[MD] Anti-reductionism in the MOQ

[david buchanan]

Akshay and all MOQers:

You're probably the smartest, most philosophically sophisticated teenager I've ever encountered but...

I recently learned that William James was horrified by determinism and his doctrines are substantially opposed to it. I believe Pirsig is too and for the same basic reasons. From the perspective of classical pragmatism, determinism makes a mockery of freedom, creativity and morality because of the way it eliminates any real possibility of making choices and thereby removes our responsibility for those choices. In terms of the MOQ determinism's "perfect chain of causality" is purely static and leaves no room for the dynamic, for betterness. In the MOQ we see this even at the inorganic level, where cause and effect are replaced with extremely persistent patterns of preference.

Thanks,
dmb  

Akshay said to Ham: 
> Ham Priday, on your comment on individual freedom (and us being robots of
> God's Will): Why, it is true, we are indeed robots of God's Will. And why
> would this be a bad idea?
> 
> Wherever we can look, we will find proof of determinism, and by extension
> predestination, except of course our own personal experience. But a good
> science education will show that intuition is rarely fully correct,
> especially an unrefined one. Even though someone tried to "prove free will"
> by making conclusions out of the Uncertainty Principle, it is not provable
> in theory or in practice, simply because the Uncertainty Principle only
> tells us that we cannot know a system completely, it does not say that a
> system has been left undecided or "left on its own". Read my blog for many
> more arguments: http://thegreatwheel.blogspot.com



_________________________________________________________________
Put your friends on the big screen with Windows Vista® + Windows Live™.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/shop/specialoffers.mspx?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_CPC_MediaCtr_bigscreen_012008