Daniel McKay wrote: ↑Wed Jul 24, 2024 6:47 am
One wouldn't necessarily need to defeat moral scepticism if you could show that it were all-things-considered a worse option than believing in moral realism. Certainly, there are potential moral benefits if I'm right, heh.
Well, yes...but then you'd have to invoke some hierarchy of values, just to say what was "better" or "worse." And the problem is that the Freedom Consequentialism is supposed to structure the hierarchy of values, so it's a case of a dog chasing its tail: you'd have to believe Freedom Consequentialism
already in order to get the hierarchy to say that it was "better" or "worse" (i.e. for the goal of freedom) to do one thing or the other.
What are the chances of getting any skeptic to do that? They're not going to hand you the win
assumptively, are they?
I mean, I would certainly say that there are things and facts that a non-physical (eg economic facts), but those things arise due to physical things,
In all the accounts of Physicalism I've found, this is the very problem with Physicalism. It assumes, but does not prove, that all genuine or successful explanations must arrive at the physical eventually, and stop there. And it issues a prophetic "promissory note," so to speak, for all such cases in the future -- a thing that surely cannot be granted.
In other words, it requires you to assume Physicalism from the get-go. If you don't...
such that if you copied all physical facts about the universe, you would get all the non-physical facts with them.
There's the kind of "promissory note" of which I spoke. This is an "if" that you cannot defend. It has not been done, obviously, and cannot be done. So it has to be assumed, not proved. But why should we grant Physicalists a free win, by assuming their conclusion before we begin?
You seem to be asserting that physical things must follow a chain of cause and effect, but that just isn't so. Just because something is physical (or, in the case of a mind, perhaps something that a physical thing, the brain, does) doesn't mean it must be deterministic.
I confess I find that implausible. If the only things that exist in the world as ultimate, true explanations are physical entities and physical dynamics, then it is inevitable that they are deterministic. Nothing
other than what these specific entities and dynamics conduce to could ever exist in the universe. That's the assumption of Physicalism. So one result, one outcome in every situation becomes absolutely inevitable -- whether we feel and realize that or not.
It seems entirely plausible to me that we can have free will without any spooky non-physical entities.
It seems to me possible we could be induced by physical processes to be
deluded into the impression that we were free, when we really never were. For example, if a deceptive chemical were introduced into the brain and generated a hallucinatory belief in our freedom, that would account for our belief in freedom. But more than that, I cannot grant. I cannot see how genuine freedom would even be possible...just the illusion of it.
If we are willing to say that non-physical entities can be exempt from cause and effect, then why not just say that at least some physical entities can be?
Are we saying that? Or are we only saying that cause-and-effect are the dynamics appropriate to physical entities, and the dynamics of non-physical entities are not as unequivocally accessible to our episteme? I think it's only the latter. The physical world is conveniently "withing our grasp," scientifically speaking; but the super-physical world will not get into our beakers, will not pinch tightly in our Vernier calipers, will not slide tightly under our microscopes...
But the fact that non-physical realities (assuming such exist) do not tamely exhaust themselves in response to our physical methods of physical science...is that really a huge surprise? I don't think it is.
What we're really talking about is an old problem: what is a
real science? The temptation is to privilege those sciences that are the most physical or most consistent, and then to denigrate each ensuing one to the degree it proves less physical and less reliable to our physical investigations. So traditionally, things like maths, physics and chemistry get the highest billing as "pure science," biology gets kicked down one notch, for being less consistent and predictable, and more open to empirical taint, and then below that we get things like the "soft sciences," sociology, psychology, cultural studies, history and then the "arts" like the humanities and such. But notice that the further down this list we get more mind-involvement, less physical dynamics. We also get a concommitant reduction in the level of our confidence in their deliverances; not that they aren't reliable, but that we progressively stop being certain about them, and the "discipline" involved becomes looser and harder to define.
What's clear to me, though, is that the
mind that generates things like the humanities, or arts, or psychology, or philosophy is a real entity. We all know it is, though we can't exactly say why or what it is, and we sure can't define it down in physical properties. And we all rely on that mind, even though we don't really understand its workings...just as you are relying on it to decode these physical black-squiggles-on-a-page, and to understand this discussion.
So my contention would be that Physicalism is inevitably assumptive, reductional and insufficient to account for non-physical realities upon which we rely constantly, such as "mind," "personhood," "freedom" and "values," and here, "reasoning."
. I hear you. I just don't think, to echo McKay elsewhere, s/he's asking the right question - which is why it's unanswerable. And I think the opening of the passage you quoted says it all.