That would be John Dewey, not the guy who beat Truman. Presidential election season brain freeze?
Our understanding of the world depends on models. We have models for time and for consequences and for the space around us. They serve us well but they aren’t perfect. A lot of the big questions can be answered (or at least simplified) by finding the problem in our model.
“Cause and effect” is a simple and usefel model. It’s great for figuring out how a machine works or a ball rolls down hill, but don’t put too much pressure on the model because the it will break.
We have no free will, you might say, because we have no soul. Since we have no soul, we are made up of physical particles only. And because physical particles obey iron clad rules of science, we have no space left for free will.
But that slips by an assumption about the nature of cause and effect (since science, for the most part, depends on rock solid cause and effect).
But isn’t cause and effect rock solid, you say? Well, no, not really.
Talk to a math geek someday and ask about complexity theory or chaos theory or whatever they call it to sound cool. The upshot of what they’ll tell you is that, even in simple systems, complex behavior occurs. That is to say, behavior occurs that seems intentional or controlled but isn’t explicitly in the simple rules that govern the behavior of everything in the system. Those pretty swirly patterns that math geeks thought were the bomb back in the nineties? Those patterns were governed by simple mathematical rules. In other words, the math geeks knew everything they could about the system (that is, they knew all the rules that controlled this self contained world), yet they were unable to predict that the pattern would be pretty and swirly. Complex behavior arose out of chaos.
Humans are different. We have more rules than math worlds do. But our behavior, while inherent in rules of real-world science, cannot be meaingfully explained by those rules. There is, dare I say, a causal break between the physical world and the world in our head.
So: do we have free will? I won’t say. Could our behavior be predicted, even with God-like knowledge of world? No, it could not.
Who thought it was a piece of crap as well. Basically a meme is a way to excuse a dumb thing you might have done. That is what I got out of it.
Thank you.