[MD] Choosing Chance

[Matt Kundert]

Arlo, Steve,

Steve said:
Can one choose to prefer what one does not already prefer? No. Are our preferences really random in nature? Mu. ...

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.

Matt:
This was an interesting exchange.  There's a snippet from Freud that Rorty liked to use to explain what he meant by "contingency" : "treat chance as worthy of determining our fate."  The little quote likes to flirt with the notions that we're trying to disentangle ("chance, "determination," "fate"), but what Freud meant by "chance" was something like what Heidegger meant by "throwness." From a certain view, an individual seems to randomly pop out of a womb at certain place and time.  That view, while acheiving a certain pathos, isn't the viewpoint Freud or Rorty was after.  They were suggesting a more specific viewpoint, in which where we just so happen to pop out, where we happen to be thrown into spatialtemporality, is not something we try and escape from into a broader view of this contingent circumstance.  This broader view is not only the Christian view of Real, Heaven Time after fallen, historical time, but also it's flipside--once one drops Judeo-Platonic teleologies, this broad view produces the sense of randomness, of seeing the universe as not an organized array of events, all happening for the best possible reasons (if just we could discern them), but seeing this same universe as a random cavalcade of events extending out from the first one with shit just blindly bumping into each other.

>From the point of view of the universe, reality certainly is just one damn thing happening after another.  But that perspective doesn't really mean much in trying to decide what to do--though it does suggest that "decision" is a stupid notion.  However, if you take the point of view of an individual human being, then reality looks like things happening after each other, but also a reality in which I'm having an effect on.  So where does "decision," "choice" fit in?

I think Steve suggests a good, modified large view of reality--we are thrown into the preferences we happen to have, they were created by the part of time-space we popped into, but in _acting out_ these preferences, which is what life is, it doesn't help at all in acting them out to be told that it's "all random" or "all determined" or "all chance" or "all fate."  We are chained to our preferences, but they are also our freedom--freedom is what is created when random chaos is kept at bay by the organizing power of preference.  When a person confronts a choice with different conflicting preferences weighing in on her, we can only say _retrospectively_ that one preference was more powerful than another.  Only retrospectively do things look inevitable--before than, it's just prognostication.

"Chance" can be a useful slogan, but we just have to be careful to not be seduced by the dark brother of the Light's Ultimate Telos.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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