Reading the cute refutation reminds me of Anselm or some other philosopher who plays fast and loose with epistemic and metaphysical language in order to pull an impossibility out of a hat. There are many ways to think about free will; its supposed opposition to determinism is just one way of looking at it. I have always found the free wi…
Reading the cute refutation reminds me of Anselm or some other philosopher who plays fast and loose with epistemic and metaphysical language in order to pull an impossibility out of a hat.
There are many ways to think about free will; its supposed opposition to determinism is just one way of looking at it. I have always found the free will vs determinism argument boring though, not because it has been discussed to death, but because the concept of free will has always seemed to smuggle in some kind of crypto-dualism where there is some unstated and unacknowledged homunculus viewing the world through the cartesian theater. I just don't see how the concept of "free will" could make any sense at all if one thoroughly rejects dualism.
How do you explain the fact that some physical movements can be considered "free" while others, such as the involuntary movements associated with Huntington's disease or other disorders, are not? Depending on the disease state, it may only be a question of a relatively small group of neurons dying that makes the difference. What does freedom mean to you exactly?
The only way I can think of preserving the concept of "freedom" from the biological-reductionist approach (which is the only approach that makes sense to me) is to think of it as a higher-order/emergent psychological phenomenon as opposed to some intrinsic feature of human action.
If "free will" is to have any meaning at all, I prefer to think about it like a self-regulatory capacity one develops rather than a statement about causality. It is closer to something like agency, or the feeling of integrity that comes with knowing that your thoughts and actions are in harmony. When people talk about not being "slaves to their passions", this is getting at the kind of freedom I am talking about. The ability to control rage, for example, makes us freer to respond to a situation in a wider and more useful varieties of ways. Often restraint and limitation leads to greater freedom later on, as in the case of saving money. This approach takes free will as a more "psychological" or ethical subject, but I think we'll get more mileage out of the concept if we think about it that way.
Another way of saying all of this is that the question of free will only comes up for us because the actual workings and mechanisms of our minds are opaque to us.
Reading the cute refutation reminds me of Anselm or some other philosopher who plays fast and loose with epistemic and metaphysical language in order to pull an impossibility out of a hat.
There are many ways to think about free will; its supposed opposition to determinism is just one way of looking at it. I have always found the free will vs determinism argument boring though, not because it has been discussed to death, but because the concept of free will has always seemed to smuggle in some kind of crypto-dualism where there is some unstated and unacknowledged homunculus viewing the world through the cartesian theater. I just don't see how the concept of "free will" could make any sense at all if one thoroughly rejects dualism.
How do you explain the fact that some physical movements can be considered "free" while others, such as the involuntary movements associated with Huntington's disease or other disorders, are not? Depending on the disease state, it may only be a question of a relatively small group of neurons dying that makes the difference. What does freedom mean to you exactly?
The only way I can think of preserving the concept of "freedom" from the biological-reductionist approach (which is the only approach that makes sense to me) is to think of it as a higher-order/emergent psychological phenomenon as opposed to some intrinsic feature of human action.
If "free will" is to have any meaning at all, I prefer to think about it like a self-regulatory capacity one develops rather than a statement about causality. It is closer to something like agency, or the feeling of integrity that comes with knowing that your thoughts and actions are in harmony. When people talk about not being "slaves to their passions", this is getting at the kind of freedom I am talking about. The ability to control rage, for example, makes us freer to respond to a situation in a wider and more useful varieties of ways. Often restraint and limitation leads to greater freedom later on, as in the case of saving money. This approach takes free will as a more "psychological" or ethical subject, but I think we'll get more mileage out of the concept if we think about it that way.
Another way of saying all of this is that the question of free will only comes up for us because the actual workings and mechanisms of our minds are opaque to us.
Well it's not really a problem since dualism is obviously true.