Skip to main content

David K Johnson's argument against free will

David K Johnson is a reductive materialist--as far as I can tell.  He has an interesting argument against freedom of the will: instead of arguing from the necessity of the laws of physics, he argues from the nature of truth.  It goes something like this:  Given that X has happened, then it it is true that X, then it cannot be false that X, then X is true necessarily, then the event described by X cannot be contingent, then if that event is an act of human choosing, then that human chose necessarily, then no human choice is contingent.  But such contingency is a necessary condition for freedom; hence no human choice is free.  I must be missing some of the subtleties that he would like introduced, but please excuse that for the moment, as I don't so much want to undermine the argument by looking at how its premises might fail to support its conclusion as much as I want to explore its implications.

Important:  to pull this off he treats propositions as atemporal.

If the combination of our desire to know the truth and the evidence and argumentation mustered in support of his conclusion cause us to accept his conclusion, then something other than a material process (i.e., the truth of the propositions, inference) can influence our behavior.  In such a case, the notion that all human actions are explained entirely in terms of material processes would be false.

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

robot/computers, awareness of causality, holism

For a purportedly cognizant machine to be aware of causality, it would seem (given how it happens with us rational animals) that being aware of its own causal interactions is a necessary condition for its being aware of how causal relations exist in nature.  But to be aware of its own causal interactions, the machine would have to have a sense of its acting as a whole, as an individual, and as being acted upon at a whole.  It would not suffice merely to register information from this or that outside source: there would have to be a sense of the whole acting and being acted upon.   It seems that such awareness requires appropriation and that machines can't do that (at least not in the precise sense that I have discussed in this blog).
Post a Comment
Read more