This is a thread to allow discussions about how those lucky enough to have free will make decisions.
As materialism doesn’t explain squat, this thread is a place for explanations from those that presumably have them.
And if they can’t provide them, well, this will be a short thread.
So do phoodoo, mung, WJM et al care to provide your explanations of how decisions are actually made?
It was shortly before I met her. In fact, I can remember the exact day.
Fmm, when I say God ‘must’ do this or that, I don’t mean to suggest that there is any compulsion. When we do what we do because of our own natures, we act freely. So God is not compelled to create any universe, but will do so if and only if it is best. To deny that is to deny that God is perfect, it is to insist there is some shortcoming–either in power, intelligence or goodness. That doesn’t seem to me like something you would claim.
Arguing that this is the best of all possible worlds is, thus, th exact opposite of schoolyard bragging. It is glorifying God as the highest–in spite of how things may seem to us. As we are stupid and finite, we can’t judge these matters, but can (indeed must) rely on the goodness, power and wisdom of God. That is the Christian conception, and your resistance remains strange to me.
There can be no reply to the problem of evil without recognizing God’s perfection and the human inability to gainsay it.
On that we can agree. 😉
I think this is probably where the difficulty lies.
It seems that you are saying that God’s nature compels him to create the best world and I would only say that God’s nature compels the Godhead to love and glorify itself.
It’s possible that the Godhead loving and glorifying itself would necessitate creating a world that is not the best possible world.
Does that make sense to you?
peace
Not sure. As you can imagine, some words of that (religious) kind are like static to me. (That’s not intended as an attack–just an admission.)
But I ask you, really and truly, how “free” is free will?
John Noe
I think that rebellion against a deity who choose to glorify Himself at the expense of children dying an excruciating death would be a logical choice.
You’re asking me if I think it is reasonable to assume that Dennett is afraid of God?
As I understand self-glorification, that makes sense to me too. But I don’t really grok this religion biz.
You forget that the God is a Trinity. There is no self glorification as we would understand it. Rather
The Father glorifies the Son and the Spirit
The Son glorifies the Father and the Spirit
The Spirit glorifies the Father and the Son.
Also Keep in mind that God is literally everything that is good about reality and his glorification is the simply what it looks like to value what is good instead of what is evil
Also keep in mind that in order to save children from eternal death and eventually all death God voluntarily took that punishment on himself.
The temporary limited physical death of children who by the way (just like their parents) would kill God if they could, is a terrible side effect that is brought on not by what God desires did but by what we do.
peace
Ive thought about it
If we define “the best possible” as that which glorifies God maximally and we define world as everything that exists whether in our universe or not.
Then yes this “World” is the best of all possible worlds because in the end God will be maximally glorified.
quote:
And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying, “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!”
(Rev 5:13)
end quote:
peace
Heathen Americans. Forgot what it means to worship the Queen. What more evidence do you need that the American Rebellion was the work of the devil?
Right, exactly. Because you apparently don’t think that Dennett is a crazy loon for thinking that he knows that immaterialists are afraid of life coming from simple matter.
Or maybe you do think he is a crazy loon, but you like the fact that he uses cool words.
In context, Dennett uses the term “hylephobes” to characterize those people with who think that selves — being that can take themselves to be responsible for their actions — cannot be wholly comprised of physical processes. That’s the intuition that in turn drives the appeal to agent causation. They think this because of their “lazy imaginations” (his phrase) trap them in an overly simplistic picture of what physical processes are.
That seems right to me in one sense, and wrong in another.
What seems right is that anti-materialists do have extremely simplistic models of what a physical process can be, and that in turn drives their conviction that selfhood cannot be comprised of physical stuff.
What seems wrong is that organisms differ from other physical processes in their structure, which is why we can ascribe norms and values to organisms that cannot be ascribed to other kinds of physical systems.
But that is precisely why I have always maintained that the proper rebuttal to intelligent design won’t come from any suitably revised version of Epicureanism (e.g. Monod), but from a suitably revised Aristotelianism that allows that novel forms (structures, organizations) can be generated as parts within an encompassing whole of continuous becoming (e.g. Dewey).
At this point, I have suggested that we can give a structural characterization of organisms as far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic systems that are able to maintain themselves in those conditions by virtue of being able to synthesize their own constituents as needed (autocatalytic) by drawing on their energy and materials of their environments without being dispersed into those environments (hence the need for a semi-permeable membrane).
Notice that this characterization does not specify the kinds of molecules that implement these processes.
The burden would be on the intelligent design advocate to show either that
(1) being a self-maintaining, far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic system might be necessary for being alive, but is not sufficient, or
(2) being a self-maintaining, far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic system is necessary and sufficient for being alive, but the emergence of such a system is either (a) physically impossible without the intervention of an intelligent being or (b) physically possible, but statistically unlikely to such an extraordinary degree that intervention by an intelligent being is far more plausible.
I do not see much hope for either (1) or (2), but that’s the challenge that complexity theory presents to intelligent design theory.
A further question, and a quite different one, is the evolution of moral responsibility itself within the history of life on this planet. I see that as a very different question that is properly located at the heart of hominid evolution, which is itself a very small (but fascinating!) narrative within the much vaster and grander history of life.
(I shall leave aside any question as to whether intellectual satisfaction demands positing a being of any sort as having brought the universe into existence.)
What does a non-phoodoo world look like?
I think that decisions in a phoodoo world look much like decisions in this world, because I think this world is a phoodoo world.
🙂
There was no other way of expressing the uncanny, overpowering, ‘demonic’ character of the power of sin, than by seeing this too as a work of Yahweh, even if one executed in anger.
Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, p. 269
Scripture makes no attempt to harmonize the moral freedom of the individual with God’s effective action in all things, but remains content to affirm both.
Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought p. 270.
Why should anyone believe that there is anything “immaterial” that has no properties, but can still make decisions?
But aside from the lack of any concept of said “immaterial”, there’s always the better reason: we have evidence of material properties making decisions.
I still don’t understand the issue with feedback loops and interrelational systems.
Who says it’s not a problem? Not me. But I do say it exists and can be studied. This “immaterial”…whatever…can’t
Fixed that for you.
Properties are just the sort of things assigned by immaterial minds.
no we don’t.
There is no possible evidence of material properties making decisions because material properties don’t make decisions.
minds make decisions.
Matter can only have programed responses to various stimuli.
peace
Kantian Naturalist,
Hmm..what about the part where Dennett reads minds and motives?
Kind of a long way of dismissing that.
Its true, some people don’t name their God “Emergence”. I guess they could. I am not sure it changes anything though.
phoodoo,
I certainly don’t believe it! Not after hearing about how immaterial decisions are made! But for the benefit of the audience, and I don’t want to mangle the answer, could you reprise it for us all? You know, how decisions are made in phoodoo world?
And this is not logically possible without children suffering?
It seems by your description He is also everything bad about reality as well
Ok, why is it logically impossible to do that without children suffering? If it is not logically impossible then it is a divine choice that children must suffer in order to value what is good, for example children not suffering.
Or He could have just not condemned them to eternal death in the first place
So children deserve their suffering for wanting to kill God because he is causing their suffering in order for His glorification? Those ingrates. You have a harsh God,fifth
For what I gather you saying is it doesn’t matter what we do, the side effect is logically required to Glorify God.
The sooner you lot are a footnote in the history books the better.
I came of with a working definition of voluntary action while working on me game that might be useful here.
voluntary action- An action that in not algorithmic and not random.
The point was that there were three types of events
1) events that are determined by natural impersonal forces
2) events that are random
3) events that are the result of personal choice
Do with that what you will.
peace
I would say so.
If you disagree you would need to explain how you could graciously save someone who is not in peril and how you could inflict the ultimate deserved punishment on someone without actually inflicting it.
nope
The bad stuff is what it’s like to be out of his presence.
The foolishness of the rebellion is that we willingly choose the bad and reject the good
If he did that he would be denying them what they most want which is to be away from his presence forever.
What would you think a God who denied you your deepest wish and the only thing that was truly valuable to you eternally and forever?
That sounds like torture to me
peace
It’s just obvious that nothing material can make decisions, just like its obvious that physics can’t explain life. Who needs to bother themselves with anything as mundane and boring as an explanation when you’ve got a view that’s just obviously true? Explanations are for boring nerds who are so blinded by facts and theories that they can’t see how obvious the truth is!
Well that’s obvious.
Glen Davidson
Sounds a lot like cumulative selection. 🙂
This is God’s universe, and He is doing things His way. You may think you have a better way, but you don’t have a universe.
J. Vernon McGee
Kantian Naturalist,
Besides, “Obey, don’t think,” doesn’t need an explanation.
Glen Davidson
Do you decide to obey every voice in your head without thinking?
Kantian Naturalist,
Kn,
Your propositions are so all over the map, who knews what you are trying to say.
You believe in free will, you don’t believe in free will, you don’t know what free will is, as long as it appears we have free will, its the same as free will…you have no interest in free will.
You can make a decision, even if the decision is determined by physical states, you are against immaterialist, but you are not a materialist, You think that Dennett knows what goes on in the mind of immaterialists, but you think it makes no sense for others to subscribe motives for what Dennett thinks…and, on, and on.
For someone who professes not to be a materialist, you sure do speak as incoherently as a materialist.
Again I have no idea what you mean by “explanation” here.
Do you think that the only valid explanation is one that involves a step by step description involving nothing but materiel causes?
I wonder why they work so hard to avoid admitting the obvious!
might makes right
It’s beyond comprehension that all this is in response to simply asking, well, how do you think decisions are made in your world? Some self awareness would go a loooong way.
In gods universe, how are decisions made Mung?
Since decisions cause matter to react there should be a step by step explanation of some that process, how does immaterial first get material input and what is the output that causes what to materially happen?
That is where we differ, it is completely comprehensible to me. specificity is to be avoided except when demanded of others then nothing can be specific enough
As in all cases of philosophically interesting concepts, everything depends on how one makes sense of the concept and relates it to other things we know about the world and ourselves.
The free will issue is tricky because of how conceptual explication and causal explanation are hard to disentangle.
We could say that free will is conceptually explicated as the capacity for morally responsible action, and then ask what causally explains that capacity. Then the question would be whether agent causation is the best explanation of our capacity for morally responsible action.
Or we could say that free will is best conceptually explicated as agent causation, and then we would have to either deny naturalism or deny free will.
But I do not think it makes sense to conceptually explicate free will as both the capacity for morally responsible action and as agent causation, because then denying agent causation would strictly entail denying a capacity for morally responsible action. And that’s simply false.
I think that agent causation is a useless illusion. I think it is ultimately incoherent, because it requires solving the dualist’s problem of mental causation.
But I do not think that we need agent causation in order to understand how we are morally responsible for some of our actions. Moral responsibility ultimately involves a highly complex process of social mediation between those bodily processes that can be self-controlled and those bodily processes that cannot be.
We’re not ghosts in machines; we’re highly complex social animals, with complicated processes of intersubjective recognition mediated our own self-relations such that we can experience negative moral feelings like shame, guilt, and humiliation.
No ghost-in-the-machine required — just the evolution of human morality from more primitive kinds of primate morality. If that’s not good enough for you, then you want something that no scientifically respectable theory of agency can give you.
I don’t think that decisions are determined by physical states.
I’m against both immaterialism and materialism, yes. Why is it so hard for you to understand that I do not think that the metaphysics of the 21st century should be held hostage by the categories of 17th-century metaphysics?
It’s called hermeneutics: interpreting the intensions, desires, and fears of someone based on what they write. Dennett has read, carefully and closely, the work of philosophers who defend agent causation. You, by contrast, haven’t read anything by Dennett at all (that I can tell). That’s why Dennett’s strategy is defensible (even if it’s rude).
I think that explanations can only be tested if they involve publicly verifiable entities, regardless of whether the causes are “material” or not.
The following is my opinion. I’d like to make two things clear. First, it should not be taken as me claiming facts. Second, our language is mainly formulated to deal with the material world and so descriptions of anything we may think of as spiritual are put in terms more suited to the material world.
The material and the spiritual are not separate entities, they are different aspects of the same thing in a similar way that ice and steam are different aspects of the same thing. The human being is a unity but it is a very complex unity. It is comprised of different substances and forces, some revealing a more spiritual aspect and some a more material aspect but each interpenetrating the other.
The head, brain and nervous system is comprised of more spiritual forces, the most spiritual which is thinking, but it comprises the least spiritual and most material substance. The limbs and metabolic system are comprised of substance which is more spiritual but forces which are more physical. So the substances and forces have the following attributes which are not absolute:
Material substance – static, unchanging, dead
Material forces – mechanical movement
Spiritual substance – dynamic, regenerative, living
Spiritual forces – thinking, sensing
Between the head with its spiritual forces and the limbs with their mechanical forces there are the heart and lungs. This rhythmic system is the mediator between the head system above and the limb system below.
To ask how the mind can move matter is a bit like asking how the sun can heat rock. We can see how non-matter can have an effect on matter. Infrared energy is not matter but it has an effect on matter.
It is materialists that need to be asking themselves the question: How is matter able to move itself?
Minds are publicly verifiable entities. You just don’t verify them empirically
Minds are verified when they “reveal” themselves to you
peace
The step by step part is what brains do. the non step by step part is what consciousness does.
Minds are irreducibly complex in this universe AFAIK so knowing what a brain does is a big part of knowing what a mind does.
Knowing exactly how consciousness is connected to a materiel brain to make a mind is a “hard problem” 😉
peace
Infra-red energy is low frequency photons. Rocks are composed of various crystals that ultimately can be broken down into their atomic and subatomic constituents. So the sun warming the rocks is a transfer of energy from photons to electrons. Is the effect of mind on matter anything like that?
The root of the problem here is that the conception of matter here is obsolete, and insisting on it shows an ignorance of the past two hundred years of Western science — including thermodynamics, general relativity, and quantum mechanics (esp. quantum field theory).
While we don’t have a completely unified theory of fundamental physics, we can be quite confident that there’s no such thing as “matter” as the Epicureans imagined. Particles are nothing at all like very small rocks. They are fields, which is to say that they more like structures or patterns than they are like “things” in the ordinary, everyday sense.
The modern conception of matter is that no one knows what it is. And no one knows what energy is either.
I think that quantum physicists have a pretty good handle on it. It’s just that there’s not much in their models that corresponds to the very small rocks imagined by the Epicureans and their philosophical opponents.
Since my intellectual background is in biology and not in physics — and also since we have good reasons in philosophy of science to think that the sciences are not unified — I am quite happy to make the concepts of organism, life, and life-form central to my naturalism, and let other philosophers who are trained in physics to worry about the ultimate fine-grained structure of fundamental reality.
So would you say that photons are material? And would you say that sub-atomic particles are more real than crystals?
I would say that sub-atomic particles are mathematical constructs to save the appearances. But we cannot help imagining them to have qualities taken from our everyday world of the senses.
Yes, I would say that the effect of mind on matter is similar to that.
You seem to be saying that fundamentally what we consider to be matter is actually more like minds. They do not obey the laws of cause and effect which is so central to classic physics. This is similar to human inventions where a future state is foreseen and brings about the invention.
Are you saying that minds affect something but we don’t really know what that something is?
Most materialists are closet pantheists.
Since a world without minds is to much to swallow everything becomes a mind.
Whether they will admit it or not.
peace
I’m okay with that. I don’t see it as a problem.