Ian to Steve: > Apart from the meta-point of defending yourself against dmb, do you actually > have a point ? > (about determinism / free-will / compatibilism / terminology / MoQ, ...)
Steve: Yes, of course I do. What I have been suggesting is a distinction between the (I.) metaphysical question about free will (do we REALLY have free will? Is free will or determinism the one correct description of The Way Things Really Are?) from (II.) non-metaphysical pragmatic versions of the terms "free will" and "determinism." Ron: As said before I do not think at any time in this long discussion that anyone defended any of these points of views. You had defended the position that these terms carried too much SOM bagage to be able to be effectivly used in any other BUT from an SOM perspective. You had argued that they were then rendered meaningless and moot from a MoQ(compatabilist) point of view. 1. You asserted that the terms were allways used and concieved and only hold their meaning as a diametriclly opposed either/or proposition. 2.I said "not so" Compatabilism has used them effectivly (enter SEP). Which states that they really hold no defintate meaning to begin with and the terms Free will and determinism are broad general terms for a wide range of meaning one of them being Compatabilism. Pirsig quotes confirming MoQ is a form of compatabilism are posted. Yet you still frame the problem around the SOM bagage, the one that holds to a particular objective interpretation of the terms. Steve: I. On the metaphysical side of the issue, we have to further distinguish between SOM and the MOQ. In SOM, the traditional free will/determinism question is one about the Cartesian self and the extent to which it can have any control in an otherwise deterministic world governed by that set of mechanistic causal laws mentioned earlier. The MOQ of course says, "mu" to that version of the free will/determinism question since it does not accept the S-O premises on which it is based. But it has its own metaphysical version of the question of freedom which is not articulated in terms of "will" as a capacity of the Cartesian self. It replaces that sort of self with small self, i.e. a collection of static patterns of all four types, and Big Self, i.e. DQ. Big Self is free. Small self is determined, i.e, controlled by static patterns. The question thus gets dissolved. Free will and determinism are both true and both false depending on which "self" you are talking about. They are compatible when thought of as referring to different notions of selfhood. They are incompatible notions where only one can correctly apply when referring to just one of these notions of selfhood. (My complaint here has been that in talking about Pirsig's reformulation of the question of freedom is that "will" seems like the wrong word. And note that in Lila, Pirsig did not explicitly call his notion of freedom as the extent to which one follows dynamic quality "free will." I think it would be best not to use the term "free will" since it is likely to only lead to confusion while we have plenty of other Pirsigian ways of talking about freedom without it.) Ron: Which is what this really all about, YOU being stuck-on the metaphysical baggage. You dislike the term "will".. or "self" but what other terms simply, plainspoken pragmatically be more accurate? what else is more useful to predicate the act of disinguishing between two types of selfhood or explain the act of following or choosing each in experience? Do we really want to go the route of esoteria? is it an effective rhetorical tool? Steve: II. On the pragmatic side of the issue, if we are going to take an innocuous non-metaphysical view of free will, it only seems fair that we ought to be willing to do the same for determinism, and when we do that we find that free will and determinism are compatible concepts. Instead of free will being the faculty of a Cartesian self to function as an internal ultimate cause which can occasionally violate the external laws of causality, it is merely the fact that we make choices, act on our desires and intentions, and could have acted differently if we had wanted to. Likewise, instead of taking determinism to insist on causality as the one true way of thinking about all of reality, it is simply the human hope for increasing our power to predict and control things by making explanations of things in terms of causality (the non-metaphysical kind of causality), with the recognition that there is much more to life that predicting and controlling things. On this pragmatic account, I see no reason why becoming better at predicting could be held as mutually exclusive with the ability to act responsibly. In fact, the more determinism there is, the more meaningful our free will is since our actions have predictable consequences. If the importance of free will is thought to be moral responsibility, then clearly being held responsible only makes sense if our actions have predictable results. On this view (from Dennett), moral responsibility is not only compatible with determinism but is predicated on it. Note that if someone says, "how can we be held morally responsible if everything we do is controlled by forces beyond our control?," this person has clearly slipped back into an SOM metaphysical version of the free will/determinism which says that one or the other--either free will or mechanistic causal determinism--is the way things REALLY are and our choices are perhaps mere illusions. A pragmatist doesn't ask which description (causality or choice?) is what is REALLY going on. Both are intellectual descriptions made by human beings because human beings have the desires they have (descriptions which are forever entangled with those human values) rather than because a particular account free of human values was simply handed to us by the universe. Ron: In that Pragmatic vein, The Pragmatist does not ask which one is true BUT a Pragmatist DOES ask which one is better in a given circumstance. A Pragmatist MIGHT even ask which one is moraly superior in a metaphysical explanation.ex." DQ is morally superior to SQ. " Thus big self is morally superior to small self, freedom is superior to determinism. You really dont like this idea do you? You keep trying to reframe it as an SOM explanation so you can attack it on those grounds but its just not working. .. ... 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