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

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...
Post a Comment
Read more

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here....
Post a Comment
Read more