Think of this as a continuation of the post that is above it...

Let's pick up where I left off above... by the way, the comments below are probably more closely related to the previous post

If humans, as animals, have bodily movement that follow the laws of physics, and human choices as well as the execution of those choices are in part biological events, then how can human actions be free?

Possible approaches to answering this question:

1. note that the very act of knowing necessary truths can't be explained in terms of purely physical laws. For the object of knowledge, as a universal truth, is not a purely concrete event. So that if the act of knowing these truths is in part a biological event yet this does not prevent knowing from operating at the same time on a plane that transcends the merely biological, something similar should be true for the operation of human rational appetite (the operations of which include free choice)

2. note that the way the question sets up the problem assumes that every whole is the sum of its parts, so that the act we ascribe to the whole is really a shorthand summation of the interactions of its parts. But if there are wholes whose operations that are more than the sum of the operations of their parts, then the assumption underlying the very asking of the question has been undermined. (Think Michael Polanyi)

3. this is really an example of the general point made in 2: point out how living things act in a way that surpasses the physical laws of non-living things without violating the same laws.

4. contrast how necessity is understood in the Aristotelian and in certain modern views of nature. For Aristotle, natural beings act necessarily for inherently determined ends or goals, but they certainly don't necessarily achieve them. For a modern, necessity has to do at a general level with the laws of nature, more concretely: this event might be considered as being the necessary consequence of antecedent events, inasmuch as this relation of antecedent and consequent is a complex result of the confluence of various laws of nature. My suspicion is that the latter sort of necessity is -- surprisingly -- an example of anthropomorphism. The necessity that moderns ascribe to the laws of nature might have more to do with the necessity found in mathematical truths than it has to do, if you will, with the nature of nature, and mathematical knowledge is not a purely physical event.

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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