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From: jim@ISM780B.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Re: Pfui-- Another free will non-seq
Message-ID: <27500108@ISM780B.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 27-Aug-85 22:00:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: ISM780B.27500108
Posted: Tue Aug 27 22:00:00 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Aug-85 21:41:53 EDT
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Nf-From: ISM780B!jim    Aug 27 22:00:00 1985


>Because that's the definition.  What you call free will is hardly free.
>If you cannot will your desires (and thus your actions) into or out of
>existence, you are dependent upon the way your brain happens to be at that
>time, and thus you are not free.  If it's NOT predisposed to doing what you
>describe, due to not having learned it or other possibilities, then
>it won't happen.

Rich, please define this "you", the nature of which apparently allows it to
*possess* "your brain", "your desires", and "your actions".  It sounds pretty
metaphysical to me.  It seems to me that, just as it is legitimate to speak
of "you", where the term refers to a conceptual subset of the universal
process, it is legitimate to speak of "free will", as a characterization of
certain aspects of that subset.  If you insist on restricting discourse to
the truly mechanistic and basal, then I think that not only do you have no
more justification for treating "you" as more real than "free will", but in
fact you have no justification for the use of *any* word or concept.  Rather
than indulging in these childish interminable attempts to demonstrate that
you are right, you would be treating yourself better to realize that many
"philosophical" debates come down to the fundamental inadequacy of using
language or any other form of conceptualization as a tool for analysis,
especially of empirical phenomena.  We can use computers to solve problems
for us, but the computers will never be able to solve their own problems
flawlessly, no matter how sophisticated they become, because they will always
be subject to flaws in their design and to the limitations of the symbol
manipulation facilities which have been built into them.  The same goes for
humans (clearly very fancy computers from the mechanist's point of view).
From the mechanical point of view, whether or not a human will claim a given
argument and insist that it is correct is conditioned by its past history and
is thus not "free".  This applies even to the human called "Rich Rosen".  So
rather than wasting breath on pronouncements of what is true, we should spend
more time trying to understand how language and other forms of
conceptualization work, and how they limit us.  Examining the *processes* by
which we come to conclusions is more fruitful from a philosophical point of
view than the mere conclusions themselves, especially when the conclusions
are merely illusions we use to stroke our egos (whatever an ego is).

-- Jim Balter (ima!jim)