[MD] Free Will

[Steven Peterson]

Hi dmb,



On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 1:37 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Steve said to dmb:
> "Resisting impulses and desires" usually translates in MOQ terms as "social and/or intellectual patterns sometimes trump biological patterns under certain circumstances." But there is no more freedom in such situations understood as the product of the freedom of an independent willing agent than there is in that biological patterns such as flying birds resisting the impulse to fall in acquiescence to gravity.
>
>
> dmb says:
> I don't follow your reasoning. First of all, "falling" is not an impulse. Since nobody thinks of free will as the freedom to defy gravity, I do not get your analogy.


Steve:
That no one thinks of a bird's defiance of gravity (a biological
pattern trumping an inorganic pattern) as an example of free will is
exactly my point. It is the analogy I am drawing to call into question
why we would think of a social pattern trumping a biological pattern
(say, resisting the urge to urinate in public) as an exercise of free
will.

dmb:
> Also, why does the question of free will have to be framed around an "independent" agent.


Steve:
Because independence is another name for freedom. If the so-called
agent is dependent or causally related to other things, then it is not
a free agent.

dmb:
In what sense is such agency independent? Why can't the issue be
framed as agency within the whole range and context of static
patterns?


Steve:
It can be, and Pirsig did. He reformulated the freedom issue in Lila.
The idea of freedom that Pirsig talked about (DQ) is a resolution of
the dilemma that is in no way an affirmation of either horn of the
free will versus fatalism Platypus. It is a denial of both by denying
the underlying assumptions of the question. He says not merely that
free will is bunk but that the self that is supposed to be the locus
of this "free will" is a fiction. Lila doesn't have values. Values
have Lila.

dmb:
> Einstein, by the way, believed in Spinoza's God, which was conceived as the substance underlying all of nature.

Steve:
He also had bad hair, but that doesn't have anything to do with his
argument about free will, either.

Einstein is noting that the feeling of willing a given action is
something that everyone experiences, but in what sense does it mean
anything to say this willing is free? Are we really free to will
something other than we what we will?  Is claiming to have free will
saying that our acts are frequently accompanied by the feeling of
having willed the act? If so, no one should disagree, but what more
could someone possibly mean is unclear to Einstein who was quoting
Schopenhauer (who had the same difficulties with the notion as Harris
and I) since we don't have the feeling of willing our will.

Best,
Steve