[MD] Free Will

[MarshaV]

On May 2, 2011, at 12:37 PM, david buchanan wrote:

> 
> MarshaV said to Steve:
> Isn't free will dependent on causation, and isn't causation, in the MoQ, an explanatory extension of a pattern?


Marsha:
It was a rhetorical question.  I mean causation is pattern, regularities, convention.   Explanation relies on patterns.  Patterns are explained by referring to further patterns.  Patterns (analogies) all the way down.  





> 
> dmb says:
> No, causation rules out free will. Determinism is predicated on the laws of causality. Free will says we are not bound by such laws. 
> Take the classic example. On a billiards table, you move the cue stick which sends the cue ball toward the eight ball and the eight ball drops into the corner pocket. Intellectually we chop this into the parts just named. The player "causes" the cue stick to hit the cue ball which "causes" the eight ball to move into the pocket. Once you chop it up into discrete segments, you've got to figure out a way to reunite these events. That's where causality comes in to save the day. 
> But stop for a moment and re-think this. How did the player's shot ever get disconnected to the movement of the cue ball or the eight ball. Isn't all of that really one continuous action? Those events don't just go together like cookies and milk. They were already seamlessly connected before we started dividing the thing into parts.
> It's the same kind of logic Zeno used to prove that motion was impossible, to prove that an arrow could never reach its target. This is achieved by eternally dividing the remaining distance in half so that the arrow can only ever get half way. Even though that half grows infinitely smaller and smaller, the target will be reached. See, by using logic and math we can divide the line between the shooter and the target into an infinite number of segments and thereby "prove" that ordinary events are impossible. It just shows how absurd and ridiculous logic can be. This is the logic that tells us to place our bets on the tortoise instead of the hare. (I heard that story as a ten year old and even then I knew it was bullshit.)
> It's so much simpler to avoid the logic chopping in the first place. Then we don't have to invent mysterious forces behind the scenes to reunite or reconnect the fragments. This is why radical empiricism puts so much emphasis on the continuity of experience and stresses what he calls the "conjunctive relations". Imagine how confusing and distorted these sentences would be if you removed all the grammatical conjunctions. That's what logic chopping does to experience. Obviously, projectiles of all sorts hit their targets all the time. Arrows, runners, bullets, basketballs and hockey pucks reach their intended destinations all the time. It's no problem, not until the chopping starts.
> Let's say Zeno had one of those fake arrows through his head and his tongue in his cheek. Let's say causality is just another word for the fact that things and event sometimes go together.  
> 
> 
> 
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