Karpel Tunnel wrote: ↑June 21st, 2019, 1:06 pmA few responses: 1) there were a number of points made in the post which was in the main a response to what i consider very speculative: your claim that we will have less social problems if people stop believing something different than your model of brain/self identity. 2) are you not a determinist? or if you allow for quantum randomness or statistical causation do you see this as allowing for free will?
IOW is your concern about the hypothetical social problems caused by not believing your model consistent with your beliefs and your physicalism/materialism`?
Sure, though modern physics, via its indeterminism, offers nothing like free will.
I don't see much free will physicalism on the internet or elsewhere. So while possible (if of questionable consistency) is it relevent?
First of all:
"'Free will' is the conventional name of a topic that is best discussed without reference to the will. Its central questions are 'What is it to act (or choose) freely?', and 'What is it to be morally responsible for one's actions (or choices)?' These two questions are closely connected, for freedom of action is necessary for moral responsibility, even if it is not sufficient."
("Free Will," by Galen Strawson. In
The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward Craig, 286-294. London: Routledge, 2005. p. 286)
Materialism-cum-determinism is compatible both with
incompatibilism and with
compatibilism about free will:
"As a theory-neutral point of departure, then, free will can be defined as the unique ability of persons to exercise control over their conduct in the manner necessary for moral responsibility."
For example, Daniel Dennett endorses compatibilist materialism.
I strongly tend to believe that persons (normally) have that ability, and that (a certain degree of) freedom of action or (nonabsolute) agential, personal autonomy is compatible with deterministic materialism.
What is clear is that random events cannot give me any degree of freedom or self-determination, since I'm still unfree in case my actions and choices are determined randomly and thus uncontrollably by me.
Do I believe in universal
determinism?
It matters what physics, particularly quantum physics, has to say about this issue:
"…This small survey of determinism's status in some prominent physical theories, as indicated above, does not really tell us anything about whether determinism is true of our world. Instead, it raises a couple of further disturbing possibilities for the time when we do have the Final Theory before us (if such time ever comes): first, we may have difficulty establishing whether the Final Theory is deterministic or not—depending on whether the theory comes loaded with unsolved interpretational or mathematical puzzles. Second, we may have reason to worry that the Final Theory, if indeterministic, has an empirically equivalent yet deterministic rival (as illustrated by Bohmian quantum mechanics.)"
Well, now I'm none the wiser, especially as we have to deal in this context with complicated questions concerning the nature of
causation. Are all causal relations strictly deterministic, or is there also indeterministic or probabilistic causation?
To be honest, I'm afraid I haven't yet thought hard enough about these questions; so I cannot tell you whether I'm a thoroughgoing determinist or not.
That said, I see reasons to believe in spontaneous immanent causation, and I find David Armstrong's interpretation of so-called probabilistic causation as "probability of causing" very plausible, which is deterministic about the producing of effects by their causes, but probabilistic about the occurrence of the causes or causings.
"W. E. Johnson…drew a distinction between two types of cause. He called the one transeunt causation (going across), and the other immanent (remaining within). Transeunt causation is the more ordinary sort of causation, when one thing brings about something in another particular (or sustains something, as when supporting something or keeping it in existence) and it can be argued that it is the only sort of causation there is. But I think that immanent causation is also actual. Spontaneous emission from an atom of uranium 235, radioactive decay, might be such a case. It is spontaneous because not produced by causal action from outside the atom. It doesn't matter that probability rules in this emission case. Probabilistic causation is causation when the law 'fires'. Does the 'spontaneous' suggest that there is no causation here? Well, it obeys a probabilistic law so why should it not count as a case of the uranium atom causing one of its constituent electrons, say, to be emitted?"
(Armstrong, D. M.
Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. p. 57)
"Causation is law-governed, but where the law is probabilistic only, exists only when, as one may say, the state of affairs falling under the antecedent of the law 'fires', that is, the potential cause actually brings about its effect. The moral to be drawn from this is that an irreducibly probabilistic power or disposition does not involve 'probabilistic causality' but rather a certain (objective) probability of common-or-garden, two-termed, causation. 'Probabilistic causality' should rather be thought of as a probability of causing, a probability that is irreducibly probabilistic. That is what a propensity is."
(p. 75)
"[T]he phrase 'probabilistic causality', which is often heard, is really inappropriate. What a probabilistic causal law gives us is not probabilistic causality but a certain probability that causation will occur, an ordinary causation which occurs whether the law governing the causation is deterministic or merely probabilistic."
(p. 238)
(Armstrong, D. M.
A World of States of Affairs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.)
"I say ‘probability of causing’, rather than ‘probabilistic causality’. My idea is that the word ‘cause’ can remain univocal here. Causing, where it occurs, remains the same. A probability of causing is, I suggest, a probability of ordinary causing. It is just that the causing does not always happen, although conditions for it are ripe. Such a probability of causing would, of course, have to be an objective feature of reality, which some might object to."
(Armstrong, D. M.
Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. p. 42)
Footnote: By "ordinary causing" he means
necessitarian causation, where—
ceteris paribus—causes always
necessitate their effects (with probability 1), even if the causes themselves occur only with some probability <1.