I didn’t make that claim. I questioned someone who made (or implied) the claim that mind was “nothing but” brain activity. I asked that person to demonstrate this. You are writing as if it has been demonstrated. Is that your position, that “mind is nothing but brain activity” has been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt? If that is your position, then you need to provide the demonstration. If that is not your position, then you can clarify. If your position is “We don’t know whether or not the mind is nothing but brain activity,” then we have no quarrel; but it sure sounds as if you have a pretty strong metaphysical leaning toward the reductionist view.
Universal human experience of the mind as something sui generis, to start with.
No, but the use of poor analogies goes beyond my tolerance.
If you have read it, you are welcome to discuss any passages from it that you like. I have copies of several of Descartes’s works here, pertaining to mind, body, etc. Just pick the passages that you want to discuss, and offer your comments on them, and I’ll respond.
And regarding your statement that you love your wife and children, for “love” we only have evidence for the reductionist accounts offered by modern sociology and psychology. If there is something else you feel for your wife and children that isn’t covered by those mechanistic, materialistic, reductionist accounts, let’s see the evidence.
No, it’s a description of human experience. We recognize elephants as quite different from other mammals, and we recognize our interior world of thinking, willing, feeling, choosing, etc. as quite different from the external world capable of being described by color, shape, weight, movement, etc. If you are blind to this dimension of interior experience, nothing anyone could ever say would open your eyes until you desire to have them opened. But I do find it interesting how, of all the people I have encountered on the internet, it seems to be the biologists, more than any others, who want to “explain away” this world of interior experience. I guess it’s that old physics envy again, driving the biologists to extremes.
Fascinating! Just to clarify, given an exact knowledge of the present, we would have an exact record of the past and an accurate prediction of the future?
What? No. And I presume Coyne doesn’t think so either. Quantum events, over the long term, prevent this. But I don’t think quantum events have any serious influence over human choices in the short term, leaving us with strict determinism. And libertarian free will is an incoherent concept.
The crucial word here is “causation”. This word means very different things in the different metaphysical concepts of nature. It seems to me that your “incoherence”-claim for libertarian free will depends on a very specific notion of what matter has to entail, namely a strict distinction between material and mental aspects, however the latter would look like. This then would pose the mind-body-problem which gives rise to the idea of strict neuronal determinism. I put your reductionism aside for now, though I´m interested in your philosophical reasons for the rejection of Top-Down-causation as developed by George Ellis. But first I want you to give me an argument as to why your definition of matter in this context is correct?
Then I’d suggest you have a different understanding of strict determinism from me. Allowing spontaneous processes like nuclear decay is not compatible with strict determinism, I’d say.
No, I don’t. I just think that personal agency has a cause. People make decisions as a result of prior events. If they didn’t, their choices would be arbitrary. Free will must be neither determined nor random; but what is the third option?
No idea where you would get that notion. I haven’t even mentioned matter.
As I said, quantum processes allow for strict determinism at the macro level, over the short term, which are the conditions under which human choice happens. If that isn’t strict enough for you, I will gladly abandon the adjective.
I probably don’t differ much from you regarding libertarian free will (incoherent) and whether choice within constraints is real (I think we can and do make decisions that are not pre-determined) and as you now say strictness is not important, I’ll bow out.
Missed this, so I’ll just add that, I’d agree that faced with the same exact set of circumstances, it’s arguable that an exact result would ensue (like replaying a film doesn’t change the ending). I just say because the universe is not utterly deterministic, the exact same circumstances cannot be repeated.
According to your link, Will Provine said (in a debate with Philip Johnson in 1994)
Free will is not hard to give up, because it’s a horribly destructive idea to our society. Free will is what we use as an excuse to treat people like pieces of crap when they do something wrong in our society. We say to the person, “you did something wrong out of your free will, and therefore we have the justification for revenge all over your behind.” We put people in prison, turning them into lousier individuals than they ever were. This horrible system is based upon this idea of free will.
If this is a criticism of the US justice and penal system, judging by the boom in incarceration rates and recidivism, it’s pretty apt. I read Provine talking about choice and how choice is limited by circumstances.
I think all our decisions are predetermined, because I don’t think any of our decisions depend directly on quantum randomness, so we still disagree on that point. The departure from strict determinism is over the long haul, but in that case there would be a long chain of ordinary causation between a quantum event and any decision one would make. I think I agree with Coyne on all of this.
I’d say that repetition of the exact circumstances is meaningless. The question is whether you could have chosen differently at that time. And the universe doesn’t have to be utterly deterministic, only locally so at the macro level. At bottom, the universe is not only chaotic but non-deterministic, but it usually takes a while for events at the bottom to influence the top, so we can ignore that in the current conversation.
You don´t have to mention it to give me enough points to conclude as to how the structure of the material universe has to be built up, to make your points make sense. It is actually quite simple. The sense in which you use “determined” has to be in a mechanistic way, which automatically has to be reductionist. You show your misunderstanding of this topic in this quote:
I have no idea where you´d get that idea from that a proponent of libertarian free will would need fro “uncaused” decisions in any way. Contrary I fully expect causality in every case, be it in an accidental or in a hierarchichal series. However you say that you don´t deny personal agency and thus have undermined your whole prior point. If I´m in a room and I have the choice to act in ways A or B, it doesn´t undermine my point for LFW in any form to point to the causal chain of events which led me to get into the described situation. Neither does pointing out that the decision for A or B to have taken place is determined, because it necessarily has to be, that we as rational agents ascribed meaning towards the thought processes which led the personal agent to act in either way A or B. Thought processes are never indetermined, because of the determined meaning they need to get attributed by the rational agent in order to act in an intentional way. Of course you could deny the intentionality, however this would beg the question as to why our dialogue is taking place, why we understand each other or why the rules of english grammar consistently apply to our comments. So there is nothing which undermined LFW in the idea of causation if we don´t presuppose a mechanistic, cartesian view of matter, and certainly nothing which has shown its incoherence.
Which brings me to the point that you still haven´t given an argument to accept the presupposed notion of matter and the mechanistic view of causation as an exhaustive picture of reality. Simply asserting it is pointless and bad philosophy, so I´m waiting.
It’s a pretty stupid remark by Provine. It’s hardly proof that an idea is false because it can be misused. He turns what ought to be a philosophical discussion about the existence of free will into a political discussion about the U.S. penal system. But the two things aren’t inextricably linked. To remedy the defects of a penal system you don’t have to abandon the idea of personal responsibility. Provine’s remark is, of course, typical of the knee-jerk leftism of the majority of American academics, so it doesn’t surprise me.
When people point out the historical connection between Darwinian theory and eugenics, the death camps, etc., a cry of protest rises up from the biologists: it is said that Darwinian theory is a strictly scientific theory, and should not be made responsible for the moral or political misuse that is made of it by various ideologies. Well, the same applies to the notion of free will. Whether or not free will exists is a question to be settled by intellectual means; preventing the abuse of the notion (e.g., using prisons as a place to brutalize convicts) is another matter entirely. To say: “I refuse to believe in free will, because if we believe in free will penal authorities might misuse the notion” is to be deeply anti-academic, anti-philosophical, and anti-intellectual. It politicizes the quest for truth. It’s an example of how “political correctness” is corrupting the modern intellect and the modern university.