Again, my apologies for the delay, Roger...I've been offline for some time. I'm back now, and your insightful thoughts merit first consideration.
RogerSH wrote: ↑Fri Aug 06, 2021 5:40 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Aug 03, 2021 3:25 pm
RogerSH wrote: ↑Tue Aug 03, 2021 1:37 pm
Identity through time is a special case of causation: something is as it is at a later time because that it is how it was at earlier times.
It's actually not. Identity (using the word to refer to sameness, not human "identity") does not cause anything. It's simply a recognition that an item at this chronological time is the same one as at a prior chronological time.
But nothing in that relationship has been "caused." It's purely descriptive.
The point is that identity
over time, assuming that it is a necessary identity and not a purely contingent one, is a
special case of causation. If something is in state S1 at time T1 and also at later time T2, but would be in state S2 at T2 if it was in state S2 at T1, that is a necessary identity, then the later state is determined by the earlier one.
It's not a
causal relation, though. It is not true to say that my identity at T1
caused me to be me at T2. Rather, identity picks out a particular ontological (not causal) feature: namely, that I am me at both times.
So it's not right to say T1 "determined" how T2 would be. It's just that it would be the same entity implicated at two different times and in two different states.
This is actually routine. If somebody sees a picture of an 8-year-old child holding up a fish he's caught, and he asks, "Who is that?" he's not being misled if you say, "That's me." You were 8 when you caught the fish; maybe you're 48 now. But you were the same entity, and the eight-year-old was not causally responsible for you being the 48-year-old. You were the same entity, at two different times, and in two different states.
So no,
identity isn't any kind of case or subset of
causality at all. It's not a "special case of causation." It's a case of identity.
Among the things that might influence the choice are: personal preferences; knowledge of the situation in hand and of the likely consequences of each possible choice; lessons gained from experience; some new insight gained by combining past observations; previous mental commitments (e.g. on moral grounds) to make such a choice in a particular way; and so on. You may not have been aware of some of these things, but nevertheless they enter your conscious state when you turn your mind to the matter in hand. These are all things that make up the resources of your personal consciousness, that make it YOUR choice in particular.
But it's not an exhaustive list that you have given here.
We must include such things as, "intuition," or "creativity," or "acting on an intention to produce something new." And what about "fear of possibilities," or "curiosity"? There are lots more mental states that those you've listed.
Of course…which is why I said “and so on”! But in each case they must have arisen out of something that was already in your mind, not anyone else’s. My intuition won’t help your decisions. My feeling curious won’t motivate your exploration.
Well, nobody suggested
that.
But what I'm pointing out is that it's misleading to say they "must have arisen out of something that was already in your mind." Because stuff that's "in a mind" is not "in material reality" the way that, say, neurochemicals are. In creativity, for example, the creative mind imagines something new, or a new combination of things already known, but one that has not yet existed anywhere. Or in the case of fear, maybe I imagine outcomes that have not ever come into existence and never will...as when I fear that bad diet will kill me by the age of 70, whereas I am going to be killed by a streetcar next week, or else live to 95. The relations in these things are not causal...or if we imagine they are, there is no explanation that has so far been given that makes that supposition plausible.
And this is why something like
Guernica is so remarkable, in this connection. It is a conception of Picasso's, and we do not have any reason to suppose Braque or Cezanne, let alone any lesser or more distant artists, cold have produced it, even if we gave them a billion years. It would just never have come into their minds to do it.
Well, though, the truth is that that claim is merely presumptive, not demonstrable. In point of fact, many of them, like the ones I've listed, appear to project new realities, not simply achingly play out old lines of cause. It looks very much like creative mind-states project into reality things that have not yet existed, and then are somehow capable of creating them in reality, in the physical world.
Explaining novelty is a problem for the inanimate world just as much as for the living one. The former is full of things that didn’t exist at the big bang. There must have been a moment when a soap bubble appeared in the universe for the very first time, for example. This was not the result of somebody imagining it.
Well, hold on: that's presumptive, too.
According to Genesis, God imagined everything that exists. Now, you may say that, as a matter of your own belief, that didn't happen. Okay. But you can't say that it's obvious that the first soap bubble "had" to come into being arbitrarily. There is a way of understanding the situation, and one I believe is right, that soap bubbles and everything else are indeed products of the Divine "imagination," or better, "creativity."
If the first soap bubble came into being at all, it's a marvel...and one that surely is hard to explain in terms of any random theory of evolution. For why should there have been an entity so complex and subtle...or heck, so intelligible at all...as a soap bubble or as a cosmos, if there's no intelligence behind the cosmos? We should rather expect chaos. That we don't observe that -- and that we are here to observe at all -- should argue powerfully for the God hypothesis, really.
[I’ve moved this quote down a bit] Are you familiar with Jaegwon Kim's ideas on this? … Is that your view?
I’m not familiar with that name, but brain => mind isn’t my view anyway,
Well, that's not the point, really. The point is that if we use materials as an explanation for mind, then we are faced with the problem that mind genuinely seems to be capable of "causing" things in its own right.
And if it can, then the existence of non-determined will is a reality.
...if we confine it to the sense that the effect follows the cause, that clearly cannot apply to the monist account of the mind/brain relationship.
Right. A materialist, physicalist or other such monist cannot account for any causal role for "mind." And yet, we all think it has one, and can find a plethora of cases in which that supposition is not only the most useful and functional one, but where it's the only one that makes sense of the event.
For example, you and I are discussing right now. But if our opinions are already predetermined by our brain structure, then what is the causal role of our arguing? You can't "change my mind," and I can't "change" yours, in that case.
But we both think we could, or at least that the two of us could come to a new understanding by discussion. So we are both acting as if "mind" is a causal agent, and "will" is involved. And I think the burden is on the materialist, monist, or brain-advocate to show that we are fooling ourselves, and how it is happening -- especially, since only a free will can be "fooled."
Think about that. It just doesn't work, does it?
But we certainly need to talk about higher levels of structural organisation to be remotely intelligible.
No, I think that's a category error. Complexity does not create intelligence. A pile of three rocks is very simple. A pile of a thousand is much more complex. A pile of a ten thousand rocks assembled into a ziggurat is much more "organized." But all three are just rock. There's no "intelligence" involved in producing the rising complexity or even the organization; rather, the only intelligence in the equation is introduced by the already-intelligent builders of the ziggurat.
This is one of the things that fools "virtual intelligence" advocates. They are not such fools as to think that their abacus or pocket calculator is "intelligent," but somehow they suppose that a modern computer is not just doing something more complex and differently organized than the former, but that it's actually doing something that is substantively new...becoming "intelligent" thereby.
That's not what's happening, obviously. It's just that the computations have reached a level of complexity sufficient to confuse and fool ordinary folks. It's a "Turing" achievement, but not actually any instance of "intelligence."
Just because we can’t trace the web of mental causes doesn’t mean that it is absent.
No, but it doesn't give us any warrant to believe it's
present. To all appearances, Picasso's achievement is unique. We would need some sort of scientific reason to think that that impression is wrong. And so far, we have none at all.
But the important point is that you seem to agree that decisions reflecting a will are not uncaused, just differently caused, and that difference involves consciousness - hence, in a sense, being caused by the whole person.
I think that's not quite it.
What we are debating, I think is whether or not "will" really describes any part of a causal chain, or whether "will" is just a sort of uninformative, misleading, unhelpful and unnecessary way to speak of the inevitable physical connection between prior causes and irresistible future effects.
The monist has to think that "will" doesn't actually describe anything. (Ironically, it is "he" who will "think" it doesn't.) He has to think that Picasso's "will" never rightly entered the chain of true explanations for
Guernica's existence.
But the objection then reverses savagely. For if I am nothing but the sum of prior physical forces, THEN what is the basis of my alleged "responsibility"? There is no "me," no "I" to be responsible for anything. A long chain of prior causes forced to be done what was done. There is no personal agency in there for us to blame, and none to praise if "good" things happen, either.
I’m sorry but I simply do not buy that theory of responsibility!
Then neither do you "buy" the theory of reward or praise. If you are not "responsible" for something good happening, then neither is it any credit to you when it does.
...in a nutshell, we can be responsible for a decision if and only if we are conscious of making it. Responsibility cannot be separated from consciousness.
But in a monist world, there was no "you" to be "responsible" anyway. "Consciousness" does not describe any actual feature of causal chains, according to Determinism. It's not variable (free), and does not add any cause-effect content to the description.
but if [3] we also assume away quantum uncertainty,
We don't need to: it's actually irrelevant to the question. Quantum uncertainty does not tell us anything about how the will operates. [/quote]
Well, the Hammeroff/Penrose theory suggests exactly that it does[/quote]
No, it doesn't. If quantum mechanics is the explanation of consciousness, then consciousness is no more than a random product of the physical world. We are playthings of random chance, not mechanical causes, perhaps; but we still have absolutely no volition of our own. We're just slaves to a different -- and much less predictable -- master.
One way of looking at it is that determinism can be expressed as constancy of information within the system. Implementing a decision made outside the system would add information to the system, which contravenes the assumed constancy, so is ruled out.
Whoa!
What that says is, "We want to believe in consistency," so anything that "contravenes the assumed constancy" will just be "ruled out." That's the very opposite of respecting whatever the data is...it's assuming a conclusion, then rejecting all the data that challenges it. That has no smattering of real science in it.
...what I claim to have demonstrated here is that a dualist who accepts that mental events are (differently) connected causally, should accept that the combined universe comprising the material world plus the mental world could be deterministic, without denying free will to the mental world.
I think that's obviously self-contradictory. And it's very dualistic. You've already required, in your premises, the belief in the existence of "the material world" plus "the mental world." That's two. That's dualism.
What you need for Determinism is to collapse the explanation "the mental world" into "the material world," so you can believe in just one of the two. If there are actually two distinct realms, you're a dualist. And if you believe in any "free will" at all...in any situation, anytime...then you're not a Determinist.
Sorry again for the delay. I hope the response makes up for it a bit.
Look what we have here.
Look what we have here. 
