[MD] Indeterminism

[Jan-Anders Andersson]

Hi Steve

I've  followed the Free Will thread for some months with interest. Now it seems obvious that both of you use a different static pattern behind the word determinism. 

Thanks for writing anyway. I enjoy it.

Jan-Anders

14 sep 2011 kl. 17.44 Steve wrote:

> Hi Jan-Anders,
> 
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:33 AM, Jan-Anders Andersson
> <jananderses at telia.com> wrote:
>> That fashion of the day was anyway 130 years ago.
> 
> Steve:
> Yeah, I thought it was an interesting historical note to see what sort
> of rhetorical position James saw himself in. The Determinists had
> claimed the word "freedom." Inspite of dmb's "look, Steve, it's
> simple..." the issue of whether freedom needs to be thought of as in
> opposition to determinism is an old one. It is not a new fashion for
> Parfit and Dennett to take a compatibilist view. James mentioned that
> in his time some dude named Hudgson unabashedly called himself a "free
> will determinist."
> 
> Jan-Anders:
>> The MOQ view upon free will says that there are no such thing as TOTAL determinism nor TOTAL indeterminism.
> 
> Steve:
> I think that everyone one all sides of the modern debate sees it that
> way too. What James called determinism, people today would call
> fatalism. Modern day determinists don't believe in TOTAL determinism
> of the sort where everything that ever happened was inevitable from
> the beginning of time and nothing we do could ever change it.
> 
> Dennett: "Going to happen" is a very misleading phrase. Say somebody
> throws a baseball at your head and you see it. That baseball was
> "going to" hit you until you saw it and ducked, and then it didn't hit
> you, even though it was "going to."
> 
> In that sense of "going to," Kennedy's assassination was by no means
> going to happen. There were no trajectories which guaranteed that it
> was going to happen independently of what people might have done about
> it. If he had overslept or if somebody else had done this or that,
> then it wouldn't have happened the way it did.
> 
> Dennett: Fatalism is the idea that something's going to happen no
> matter what you do. Determinism is the idea that what you do depends.
> What happens depends on what you do, what you do depends on what you
> know, what you know depends on what you're caused to know, and so
> forth--but still, what you do matters. There's a big difference
> between that and fatalism. Fatalism is determinism with you left out.
> 
> If I accomplish one thing in this book, I want to break the bad habit
> of putting determinism and inevitability together. Inevitability means
> unavoidability, and if you think about what avoiding means, then you
> realize that in a deterministic world there's lots of avoidance. The
> capacity to avoid has been evolving for billions of years. There are
> very good avoiders now. There's no conflict between being an avoider
> and living in a deterministic world. There's been a veritable
> explosion of evitability on this planet, and it's all independent of
> determinism.