The lawfulness of higher order forms is either strictly deducible from the lawfulness of lower order ones or it is not. If it is, then it either requires translation principles or it does not. If it does not, the we have eliminative materialism. If it does, then the higher forms are either subjective, something we read into lower order, or they are not. If they are subjective, then once again we have eliminative materialism. If the higher order is real but the causality is one way (bottom up) then the higher order is epiphenomenal. If there is top down causality, then we have either hylemorphism or something else like it. And of course, that top down causality may be either determined or not. If it is determined, its behavior would be lawful, but that lawfulness would not, strictly speaking, be a more complex version of the lower level lawfulness.
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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