Hi dmb, On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 3:24 PM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > Steve said: > That idea agrees with what Putnam said..."Yet James also believed that the > question of whether we have free will cannot be settled on intellectual > grounds. Consequently, it is the sort of question one is entitled to answer > on passional grounds; James asserts he has free will." ...surely we don't > have a forced choice between abandoning either science or morality. These > "devastating logical consequences" are only possible under SOM where either > one metaphysical belief or the other can be true. ...After we have abandoned > SOM, what "passional grounds" even remain for choosing one over the other? > What is left to get all passionate about once we view free will and > determinism as intellectual patterns that can be used for whatever purposes > they may be good for rather than as competing claims about the ultimate > nature of reality? It seems to me that if someone claiming to have abandoned > SOM can still be driven into an existential funk while contemplating free > will versus determinism, then that person has not completely abandoned SOM. > > > > dmb says: > You seem to be saying that once we drop SOM ideas don't really matter. You > seem to think that being logically consistent or believing one thing instead > of the other just doesn't matter anymore. That strikes me as absurd in the > extreme.
Steve: When I "seem to be saying" something that "strikes [you] as absurd in the extreme" I hope you consider that that may be because that is not what I mean. Of course "ideas don't really matter" is not at all what I mean. Both of us agree that that is an absurd notion. What I am saying is that if we aren't looking at the choice between free will and determinism as a choice between two alternatives constructions for what is REALLY going on in the world--for which either one or the other is the one true description of The Way Things Really Are independent of human needs and interests--then why on earth we get all suicidal contemplating these ideas? dmb: For the pragmatist, the truth of an idea is measured in terms of its consequences in experience. This has nothing to do with what's absolutely true or metaphysically true or the really real. It's just about what happens when you put the idea to work. If an idea is a logical train wreck, then it clearly won't work. If an idea renders your actions inert and your life meaningless, then that's a very bad idea, a destructive idea that does not serve life. Quite the opposite. If think you can hang determinism in this pragmatic gallery of truth, then you probably can't discern good art from bad art. Steve: But that's just it. If we subtract the metaphysical baggage from BOTH free will AND determinism, then how could the idea of determinism render your actions inert and your life meaningless? If we are are considering determinism pragmatically rather than married to SOM, then we aren't considering it as a candidate for what is REALLY going on in spite of all appearances to the contrary. It is just the human hope that we can improve our lives by coming descriptions of things in terms of causes and effects. As James put it in the Indeterminism talk... "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." 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
