Skip to main content

laws of nature, necessity, determinism, quantum theory, reductive materialism

Reductive materialists claim that the laws of nature predetermine how every material thing shall move, including human actions.  One objection that might be posed to reductionism is the randomness scientists attribute to the behavior of individual particles  at the quantum level.  The reductionist reply (this time correctly, in spite of the incoherence of their philosophical position) that quantum fluctuations don't save freedom.  If we behave as we do simply because of a lawful relation between our behavior and its material preconditions, then determinism is not avoided by supposing that right before behavior x happens, a (random) quantum fluctuation happens, which ends up causing (think of the butterfly effect) us to act differently than we otherwise would have, had the fluctuation not occurred.  That is because our behavior, although not predictable in virtue of what happened before the random fluctuation, is predictable in virtue of what happened subsequently.  We could get around this by identifying our behavior with the fluctuation itself, but that would be pathetically ad hoc.

What if what we call the laws of nature were to change?  That would not save freedom either, because action would still be determined by the (changing) laws of nature.   So an appeal to the fixity of the laws of nature is not a necessary condition for determinism.

What can't be dispensed with is reductionism.  Their denial of freedom is not much about foreknowledge as it is about the claim that we're not so special: we're just dust in the wind, as the song says.  But even the most complicated combination of forces can't think it is nothing but dust in the wind; hence reductionism is self-undermining.  All of its arguments turn to dust.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

entropy, teleology

Perhaps the best way to understand entropy is to look at it as the tendency of things to arrive at equilibrium.  Many non-living processes head in that direction, but not all.  For an example of an exception, consider the movement of electrons around the nucleus: that movement itself doesn't seem to be heading toward any equilibrium… unless one considers the tendency of atoms to combine into molecules so as to fill the electron shells.  If reductionism is false, then isn't the fact that organisms continually create disequilibrium at one level, while seeking another equilibrium (for example a full stomach) quite relevant?   Of course, entropy as a law is about systems, not individuals…. right?
2 comments
Read more