Asking, as Daniel Dennett does, what an antireductionist would have to say once he or she encountered a robot that behaved in every way in a manner indistinguishable from a human (okay, it wouldn't breathe, eat, excrete or reproduce), is kind of like my asking what he would say if, upon confirmation of the multiverse hypothesis, he also discovered that every single one of the component universeses is finely tuned for life. Okay, it is much harder to imagine how one might confirm the latter. But suppose that he did: what would he say to that?
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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