Dennett's reliance upon Benjamin Libet's experiment shows how pathetically ignorant he is of where freedom of the will is be found. He thinks it's about acting for no reason; whereas it's acting for a reason, i.e., for a goal. Moving a hand at an unassigned moment is one of the least suitable examples of the exercise of free will that could be conjured up. For free will is an act of choosing between two alternatives that are intelligibly different. Try as I may, I just can't see anything intelligible about the difference between moving my hand now and not moving my hand now. That sort of choice looks less like the product of typical deliberation than it looks like the attempt to act indeliberately, randomly.
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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