ROGER FINALLY UNDERSTANDS STRUAN STRUAN: Roger. I think you will find that the author (Gary Watson) of the article you have read was saying how intractable the problem of proving a philosophically clear 'free will' which entails moral responsibility and what he calls autonomy. It is intractable because the free will it attempts to prove is a chimera. ROG: I am very impressed with your ability to find my reference with such sketchy sourcing. BRAVO! But the 'chimera' interpretation is all of your own. Mr Watson goes on to say...."But in view of the manifold complexity of this topic, pessimism would be somewhat hasty. All that can be said is that it is too soon to say." STRUAN: I sketched out my view of free will in my initial posting on the subject and showed how, contrary to your claim, autonomy is perfectly possible under the definition that, "free will lies in the fact that we cannot predict what we are going to do. ROGER: I have been unable to grasp your argument to prove free will until now. All along, I thought you were trying to really prove it. Instead, you have been dismissing it as an illusion caused by unpredictability. Now I see. And to think some have accepted your argument. STRUAN: An analogy: A computer is set up to solve an equation. An electronics engineer would consider this to be a physical system set up according to determinate laws, therefore its behaviour is determined purely by physical causes. The user, on the other hand, would consider that what matters is that the computer's behaviour is completely determined by the problem it is solving. There is no conflict here as the equation is not something outside the computer but embodied within it in such a way that the computer's behaviour is determined both by the physical forces and by the equation. The solving of the equation is the significance of the physical activity and so the two answers to the question, 'What determines behaviour?' are not rivals but complementary. (A and not A!) ROGER: Your argument supports causation well, but certainly has nothing to do with free will. But that is what you intended isn't it? STRUAN: Transport this analogy to humans and the significance is clear. A deterministic explanation showing how physical forces determine behaviour would rule out 'free will' only if choices and thought were external to the physical system. If our thinking and decision making processes are embodied in the workings of the brain then there is no contradiction in claiming that our behaviour is determined by our thinking and choosing, even if our brain mechanism is wholly physically determinate. ROGER: Now I see why the term in question is in parentheses. STRUAN: I still have a perfectly satisfactory answer which is accepted by most scientists and non-theologian philosophers working in the field and I see no need for your moq solution - of which, incidentally, I still can't make head nor tail. ROGER: Well at least I am in good company, as nothing in the MOQ seems of any value to you. I would worry if my one little argument stood out as especially brilliant. STRUAN: You seem to have a self which is identifying with other selves in some schizophrenic frenzy of action. What is this self which chooses between identifying with the biological self and the inorganic self? And how can this self affect the value patterns to make one victorious? Or does it just go with the flow? This seems unfeasibly confused and terribly convoluted to me and I can't see its relation to free will at all. ROGER: Well at least I must applaud your honest attempt to succinctly summarize my argument. That pretty much is what I was trying to do, you know, use the basic unfeasibly-confused-and-terribly-convoluted-schizophrenic-self free will attack initially popularized by .....Hobbes wasn't it? STRUAN: I'm afraid that I can't even begin to think in those terms any more. They seem so obscure and confused. Just in the first line of your explanation you wrote, "In SOM, the self is some fixed, objective entity." Again. If that is SOM then most empiricists do not subscribe to it. Take Hume for example, 'the self is nothing more than a bundle of perceptions which change from one instant to the next.' It seems to me that every time somebody throws SOM into the conversation, they do it solely to obfuscate precisely who and what they are talking about. Am I to take it that Hume is not part of this SOM conspiracy, or will he be dragged back in for the next conversation? It is like God. Impossible to disprove because it shifts around with every argument to suit the arguer. Disprove one use of the term (as I just have if the main strand of empiricism is to remain SOM) and remarkably a new use will emerge phoenix like from the ashes just in time to re-establish itself as the 'worthy adversary.' Can you blame me for concluding that it doesn't exist? ROGER: I would, but as you don't believe in free will would it matter? I am not suggesting the pattern of self doesn't change, just that it is a constant pattern. I know you see the difference here. Hasta la vista, Rog MOQ Online Homepage - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/ Unsubscribe - http://www.moq.org/md/index.html MD Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
