Hi Ian,
> Ian said: > The good thing about that exchange dmb & Steve, is that it's on topic. > Causation. Steve: Is that what you have been wanting to talk about? Why didn't you just say so? Is there something you wanted to say about it? I see causality as an intellectual pattern of value--one of the tools we have evolved for coping with reality. As we become better and better at wielding this tool for predicting and controlling, is there some point at which we should become concerned that the tool has actually been the thing that has been controlling _us_ since before we even existed? I call that "being afraid of ghosts." If causality is a tool that evolved after humanity came along to help humans cope, how could it have been controlling everything before we even existed? All the existential anxiety in pondering causality comes from thinking of it in metaphysical terms--as what is ULTIMATELY going on in the world--rather than as a tool. Pragmatism is a good therapy for this fear. Once we subtract the metaphysical baggage from determinism (the stuff about what is REALLY real with other descriptions being mere illusions) we pragmatists aren't afraid of such "ghosts." The mystery to me is how James would not follow the path of Dewey on this issue (Putnam: "Dewey holds that the question of whether we have free will arises out of a radically false worldview--a dualism that regards the moral agent as separate and different from the natural world and takes the world to be deterministic. Dewey takes it that the free will issue disappears once that radically false wordview is rejected.") Why was James so afraid of ghosts? I bet it is related to his soft spot for religion and a deep-seeded SOM-holdover psychological need that he tried hard to rationalize. 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
