New, improved meditation on teleology

I pulled out part of the previous post and edited it: [Hi Tim! If you're looking for your comment(s) and my reply, they're in the post that follows!]

Thomas Aquinas and other premoderns would be quite comfortable with the claim that a stone, if not impeded by an extrinsic force, falls to the earth. They would have described this process in teleological terms. The stone by nature inclines toward the earth and heads toward this goal unless something else, (which is also acting to achieve another goal), interferes with the trajectory of the former.

Things necessarily act for an end, but don’t necessarily achieve them.

But doesn’t every thing in nature act upon another so that the other behaves differently than it would have otherwise behaved? Does that mean that everything is frustrating whatever it interacts with? On the contrary, if any natural processes involve teleology, then the interactions involved in these processes are fullfilments rather than frustrations of purposes. But if some natural processes are fullfilments of nature, then why not all? To call some natural and other s “unnatural” as in frustrations of nature, we would have to assign value to the end products of some natural processes and disvalue to others. To do so would be an exercise of vanity. The only place where it would not be vain to make such a comparison would be in the contrast between living and non-living beings. Inasmuch as life is objectively of greater value than non-life (zoecentrism, anyone?) , it is rational to say that one thing that harms a living being act to frustrate the achievement of the natural end of another. But since there is no such comparison to be had among non-living things, there is no such objective basis for saying that an action frustrates the achievement of a goal. But that is not to deny teleology in the non-living world. Rather, it is to see teleology in holistic terms. Nature as a whole involves balances. Action reaction—stuff like that. It is as if nature as a whole were a living thing. It is only "as if," for while living things give birth to new, similar beings, nature doesn’t (multiverse octomoms, anyone?)

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity. He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem. But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones. In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again. They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is in fact different from the one that came before. Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...

naturalism (or rather, anti-supernaturalism) and preternaturalism

I will use the term "preternaturalism" to designate a willingness to posit causes that are less than divine but which stand above and beyond those observable ones we see operating within the laws of nature. A naturalist might oppose theistic arguments from miracles or design by arguing for the possibility of preternatural causes. Such an argument, however, would bring us back to Zeus and Hera, tree nymphs and the like: a supernatural explanation would, by contrast, be more conducive toward a scientific approach to nature (i.e., positing only laws that are falsifiable when doing science).

The Human Question

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