II Gyan II–
If you are a glutton for punishment and want to read about how objects are not strictly defined, you can read Michael Morreau’s “What Vague Objects Are Like”.
As has been noted, when you assembled the tennis balls with the string, you just made something. (Singular). That thing (singular) may have a name, like ‘bola’ (as has already been pointed out; or it might not, in which case you might just call it a (singular) thing you made by tying a pair of tennis balls together with string.
Welcome to the language. It disagrees utterly, at every level, with how you’re trying to redefine it.
No, I’m arguing with you. I certainly don’t think that volition springs from nowhere, and you’re the one who claims it comes from magic. If it wasn’t magic, it could be examined, understood, and explained, like everything else can.
never mind
Presumably,
a)there is an external world, whose ontology is independent of us.
b)this debate about ‘free will’ is centered around what’s ‘really true’.
c)My implicit premise is that actions are related to actors, and that e.g. the computer is not an actor because it is a bundle of perception and hasn’t been shown to have any ontological existence. I may, and do, treat the assembly of matter as a singular entity, when convenient, and label it a computer. But we aren’t talking about how humans organize their sensorium.
That’s where physics seems to lead for what you label the “hardcore realist”. You said you treat the bola as an object. What’s the justification for that - that it seems plausible to you?
Since you’re making the distinction do quite a bit of work for your view, it seems necessary for you to offer an account of what you’re calling ontological existence. What is required for ontological existence? And why must actors have ontological existence? And what has, and what does not have, ontological existence?
-FrL-
They must exist in the same sense as the ‘external world’ is held to exist; as independent of me. Otherwise, one outcome is that there’s no rigorous distinction between dreams and reality.
I can only appeal to my intuition i.e. in every-day folk-physics, actions are committed by actors, i.e. the hammer pounds on the nail. The language is also certainly constructed on that model - subjects and verbs. Must actors really exist? Then that’s a world with action but no actors. Maybe true, but counterintuitive to me.
(I’m reversing the order of your paragraphs to facilitate the flow of my own comments.
Certainly an actor must exist, must really exist, but what you’ve said is that an actor must ontologically exist. You count on our folk and linguistic intuitions to satisfy us that actors must exist, but you can’t use this move to satisfy us that actors must ontologically exist because as you’ve already acknowledged, it is not intuitive in the folk or lingustic sense that something only really exists if it ontologically exists.
So of course I’ll grant an actor must really exist in order to act. But from that we don’t immediately get that an actor must ontologically exist in order to act. For that, we need to know what ontological existence consists in. So:
My computer exists independently of me. Here is my argument for that claim. If I did not exist, my computer would still exist. Also, it could easily have been that I existed but my computer never got built. So the existence of my computer is logically independent of my own existence–neither implies the existence of the other. Logical independence is independence, so, my computer’s existence is independent of my own.
Since my computer exists independently of me, my computer has ontological existence.
What problem do you think you find with that argument?
-FrL-
Well, there is an external world whose elementary constituents are independent of us. But how we divide these constituents up into objects is determined by our language and guided in large part by pragmatic considerations. It might appeal to your rigid principles to deny that there are shirts and pants, but it sure would make shopping inconvenient. Isn’t that a good reason to allow these terms into our language? There are good reasons for identifying individual human organisms as ‘loci of responsibility’ and treating them accordingly, as I have argued earlier in this thread. It’s not the only way to divide up the world, but it beats the alternative of not dividing the world up at all (which is more or less where your suggestion leads).
No argument there. On a tangential note, that ‘language’ qualification seems to present a chicken and egg problem.
No, it wouldn’t. As I said earlier: I may, and do, treat the assembly of matter as a singular entity, when convenient, and label it a computer.. An office chair, for example, is assembled from many parts. I deny that chairs truly exist, but that doesn’t prevent me from sitting on one. That’s just me treating that assembly as a singular unit for purposes of, say, communication: “Bring that chair here!”
I agree. In the ‘chair’ example, it sure beats saying “Bring that assembly of cushion, backrest, legs, joints…etc over here!”. But, like I said, we are not talking about how humans relate to their sensorium. As you agree, an external world exists independent of us. And this free will debate is purportedly about some aspect of this actual and independent nature of the external world. In that context, science suggests to me that computers and chairs don’t exist. As a philosopher, you are most probably aware over the debate on color realism. That the sensation of color is an interpretation of our brain and isn’t “out there” (of course, it’s a debate because some disagree) In that same sense, the world is a fabric of spacetime and matter. Some of the matter are in a certain relation with other matter. And our brain finds it convenient to bundle and categorize perceptual input. Everyday objects are simply such categories. They don’t really exist. And which is not an impediment to our interaction with “them”.
Consider me chastised for being ignorant of vocabulary. I simply mean “really exist”. I used the word ‘ontologically’ to emphasize the independence of existence, especially from our mental treatment.
You are just restating the premise.
The question of whether chairs exist, or really exist, or really really exist is only a moderately interesting linguistic exercise (like much of metaphysics). How one resolves the inherent pitfalls and vague boundaries of dualism is more interesting - perhaps to the point of it deserving its own thread. But to get back on track… presumably libertarian free will is a feature of the “self” side of this divide but I don’t see how that really solves anything. How does the self explain LFW? Is it tied to “wants” or completely free? If it’s tied, it’s still determined. If it’s free, it’s still random. If it’s a little of each, then what is it that is lost in the reduction to components? If it’s neither, what could it possibly be? The ball is not being moved here.
“If I did not exist, my computer would still exist” is certainly not a restatement of “My computer exists independently of me.” But in any case, I take it that you do not accept the premise that if I did not exist, my computer would still exist.
If I did not exist, would my cat still exist? My wife? Quantum particles? (Or whatever the fundamental constituents of matter might turn out to be?) I am trying to get clear on what exactly you’re saying here.
-FrL-
Well, you think you are just working with the definition of ‘exist,’ but in fact you are advancing a controversial ontological claim: if x’s can be reduced to y’s, then x’s don’t really exist. For example, chairs ‘really’ are just particles, so chairs don’t exist. But why should we accept this claim? Chemistry is at bottom ‘really’ just physics, but are you saying that there are no elements or chemical reactions? Why would we want to talk this way? And if you think there are good reasons to continue talking about chairs and chemicals, then why not persons? Chairs exist: they are a particular combination of particles. Your denial of the existence of complex objects is, again, not based (as you seem to think) merely on the meaning of the word ‘exist’; it is a substantive ontological claim which I (and others in this thread) reject.
And actually, I agree with PC apeman. Even if you could identify a self, that wouldn’t help one iota with the problem of libertarian free will, which at bottom suffers from conceptual incoherence no matter what the constitution of the self.
My niece was just up here visiting. I haven’t lured her into lurking here yet, but the topic of free will and determinism did come up. Here was her take on it (in my words, from memory):
• there are not multiple possible futures; at any given moment, the sum total of all that is can lead to one possible future, not multiple ones; therefore it is not true that some other outcome was possible, the only outcome that was possible was the one that happens/happened
• this is due to considering the question “if the outcome is not determined by some determining factor that causes this and not that to be the outcome, i.e., that could have been the outcome instead, then what is the reason for this actually ending up being the outcome?” — and realizing the answer to be “there is no reason”.
• it is the notion that a future (therefore the present, and every single moment of time up until now) would occur for no reason that is rejected here; and to reject that one must reject the notion that a specific future is somehow selected from among possible futures in some fashion apart from being caused or determined by anything.
I wonder how close this is to the perspective held by those arguing here that free will does not exist. (As noted many times before, terms were not defined; a post hoc clarification that it is “libertarian free will” that is being dismissed as nonexistent here, but that phrase was not defined either).
I’m not denying the latter clause. “Chairs don’t exist” simply means that there is no chairhood to the aggregate apart from the one assigned within mental activity, like, in one side of the debate over color realism, there are no colors out there. But I still see colors and identify them, and I expect that as an adequate and similarly functioning human, so do you. So, I can tell you that the background color of the sky is blue-ish… Same for chemical reactions. The really existing or not issue is irrelevant from a pragmatic perspective, but not for philosophy. If some child thinks that invisible angels push a battery-operated toy car, that false belief doesn’t impede the child from operating the car (as long as the parent replaces the battery).
All LFW means is that the self-exists and it is an actor. This incoherence, to me, derives from the implicit assumptions and tendencies inculcated by science to explain everything in terms of other things. LFW, by its very nature, implies that this is not possible with the activity of the self. So the urge to see how LFW can be mechanically conceptualized is what’s incoherent. Above, the PC apeman wonders what’s the relation between desires and the self. IOW, LFW has to be explained in terms of the self + desires + their connection. This elucidatory expedition, implicitly but presumptively, denies free will i.e. from the outset. It’s like asking “how do any of the fundamental laws exist?”. It’s the question that is incoherent, and the inability to come up with an answer doesn’t affect the issue of their existence.
Some of you seem to think I’m seeking to redefine the language. I don’t think so; ‘exists’ means what it intuitively means: “really being out there”. But, ISTM,
a)language has organically evolved and naive realism has played a critical role in its shaping
b)although the implications of science should inform the applicability of ‘exist’, within the overwhelming majority of people, immediate conscious experience still sufficiently holds up naive realism, so ‘exist’ continues to be applied to chairs and computers. Since pragmatically, chairs do exist, there’s no urgency in lay discourse to change matters.
[quote=Frylock**“If I did not exist, my computer would still exist” is certainly not a restatement of “My computer exists independently of me.”[/quote]
Why would the computer still exist if you didn’t? Because it is independent of you? But that’s the thesis under consideration.
But even a philosopher can countenance the existence of ‘medium-sized dry goods’. Wilfrid Sellars famously distinguished between the ‘manifest image’ (consisting of such medium-sized objects, along with person, norms, and other common-sense things) and the ‘scientific image’, which consists in large part of unobservable entities posited to explain the behavior of observable (‘manifest’) objects. Sellars argued for the legitimacy of both images. One might claim that the scientific image tells us about the underlying reality or composition of objects in the manifest image, but that is no reason to abandon the manifest image. Rather, we can see science as giving us a deeper understanding of the manifest image, not replacing it.
It’s not the inculcation of science causing problems here. It’s logic. The problem is free will either coincides with desires (ie. is not free) or it doesn’t (ie. is not will). To say that’s the wrong question without providing an alternative explanation is merely a hand-waving furtherance of your obscurantism. ‘Free will neither coincides nor non-coincides with desires.’ What does that mean?
Of course, at some point “our spade is turned” and we cannot give a further analysis or explanation of some phenomenon. But again, the self is a proposed solution to a problem (the problem of explaining behavior), not a basic problem itself. And since it is a bad solution to the problem, and psychology offers us a better solution (which actually allows us to analyze human behavior), we should discard it as an outdated remnant of Platonism and Cartesian dualism.
This is fine. I am more interested in getting clear on your view, like so:
-FrL-
II Gyan II, the more you post, the less coherent your position seems to come. As of now you appeal to and accept the external existence of particles yet reject the external existence of objects based on, among other things, solisism; you reject that computers can be actors, and then define actors such that hammers are actors; and you define libertarian free will as unanalyzabe in defiance of the fact that human thought clearly and demonstrably is analyzable, and then presumably claim that humans have this free will.
Honestly, I don’t know what your position is anymore, and I don’t think you know either. Perhaps you should take a moment and try and restate your position in a clear and non-self-condradictory manner.
And underlying reality is what we are trying to get at; one may keep the manifest image if it suits us, and for daily and most other endeavours, it does.
If it helps you any, simply originate the desire with the self. “I do what I want to do” is within the scope of free will. It’s no more problematic that “I am me and can’t be other than me”. Free-will ought to be renamed self-will.
The self is a basic problem itself. Just flip through some of the journals on consciousness or recent academic works like those of Metzinger. It is not just an accommodation for explanation of behavior.
Just make sure the ‘that would suck’ fallacy is not an implicit factor in your thinking. See below on ‘analyzable’.
I reject computers as actors and the hammer remark was an illustration of how action is attributed to, and thought of as requiring, actors. I don’t claim that hammers truly are actors.
What does it mean to analyze ‘human thought’? To notice patterns? How and why the patterns arise is a different issue.
For other people? Sure. In the external world? Well, you picked a tricky object i.e. a possibly conscious entity, so if it is conscious, then yeah. If not, then it never did. To make it clearer, let’s stick with chairs. When you exist, you organize certain perceptual input as a chair. The chair only “exists” as a object for cognition.