The Human Question

Every mechanistic account presupposes something that drives the mechanism AND which itself is not driven by the mechanism. This is not an argument for God (at least not immediately) but for entelecheia. Consider the Newtonian explanation of planetary motion.  It presupposes gravity, which is itself NOT explained mechanistically.  Rather, gravity is a tendency toward a state that is not yet acheived. Nothing "pushes" gravity: rather, it's an unpushed pusher or an unpulled puller or something like that. Consider a regular hand-driven device.  Say, an old-fashioned coffee-grinder.  The hand that is driving the grinder in that system is like gravity in Newton's explanation of planetary motion, i.e., a force that is not forced by another.  Such forces are.... teleological: that is, they can be described in terms of aiming toward something but CANNOT be explained mechanically--at least not in terms of the wholes and parts that make up the system in question (whe...

It is noteworthy that LaPlace, inspired by Newtonian physics, got rid of both divine Providence and human freedom. Something similar can be said about Freud: he considered belief in a provident God a delusion, and regarded human freedom more or less in the same way. So divine freedom (as manifest in divine Providence) and human freedom go (and come) together: this is worth investigating more.

Newton's third law (that every action has an equal and opposite reaction), seems to me to describe two aspects of the same whole, for the action and reaction occur during at the same time. Our ability to note how two things are contemporaneously interrelated via this third law totally belies Hume's crude conception of antecedent/consequent events as the only knowledge we can have of causality. (On the other hand, a Humean can object that this law is an example of superimposing a mathematical conception of objects [which involves a kind of simultaneity] onto the data of experience.) If they are simultaneous, however, then why do we call one the "action" and the other the "reaction"? Such language misleads us into imagining that one occurs before the other. The answer might be that in our experience, one of the two things exerting equal and opposite forces usually seems to initiate the process: e.g., when I run on a track, I initiate this process, even thoug...

F=MA expresses a simultaneously changing relationship between different variables. There is a kind of causal relationship between them. An increase in mass causes a decrease in acceleration (where force is constant). But it is not the sort of cause and effect described by Hume. Rather, it is an interrelation between two aspects of the same whole... more like per se causality as described by Aristotle rather than Humean characterization of causality as essentially a relation between antecedent and consequent events. In this way it is ironic that Hume sought to emulate Newton by identifying a psychological analog to universal gravitation.