View Single Post
  #57  
Old 11-03-2011, 07:34 PM
erimir's Avatar
erimir erimir is offline
Projecting my phallogos with long, hard diction
 
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Dee Cee
Gender: Male
Posts: XMMMDCCCVI
Default Re: A Revolution in Thought: Part Two

Quote:
Originally Posted by Clutch Munny View Post
The short version is that it depends what you thought "free will" meant in the first place. If you think it means just that your actions are caused by your desires, then if it turns out that your desires just are brain states, neurology won't limit your free will -- it'll manifest your free will.

If you think free will means that your actions should depend on your will in a way that is not determined by the wider causal order of events in the world, then the fact that brains cause behaviour will certainly seem a puzzle.
Yup.

It would seem that libertarian free will makes the most sense in a context where you believe in a soul, and that it interacts with the body, and that the will is part of or controlled by the soul.

Because it seems in the physical world that there are things that are random, and things that are caused (predictably), and it seems weird to have a third category of things that are not determined causally nor random. As far as the physical side of it, however, proposing a soul that is not physical/is supernatural/whatever can get around that. The brain causing behavior? Oh when the brain is malfunctioning then what's really happening is there's interference in the soul/body interface :P

Of course, proposing the existence of a soul in order to save libertarian free will has a multitude of its own problems - problems that would not have occurred to many of the people who first put forth the idea of libertarian free will, since people used to just assume the existence of the soul was obvious, I suppose because the workings of the brain were less understood (not that people don't just assume its existence today without thought, those people just don't tend to be philosophers).

And of course, it's also a move that just pushes the question back, since it doesn't really avoid the problem of causation vs. randomness, it just says that those things don't happen in the physical realm. But that kind of move seems to be convincing to many people (as in the classic - the universe can't "just exist"... God must have made it. Where did God come from? Oh, God just exists).
Reply With Quote
Thanks, from:
Adam (11-03-2011), Clutch Munny (11-03-2011), Kael (11-03-2011), LadyShea (11-03-2011), specious_reasons (11-03-2011), Stephen Maturin (11-03-2011), Vivisectus (11-11-2011)
 
Page generated in 0.15066 seconds with 11 queries