action, properties, soul, action, power and being

Scientists, inasmuch as they are focused on the observable/measurable, are concerned with actions, with dispositions to action, and with characteristics that distinguish things with one kind of disposition from those with other characteristics. This range of concerns is narrower than a philosopher might have: it tends to exclude concern with that in virtue of which a thing having many characteristic parts is one being rather than a composite of those parts. This narrow focus likewise bears upon our knowledge of a thing's substantial form, i.e. that in virtue of which it is one whole being rather than a composite of many beings. In the case of living things it bears upon the soul, for it is the form that gives unity to the parts, duration through time and a kind of impetus to life acts. The substantial form can be defined as the first act of a body, in virtue of which it acts as it does, while the soul gets a more specific definition the first act of a body disposed toward life, in virtue of which it engages in life acts. If there is a soul/substantial form, then science as practiced today is systematically blind to both of them. For scientists distinguish different kinds of things in virtue of the differences in their parts, and this focus leaves aside the question of why either of these types of components is one whole being or just part of a whole; it leaves aside the question of whether each of these components is likewise a whole being or a composite of even smaller parts. Cells consist of organelles, which consist of molecules, which consist of atoms, which consist of particles, etc. That's all a scientist needs to think of. At each level, the very method used to distinguish one type of individual from others defines eachtype in terms of its parts. It never considers whether one of these wholes is more genuinely a whole than the others.

That is not to say that this method obviates the need to consider whether such unifying forms/activities exist in nature. For this methodological setting aside of such questions is a kind of naivete that would run aground if we were to make it into an ontological claim. For if there is no such thing as one whole atom but rather only the collection of its parts, then we can say the same thing of each of the parts, and of the parts of the parts, etc., ad infinitum. What we would be left with an infinite number of infinitely small parts... something like Leibnitzian monads... If such a consequence is absurd, then we need to reject the claim that every whole is nothing other than the sum of its parts.

One bit of support for this rejection might come from the notion of emergent properties. They are more than the sum of the properties of their parts. To affirm the existence of emergent properties is to open oneself to the possibilities that there is something like a substantial form/ soul. One need only add the claim that such properties are the properties are the properties of beings. Properties emerge because levels of being emerge. An organism is such a being and the soulis nothing other than the most basic activity of the organic body: you might call it the organism's very act of being.

More to consider: whether it is systems rather than beings that exist and have emergent properties... can't do that now, as I gotta cook supper.

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 ...

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...

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...

The Human Question

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