouldn't), but I can't see how doing so does any more injury to "determinism" than calling the self an absurd fiction does to "free will." In short, I think both terms are better dropped as having too much metaphysical baggage, but I don't think you get to keep "free will" while denying "determinism" if you are playing fair and putting them both on even footing by re-conceptualizing them without the metaphysical baggage. Best, Steve 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
