Listening to a professor Sam Wang from Princeton talk about neurology in a Teaching Company set of lectures. He talks of one part of the brain as "interpreting" a "signal" from another part. This manner of talk is too homuncular. One needs a vocabulary that tips its hat, as it were, to human operation as the source of analogies by which we understand the processes taking place within our bodies. But that vocab must also distinguish the processes/states occurring in this or that part of the human FROM properly human operation. Perhaps one should speak of this part of the brain as "sub-interpreting" the "sub-signal" from another part? Uh, perhaps that is more distracting than illuninating (hmnmmm).
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 ...
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