Quoting a lead into an article recently published:
If moral responsibility and the social institutions that enforce it depend on belief in our own agency, what happens when we lose faith in free will?
I haven't read the article, that is not the point in today's post.
I say that because --- the support for good behavior is not the most dangerous loss when people glimpse their own helplessness. The aspect of the debate on free will which is so scary philosophers and natural scientists won't even talk about it, is
that rational discourse depends on faith -- faith that man is a rational animal and capable of surveying the evidence and coming to conclusions, and then defending them.
To suggest that man has no free will is to glimpse that his words and sentences might be determined by non-rational factors, his mega and micro biomes, or something equally appalling to the presumptions of cognitive flag-wavers.
Even David Hume,who tossed out the validity of causation, rather fliply, did not tear up his own books. As radical as Hume's conclusions about causation might appear, he could not glimpse that everything people said might just be foam bubbles, erratic juxtapositions, like vomit, because the words are not based on a sober analysis of facts, as they are claimed to be. Rather even within a sentence words are concatenations based on non-rational, unglimpsed, forces. The illusion of cogency then may just be a reflection of man's assumptions about his own agency.
One picture Jan Cox drew, from science fiction tropes, is of the modern intellect is that of a brain in a laboratory vat, thinking away in a bubbly medium.
Jan's is an apt picture, not because of what it says about the possibility of human rationality, but for the accuracy of the picture of the typical mechanical mind.
If moral responsibility and the social institutions that enforce it depend on belief in our own agency, what happens when we lose faith in free will?
I haven't read the article, that is not the point in today's post.
I say that because --- the support for good behavior is not the most dangerous loss when people glimpse their own helplessness. The aspect of the debate on free will which is so scary philosophers and natural scientists won't even talk about it, is
that rational discourse depends on faith -- faith that man is a rational animal and capable of surveying the evidence and coming to conclusions, and then defending them.
To suggest that man has no free will is to glimpse that his words and sentences might be determined by non-rational factors, his mega and micro biomes, or something equally appalling to the presumptions of cognitive flag-wavers.
Even David Hume,who tossed out the validity of causation, rather fliply, did not tear up his own books. As radical as Hume's conclusions about causation might appear, he could not glimpse that everything people said might just be foam bubbles, erratic juxtapositions, like vomit, because the words are not based on a sober analysis of facts, as they are claimed to be. Rather even within a sentence words are concatenations based on non-rational, unglimpsed, forces. The illusion of cogency then may just be a reflection of man's assumptions about his own agency.
One picture Jan Cox drew, from science fiction tropes, is of the modern intellect is that of a brain in a laboratory vat, thinking away in a bubbly medium.
Jan's is an apt picture, not because of what it says about the possibility of human rationality, but for the accuracy of the picture of the typical mechanical mind.
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