[MD] Free Will

[david buchanan]

Horse said to Steve, Dave and others:

The general impression I get with this debate about Free Will / Determinism is the same impression that I get with the Selfishness / Altruism debate. It's somewhere between political and ideological. That's to say that proponents of either side see the distinction as a comparison of absolutes and somewhere along the line each side tries to define the other side out of existence. The position appears to be that there is only free will or there is only determinism or, there is only selfishness or there is only altruism - it's very rare to see a position which relates to the degree of one or the other in a particular context. I remember being attracted to the MoQ because, for the most part, it avoided absolutes in favour of context.

dmb says:
It has been awfully confusing, that's for sure. I still don't understand what Harris was saying about the illusion of free will being itself an illusion. And I never heard the idea that free will is the capacity to control your preferences until this thread started. But more to your point...

As I understand the issue (from a pragmatic, radically empirical stance), Free Will and Determinism is the overblown, metaphysical version of human freedom and restraint, both of which are known in experience and are the concrete stuff of which metaphysics is spun. This is what I said at the start and this is what the big "Free Will-iam James" post said in great detail.
To repeat the main point....

We want to know whether we are responsible or determined for practical reasons. The metaphysical question must be dropped, Seigfried quotes James saying, for the meaning of causality can only be found by returning to actual, concrete experience. Causal relations are not built into the fabric of the cosmos such that our conception corresponds to that objective fact. Instead, The laws of cause and effect are answerable to the original concrete experiences from which they were derived in the first place. To say that the feeling of free will is an illusion, Seigfried says, is to prefer unknowable ontological principles over actual, verifiable experiences. This is what James calls "vicious abstractionism", wherein the products of reflection are taken to be more real than the empirical flux of reality from which they were abstracted in the first place. Or, as Pirsig phrases this complaint, this is the subordination of Quality to intellect. Pirsig and James both push back against this other-worldly Platonism, insisting that the point and purpose of our ideas is to serve life, not to unlock the secret riddle of the universe. And that's why we want to know about responsibility and determinism, because of the practical effects it has in human life. It's a human question, not a metaphysical mystery.