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.
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.
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