[MD] Choosing Chance

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Arlo,

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 9:31 AM, Arlo Bensinger <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:
> [Steve]
> As I understand it, the MOQ isn't a philosphy of choice or chance but rather
> preferences. Our preferences are not based on choice or chance but on other
> preferences. It's preferences all the way down.
>
> [Arlo]
> I think we are just splitting hairs here, but I'd say that an agenic
> response of "preference" is founded on the presence of "chance". If
> something has no "chance" but to act the way it does, then it has no ability
> to enact "preference".
>
> When you "prefer" vanilla over chocolate ice cream, you do so because your
> choice is not certain; it is not predetermined, coerced, manipulated or
> orchestrated. If there is 100% certainty that you'd pick vanilla, then you
> did not act on preference, you were simply machinistically doing what was
> planned of you.
>
> Subatomic particles "prefer" forming atoms only when there is some "chance"
> that they might not. If they were coerced by an unseen, willful, hand to do
> what they did, then they were not exhibiting "preference", were they?
>
> There are times, like I said before, that "preference" or "choice" may
> approach near certainty, but if you remove probability/chance altogether,
> then you eliminate freedom. You make the cosmos the super-marionation show
> for the Will of Qualit-god, nothing more.

Steve:
On the one hand it sounds like you are using "chance" as "opportunity"
or a range of possibilities yet to be settled, but on the other hand
as randomness and probability. I'm fine with the former, but I think
the latter is problematic for the MOQ since randomness can't be the
explanation of anything. From a metaphysical standpoint, saying that
something is random is saying that it can never be explained, so
randomness is by definition a non-explanation.

Randomness is a useful concept for making decisions but a poor choice
for a metaphysical description. If we just take randomness as an
epistemological notion, then saying that something is random is a way
of saying that you don't know what will happen, but you do know the
relative frequency of its occurence. As a teacher of statistics, I
know that there is a lot of mileage to get from this concept of
randomness and also that nothing is lost if we just stick to the
epistemological view of randomness as a term that applies to specific
perspectives and what can be known from a given perspective rather
than as a metaphysical notion describing what sorts of things possess
the property that they cannot ever be known even from a
perspectiveless God's-Eye-View.

I'm with you on wanting to dispell the Quali-God notion, but I don't
think the way to get there is to introduce randomness as a
metaphysical reality. We get there by saying that metaphysically,
everything is preferences, but there is no over-arching entity that
guides all preferences. There are instead just preferences based on
preferences based on preferences and so on without additional
metaphysical properties that entities either do or not have such as
choice or randomness.

Can one choose to prefer what one does not already prefer? No. Are our
preferences really random in nature? Mu. Preferences are not best
thought of as substances that have intrinsic natures, so we don't need
to ask whether preferences either have or do not have such properties.

It is better to drop such metaphysical claims about the intrinsic
nature of preferences (free choice?, random?, deterministic?...) and
simply say that we aren't in an epistemological context to know the
whole story of the evolution of the entire universe to be able to
describe the origin of our particular patterns of preferences with
great specificity, but the MOQ gives us a useful "big picture" to
describe the evolution of value patterns on a broad scale.

Best,
Steve