Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

If atoms never swerve and make beginning Of motions that can break the bonds of fate And foil the infinite chain of cause and effect What is the origin of this free will Possessed by living creatures throughout the earth? Lucretius, De Rerum Natura

controls

This prwmise seems icomplete and should read the past controls some of the present. So tge conclusion likewise should change to the more accurate ylou cant control some of tye present.

determinism, which can be put by saying that every event is the upshot of antecedent causes.

certain.

But tgeres variability in perspective. I was weak till now without strengtgening myself i remain weak now. But perspective can change in reference to someone weker tgan me. If so i am now strong

People who accept this argument are called hard determinists, or incompatibilists, since they think that freedom and determinism are incompatible.

But this is not quite what we wanted: it is introducing an element of randomness into things, but not an element of control or responsibility.

This is a good distinction bjut randomness is nec for choice; there must be more than a single predetermined possibility in order to choose vis a vis follow a single predetermined path

If determinism does not hold, but some events ‘just happen,’ and then, equally, we lose freedom and responsibility.

No. As in my note abkove, randomness allows for the requisite variety of choices nec to allow for a choice

But here is the German philosopher Schopenhauer (1788–1860): Let us imagine a man who, while standing on the street, would say to himself: ‘It is six o’clock in the evening, the working day is over. Now I can go for a walk, or I can go to the club; I can also climb up the tower to see the sun set; I can go to the theater; I can visit this friend or that one; indeed, I also can run out of the gate, into the wide world, and never return. All of this is strictly up to me, in this I have complete freedom. But still I shall do none of these things now, but with just as free a will I shall go home to my wife.’ This is exactly as if water spoke to itself: ‘I can make high waves (yes! in the sea during a storm), I can rush down hill (yes! in the river bed), I can plunge down foaming and gushing (yes! in the waterfall), I can rise freely as a stream of water into the air (yes! in the fountain), I can, finally, boil away and disappear (yes! at certain temperature); but I am doing none of these things now, and am voluntarily remaining quiet and clear water in the reflecting pond’. In this parable, the water is not conscious of the causal setups necessary for it to boil, make waves, and so on. It only remembers that it sometimes does these things. Hence, it thinks, it can do them.

Great explication ! This is tge first idea in this book which i cant refute to my satisfaction!

When I speak I am not conscious of the incredible causal structures that make it possible for me to speak: the musculature, the coordination of muscle and breath control, the movement of the tongue and palate, the configuring of my jaw.

God example

lies.

This allows for determinism. This at first blush is unsettling, i am not in control, only like a robot foollowing a program, pathetic and impotent. i suspect the reasoon thatt this is al all unsettling is more fundamentl than a loss of pkowerf; its truly because of the loss of a familiar fact and tgis alone is the unsettling element: our familiar perception is that we are in control and free to make choices. Therefore suddenly losing this freedom to Schopenhauer is unsettling because we lose a familiar thing. The advantage of tgis explanation is that if one accepts that freedom was only an illusion (at least according to Schopenhauer ) than nothing actual is lost, only a perception, which isnt a loss at all. i suspect likewise that the unsettling feeling which comes from realljizing ones mortality is the feeling of losing a familiar thing. Likewise for amputation and hairloss.

If not, then is ghost-stuff subject to random fits and starts? How does that help me to be free and responsible?

I cannot wish away pains,

But i can wish my arm raised or resting

The dualist approach to free will makes a fundamental philosophical mistake. It sees a problem and tries to solve it by throwing another kind of ‘thing’ into the arena. But it forgets to ask how the new ‘thing’ escapes the problems that beset ordinary things.

the Greek and Roman atomists, including Epicurus and Lucretius, were better off in one respect than Descartes. For they thought, as he did not, that the spirit itself must be understood in mechanical terms. The mind or spirit, they held, was composed of particularly fine, small, and exceedingly mobile mechanical particles, so there is no reason in principle why these should not influence the directions and velocities of the larger particles of the body.

An intermadiate stage of thought still in line with the vitalist school of tgought and insisting on unique qualities of life vs nonliving matter but not yet approaching our modern notiin of uniform compkosition of all objects

Lucretius explains the way in which this subtle stuff is ‘of seeds extremely small, through veins, flesh, sinews, woven’. The soul

Cf. Arizal and the 613 structures of the soul mirroring the 613 strucgtures of the body

incompatibilism?

It occurs to me that basically this problem of interaction Between spiritual objects and physical ones is the same as the chorismas which aristotle blamed on platos forms; ma nafshach: if spirits effect physical consequences tgen they ought to likewise be effected by them to. If not then not and they cant serve the purpose which they are invisioned to serve

delivers options for behaviour in the light of what the scanner says.

Tgis reminds me that we dont necessarily act in an optimal manner. We can be cspricious or lazy or industrious. This indicates freewill

And now it is doubly bad luck, because you are going to get thumped for it.

Actually the expectwtion of punishment ought to be likewise part of the offensers programming and so weighed against relief from the dogs presence. In fact this is the ubiquitous conflict of impulses facing us and we likely decide based on civilized ways

posited a kind of intervention from outside the realm of nature: a ‘contra-causal’ freedom, in which the ghost is distinct from the causal order of nature, yet mysteriously able to alter that order. We could call that conception, interventionist control. It is sometimes known in the literature as a libertarian conception of freedom, although this is confusing, since it has nothing to do with political or economic libertarianism,

the great Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who dismissed it as giving us only the ‘freedom of clockwork’ and called it nothing better than a ‘wretched subterfuge’.

worries.

My nascent reaction to all of tgis is tgat tge author is worried about an abortive preconception of freedom in that after some thought tgere seems to be a loss of tgis freedom. But in reality, thinking didnt cause a loss, cant cause a loss, only a change in understanding of what is had. To suppose a thought can effect a status is a reification fallacy

past.

Its noteworthy that people make apparent choices, howdever the author analyses tgis, while trees donT even make apparent ones.

there actually exists a parasite

cool

Some philosophers (Baruch Spinoza [1632–77] is the most famous example) like to associate freedom with increased knowledge and understanding. We are free, they say, in so far as we understand things.

responsible.

This imputes culpibility to the act of a child, and that a few sentences after prosaically excusing children of culpability

The conceptual engineering we are doing at this point is supposed to tease out or make explicit real elements in our thinking.

even if the revised revised analysis does not settle this issue, it certainly pinpoints it.

Compatibilism tries to generate the right notion of control out of the reflection that under different circumstances the agent would have done otherwise. There are nasty cases that suggest that these notions do not fit together quite so tightly. These are called ‘causal overdetermination’ cases.

Strawson asks us to confront what is lost in this change. He suggests that a lot of what makes human relationships distinctively human is lost.

people.

if the matter of free will is disconcefting or scary, i tgink its for tge same reason that death is. And this, i tgink is because we have an urge to keep what is familiar, whether its territory, culture, a gangrenous limb or our very lives. death is the loss of something familiar, in fact of everytging which is famikiar. so too the question of free will considers we dont have it. At first blush this is uncomfy bec it appears to be the loss of this familiar thing, very uncomfy inasmuch as its a very intimate quality. but tgis discomfort Arises from misonception; chsnging how you think of an object doesnt change the object. So sehatever this quality of free will was yesterday is exactly the same as today even though you read this book. Considering it to be a determined pricess arising from optimal rankings of options by your brain doesnt steal from you what you had yesterday. tgis fallacy is akin to the easily lauggable predicament of uneducated people at the time that the modern calendar was integrated for use; it changed the present date to a later one i tgink three days later if memory serves and the uneducated folk thought those tgree dys were stolen from theur life. Just like its cler to us that time wsnt stolen but only relabled so too our intimate and familiar quality hasnt been stolen only relabled.