ALB
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Interesting (but unfortunate name — when I saw “Christian List on Free Will” I thought I had gone to a religious site).
I don’t think that TM here was denying that humans are “intentional agents” (have “wills”) or have “causal control” (that what they do causes something to happen). He was denying that humans can choose between “alternative possibilities” — that when you go into a cafe your choice whether to order tea or coffee is not a free one, that if you chose tea that was the only possibility (as shown by you choosing it)
A difficult position to maintain unless you are prepared to argue that everything that happens (and is going to happen) was predetermined at the time of the Big Bang. Or, as List points out, unless you think that the only reality is the movement of physical particles and that everything can (and should?) be explained in terms of this. In other words, “mechanical materialism”.
I have finally got round to watching that video on so-called “free will”. Alex presents his case well enough. See post #238723.
But what he is actually arguing against is the claim that people are free to decide to do something they don’t want to do. This is because he assumes, by definition, that what you do (unless coerced) is what you want to do. So whatever you do do, you wanted to do, otherwise you wouldn’t have done it.
It’s a bit of a sophist’s argument rather like the subject of a student study essay I once had to write: if good is what you want, can you want to do bad?
What about at a factual level? Most people will agree that at least some of what they want to do does depend on external factors such as the past and present experiences such as the way they were brought and the type of society they are living in.
But agreed, they will still want to say that they can freely choose between different options on simple everyday matters such as to what clothes to wear or what to eat for breakfast.
Alex says this is an illusion (because everything that happens anywhere in the universe at one moment is determined by everything that happened before right back to the Big Bang). Maybe it is in that unhelpful sense (unhelpful because it doesn’t explain anything). Or maybe “free will” is the (unhelpful) name given to that illusion?
Yes, the German Greens are a bunch of Scheißer. But not so much for keeping nuclear plants going as for being war-mongers over Ukraine. Quite unconcerned about the carbon footprint of the Russo-NATO war.
“air (spiritus)”
I wonder if that’s where the term
“airy fairy” comes from?But, seriously, what has air being material (as it is) got to do with “spirituality”? They are two different things. As an emotion “spirituality” is also material and can be studied by materialist science too.
As to Sagan, I saw the tv series and have got the book. They were good. Sagan was ok, except he was a bit soft on religion. I’m with Dawkins on that.
More Russia Ukraine, Same Refrain:
“The coercive regulation envisaged by the bill and in the hands of a regulator totally controlled by the government is worthy of the worst authoritarian regimes.”
https://news.yahoo.com/zelensky-signs-media-law-criticized-224451134.html
But I come from a family that doesn’t just contemplate art but actually practises it !
https://www.artrenewal.org/artists/robin-buick/517
I would say interesting rather than beautiful.
As for Sagan, what’s he talking about? “Emotional” seems to be the word he is looking for as he says what he has in mind is material and can be studied, as our emotions are and can be.
“Spirituality” is quite the wrong word, with its suggestion of non-material spirits which have been shown not to exist. Anyway it’s already been bagged, with more justification, by the Spiritualists.
I agree with Wez that it’s a word we should be suspicious of.
His obituary in today’s Times says he was “a lifelong socialist”. In 1997 he told the London Evening Standard that he had once been a member of our party. As the February 1998 Socialist Standard reported: —
“Asked if his political consciousness had been awakened by meeting members of the ruling class at Cambridge University he replied:
“Actually. I was a member of something called the Socialist Party of Great Britain at school for a while. You had to pass an exam, you known. You could not just join” (Evening Standard, 3 December).”That would have been in Nottingham in the mid 1950s as a result of the outdoor meetings we held there.
I don’t suppose he meant spending too much time carrying out scientific experiments rather than contemplating.
I never said that thinking proceeds brain activity. I just mentioned that as a possibility in the course of replying to LEW’s request to produce the scientific evidence that thinking was linked to physical brain activity.
Your answer seems to be that you know this from your own “contemplation” of how you feel when you think. Quite how you can know from that what is going on in your brain you don’t explain. In any event, only empirical research is going to provide the answer.
The most famous contemplative philosopher was of course Descartes who came up with the conclusion “I think, therefore I am” and so started off the “ghost in the machine” myth that the next century materialists demolished.
He also forgot that he was only to able to think because he was a member of society. He thought in words and words and their meaning are a social product. He should have concluded. “I am a member of society, therefore I think”.
The word “contemplation” reminded me of what Joseph Dietzgen had to say about “philosophic speculation”:
“When we retire to the solitude of our cell to search there in deep contemplation, or, as it were, in the inner-most of our brains, for the right way we want to follow the next morning, we must remember that our mental effort can be successful only because of our previous, if involuntary, experiences and adventures which we, by help of our memory, have taken along into our cell.
That tells the whole story of philosophic speculation or deduction. These philosophers imagine they have drawn their theories, not from concrete material, but from the innermost of their brains, while, as a matter of fact, they have but performed an unconscious induction, a process of thought, of argument not without material, but with indefinite and therefore, confused material. Conversely, the inductive method is distinguished only by this that its deduction is done consciously.“https://www.marxists.org/archive/dietzgen/works/1870s/scientific-socialism.htm
The second half of your comment is philosophical speculation.
I wouldn’t say “philosophical” speculation. That something was going on in the brain when we think would have been that in the 18th and 19th centuries as philosophers sat in their armchairs contemplating. Though even in the 19th century such “speculation” could be a scientific like Darwin’s conclusion that there must be something like what was later identified as genes.
Today, with regard to the brain, it has been established and verified that there is a correlation between recordable brain activity and thinking. That is no longer speculation. What is speculation, ie open to testable hypotheses, is what is the relationship between the two. For instance, does thinking cause brain activity or does brain activity cause thinking or are they part of one and the same process? I don’t know what neurologists are concluding, though there seems to be some evidence that brain activity precedes thinking in some circumstances at least. For instance:
I don’t claim to have any special knowledge in this field but am mainly relying on what I read in the Skeptical Inquirer.
separating the term from its modern use
What is its modern use? People who have read a bit about philosophy will know what its historical use was and why it was controversial (and even progressive as a weapon in the rising bourgeoisie’s ideological battle against mediaeval obscurantism).
But I doubt many others will see much difference between your “did it of own volition” and “did it voluntarily” or “did it of own free will”. Maybe they should but they don’t. And it’s unfair to those who don’t to then attribute to them the idea of a supernatural “self” which won’t be what they believe.
Not that someone would normally say “I did it of my own free will”. That sounds rather pompous and the sort of thing you would only say on some formal occasion as in a court of law. I suspect some are defending it because they as interpreting you as saying that they didn’t do something “of their own volition”. Which, ironically, you wouldn’t object to them saying. Some may do this vociferously, dismissing you as a crackpot for saying that they were forced to do something “of their own volition”.
It’s you who are being vociferous here by pedantically insisting that the word should only be used in its 18th century sense. Actually I agree with you that it can be confusing to use it other than in that sense but I don’t see the need to make a big song and dance about it. It doesn’t make the user a philosophical idealist.
So your anathema for using the mere words “free” and “will” in conjunction only applies to members of the Socialist Party. Members of the Roman Catholic Church, the church that banned Voltaire’s works and excommunicated anyone of their flock that read them, is exempt. Not only can its priests continue to propagate the doctrine if Free Will but its followers should also be allowed to join the revolutionary socialist party. Are you having us on or being wilfully provocative? Voltaire must be turning in his grave.
