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Path: utzoo!laura
From: laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: freedom and reason (attn russ, rich, & laura)
Message-ID: <5312@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 21-Mar-85 05:47:49 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.5312
Posted: Thu Mar 21 05:47:49 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 21-Mar-85 05:47:49 EST
References: <362@aesat.UUCP> <5272@utzoo.UUCP>, <734@pyuxd.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
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	This is truly sad, because I fail to see why Laura (or anyone)
	should kill themselves because they don't have free will? 

[Why not? it is just what my chemicals make me do...]

	I feel quite glad that I am fortunate enough to be alive and to
	experience life and live through and gain from and enjoy those
	experiences.  Regardless of whether I "will" the things I do or
	not.  The danger is not in denying free will (for good reason,
	I'd say) causing despondency and despair owing to "lack of
	???"; the danger is in allowing such a notion, that without
	"free will", I am nothing, to be perpetuated! [RICH ROSEN]

Rich, it is a very strange notion of ``I'' that you have that can exist
without a belief in free will. What does ``gain'' mean in the absense
of free will? what does ``enjoy'' mean? More importantly, what does
``I'' mean? Very little, I would say. Why learn? You cannot influence
your actions through your learning. Why love anyone? If you don't it is
no reflection on you. Why care about how elegant your code is? It is
easier to be sloppy, and no reflection on you if you are. You couldn't
change it -- it is just how your chemicals came out. Without a sense of
personal meaning, I see no reason to hold onto a belief in the self at
all. It was a mistake to ever think I had one -- so I think that I will
just go out like a candle now and enter into nirvana. Life is pointless
and I quit...

> For instance, take the proposition ``knowledge is good''. Try to refute it. 
> If you say ``Knowledge is bad for you'' then you are making a statement. 
> That statement is, in itself, knowledge. Thus, you are forced to admit that
> certain knowlege is good.

	Take the statement "Snerdfelb is good".  Please.  By making
	assertions and defining things after the fact, you are not
	really saying anything at all.

No, no, no. This is the logical positivist approach. (incidentally, I
read a quote by Smullyan the other day. He said that if he were ever to
write a Ambrose Bierce type dictionary, he would define a logical
positicist as someone who rejects as meaningless any statement he is
incapable of understanding. this is the funniest thing I have heard in
months...).  I am not definitng things after the fact. If you want to
go after this one you are going to have to prove that ``knowledge'' is
meaningless. Is Knowledge then meaningless, Rich? I don't think so, and
I don't think that you think so either. Your actions in posting make
you out to be in contradiction if you say this.

There is a potential paradox here, but not the one that you suggest.

the statement ``Knowledge is not good'' is an instance of knowledge.
Thus it is self-referential. Self-referential things have the
potiential for paradox. As it turns out, though, this one is safe. The
statement ``All Knowledge is not good'' (where not binds to good) is
clearly false. THis leaves open the question of the truth of ``Some
Knowledge is not good'' of course.

> I do not think that you can ask the question ``does man have free will''
> without using the free will whose existence you are questioning.

	If I program a machine to ask the question, does it have free
	will?

Now, here is an instance where we must be careful of what we mean.  what
do you mean by ``ask''? If you mean ``print out the question on a
terminal'' then I would say ``no''. On the other hand, if you
programmed a machine and then it spontaneously came up with the
question ``does man have free will'' then I would have to answer that I
do not know -- but I would be inclined to suspect that it does. I think
of Mike in *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress* as being a computer with free
will. Personally, though, I wonder if you can ever build and program
such a machine.


> The question implies that there is a true answer to the question and that
> you would like this knowledge.

	Questions are just words strung together.  They don't
	necessarily "imply" anything.  The question above "implies" no
	more than the words it strings together.  It is only if you
	assume that asking such a question represents an instance of
	free will that this "implication" presents itself.  But that's
	some assumption...

No. All I am assuming is that either men have free will or they don't,
and that the expression ``men have free will'' is meaningful. I am not
assuming that the answer is going to be ``true'', it could be
``false''. This is the case with any question I pose (since I do not
pose questions which I think are meaningless). If I ask ``Does Rich
have blue eyes'' then I am assuming that the sentence has some meaning,
and that there is an answer to this question -- either ``yes'' or
``no''. [If you happen to have one eye, or one brown and one blue, then
you can call to my attention that my question is ill-formed, but that
is entirely beside the point. *I* think that the question has meaning
as it stands, and is either answerable in the affirmative of the
negative.]


> But why should knowledge interest you? 
> Because it is possible to make mistakes, and you are trying to avoid
> making them. Aha! By your own effort, in searching for the truth, it
> is possible to influence your actions so that you will make fewer
> mistakes! ... This is an implicit assumption in asking any question. So,
> in asking the question you are either performing another meaningless
> action, or you are demonstrating the free will whose existence you
> are trying to prove.

	What am I demonstrating when I ask "Does man have snerdfelb?"
	It's no more or less meaningless than asking "Does man have
	ANYTHING ELSE?"

Are you going to play Humpty Dumpty again? I do not have any concepts
which I do not believe are grounded in reality. Therefore I do not
think that nonsense is as meaningful as my concepts. If nonsense became
meaningful it would no longer be nonsense. I am *not* claiming that
there is anything special about the words I am using to represent my
concepts, but I am claiming that there is something special about the
concepts themselves.  ``Unicorns'' and ``horses'' are both instances of
concepts. The first do not exist, and the second do. But neither of
them are nonsensical.  In the absense of a definition, ``snerdfelb'' is
nonsense. My sentences were not nonsense -- though I had not gotten
around to demonstrating that they are true.


	Only the answer provides a means of saying whether it was a
	meaningless action or a worthwhile effort to ask the question.
	If, in asking a question, you are seeking knowledge about
	something, asking alone has no bearing on the nature of the
	answer.  Obviously one is searching for information when asking
	a question.  But if the answer to the question you ask is "no",
	the action was hardly meaningless:  you have gained information
	that you can use in the future.

I did not say that the action would be meaningless if the answer was
no, I said that if the answer was no, then the action would be
meaningless.  These are not the same. a implies b does not mean the
same thing as b implies a.

But this leads us to wonder why a man has engaged in a meaningless
action.  Well, if the answer is no, then I argue that all actions are
meaningless.  However, if the action is meaningful, then this would
imply that the answer was not no. [By denial of the consequent]. I know
that I cannot prove that all actions are not meaningless, but I think
that I have proven that either all actions are meaningless or man has
free will.

WHich moves us back to the top of the article. If I believed that I did
not have free will, I would also believe that all actions are
meaningless. Time to quit again...

Laura Creighton
utzoo!laura