Hi Jan-Anders, (Matt K mentioned) you said to dmb: > Maybe you should ask Steve about his definition of the word determinism. If > it should be equaled to Quality as determining factor behind choice, the D > should be classed as undefined, neither hard, nor soft or even not > determinism at all?
Steve: I have answered this question for dmb a few times previously, but for your benefit I'll answer again. I see determinism and free will as terms that have strong association with theories about the way things really are and are attempts to distinguish certain experiences as either real or illusory. In the MOQ experience is reality, so we ought not be worried about such questions as do people REALLY make choices or do they only SEEM to? If we drop the appearance/reality metaphysical baggage from both free will and determinism, we are left with free will as the fact that we make choices and an entirely compatible notion of determinism which just says that everything "depends." We can always look deeper and deeper for more and more patterns of dependency between actions, but whatever we learn about such relationships between experiences is no threat to the fact that choices are made all the time. That's "compatiblism." It is not the idea that we have SOME free will but we are also SOMEWHAT controlled. Compatiblism says that free will and determinism are both true. It says that the serpent of causation is thus over everything. By this I mean that if you go looking for explanations in terms of causes, there is no necessary point at which we must stop and say "this is or that, say, 'the will,' is the _final_ cause"). But at the same time, though everything can be thought of as having a cause, "everything" is a collection of value choices. (Notice that I did _not_ say that everything only ever pought to be thought of in terms of causes. This is analogous to the Matt K pragmatic version of materialism as "everything _can_ have a material description," as opposed to the metaphysical version, "everything only ever ought to be described in material terms because those are the terms the universe demands we use to talk about it.") Choices are part of experience, and so are intellectual explanations for choices in terms of causation (understood in the MOQ as patterns of preferences). Explaining a choice is not to explain it away. It is still a choice even if we can give reasons for it. In fact, if we can't give reasons for our choices, or even go so far as to say that there _are_ no reasons for them--if _that_ is what we mean by free will--then those choices would be just random. That wouldn't be the sort of freedom that anyone would want anyway. 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
