What if...? computer program; translation of laws of nature

Suppose you could write a program to represent all of the dispositions of a pencil (so that it would show algorithmically that if you apply force here and there, and thereby push it against a paper, it shall make lines).
Suppose you also wrote a program to represent a person trying to write a sentence using an instrument.
Suppose you were able to combine the two so that they represented, together, a person writing a sentence with a pencil.
If both programs were well-designed, then you wouldn't have to violate the first program in order to apply the second.
So it is in nature: writing a sentence with a pencil does not violate the internal dispositions of the pencil.

Perhaps this fact is analogous to how the laws of nature are to be applied to individuals. For in trying to understnd how an individual behaves, we can't just plug in the laws of nature in an abstract way: we have to translate those laws into internal dispositions, dispositions to act a certain way that can be modified by circumstances. "That can be modified..." captures the difference between the translated disposition and the untranslated law: the latter discusses how two (or more) events are related while abstracting from any real-life circumstances. Light travels at 186K mps IF it is traveling through a perfect vacuum: otherwise it slows down. The law only talks about the former. Our application of the law includes details that modify how the individual actually behaves.

Our understanding of how light behaves at a particular place and time takes light -- not as following an absolute law -- but as having a disposition to act a certain way in abstracto with the openness to behaving other ways in concreto.

What we call laws of nature are not like the three Fates; rather, they are descriptions of dispositions to behave a certain way, descriptions that abstract from the circumstances that modify how things actually behave, descriptions that relate to behaviors that are affected not just by the dispositions being described but also by circumstances that have been left out of the description.

When laws are understood in this manner, the "necessity" attached to them has quite a different flavor than one finds in discussions about determinism v. indeterminism. But that is not to say that everything or even anything that happens does so indeterminately. Rather, it is to say that there is a fundamental openness in individuals to their being influenced by factors not acknowledged in the abstract formulation of laws.

To figure out how an individual will ACTUALLY behave, we must translate the abstract laws of nature into concrete dispositions had by the particular individual under consideration. The actual behavior is a function of all of the dispositions that come into play: it's a kind of synthesis, whereas the initial statement of the laws is a kind of analysis. That is, the laws as stated depict idealized states that leave out of consideration the concrete facts that modify how the individual in question will actually behave. The actual dispositions of that individual are a function of many things that we haven't yet measured or even observed.

When we talk about an animal being moved by its desire for something that it has perceived, we think of desire as influencing movement in a manner over and above the influence of the sort of push and pull found in non-living things and measured by physics. That is not to say that desire is immaterial: it is to say that (in the case at least of animals) material existence includes more than what is found and measured in the study of physics. And that is not just because our minds can't handle the complexity of the descriptions of how physics comes into play with living things. This influence does not go against the concrete material dispositions that the body has in common with non-living things any more than the internal dispositions of a pencil a violated when it is used to write a sentence.

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...

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...

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 ...

The Human Question

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