On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 4:12 PM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > Steve said to dmb: > 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. > > dmb says: > Not at all. The MOQ says freedom and restraint are both real in the empirical > sense, not metaphysically. It is the determinists who insist that reality > differs from appearance, by denying the freedom we experience as an illusion. > We see this in James's description of determinism too, but describing an idea > is not the same as subscribing to it.
Steve: You keep missing the other side of the "metaphysical baggage" issue. You insist that, for example "choice" means free will, while as I've said many many times, all I mean by "choice" is that we do one thing and don't do another. We don't need to get into a denial of a determinism as an appearance reality issue to talk about doing one thing and not doing another. You are holding "free will" as something that can be described without appealing to metaphysics and also claiming that it is inherently opposed to to determinism (which you seem to insist say can only be viewed as a metaphysical position). But the denial of a particulr metaphysical position is a metaphysical position. It is to enter into the appearance/reality debate that anti-Platonists don't want to be in. When you say that "the freedom we experience is NOT an illusion" but rather real, you are taking a metaphysical position. When you deny determinism, you are asserting that our ability to dip into DQ and draw out an inexhaustible number of descriptions of experience in terms of causes and effects as an illusion. You are saying that causes aren't really real. That is the metaphysical baggage you are carrying into this debate. If we are going to compare free will and determinism on equal footing, then we ought to be willing to drop the metaphysical baggage from BOTH terms. If not--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. 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, so I think it would be far better to pick different terms in talking about freedom. 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
