Skip to main content

to the free-will skeptic...

... who might point out that things go on in the brain at the preconscious level before we are aware of ourselves as "deciding" whether to have vanilla or chocolate, and do so in a manner that predicts with perfect accuracy the consequent expression of a decision. My reply(ies):
1. It may well be the case that such deliberations and choices are not free when no particular significance is attached to the two choices other than direct desire for a tastier flavor.
2. But what if one asks a person who is fasting from chocolate for religious reasons about their preference? Does the same neural process take place prior to the expression of a preference?
3. And what about deliberation about what Strawson calls second-order desires (i.e., which desires are desirable to have)? Isn't that more pertinent to what freedom is all about? What type of neural activity precedes these sorts of decisions?
4. If the mere fact that some preconscious activity predicts our conscious "choices" might not be the same as causing those so called choices. What if another neural process were to invariably precede our explicit knowledge of the necessary nature of the truths of math and logic. Would that antecedent process strictly cause our conviction that these truths are universal and necessary? If so, then wouldn't it be harder to believe that really know these truths are universal and necessary? If not then can we cut slack to liberatarians when they claim we have free will even if some apparent (& very low level) choices don't seem to be free?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...
6 comments
Read more

interesting article by Jimmy Akin on death before the Fall

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/did-animals-die-before-the-fall/ Akin below: Aquinas.... writes: In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon. Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1:30, say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some. Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals  [ Summa Theologiae I:96:1 ad 2 ].  Aquinas thus holds that it was not  all  death that entered the world through man's sin, but human  death.
Post a Comment
Read more