Speaking of circling back......hope you don’t mind. — Mww
Does your statement “indeterminism is no threat to the metaphysical sense” meant to indicate a metaphysical sense of free will? In which case, the statement then becomes.....indeterminism is no threat to the metaphysical sense of free will. — Mww
If so, does it follow that indeterminism is no threat to the metaphysical sense of free will because (or, iff) the will is taken to be free to make determinations of its own kind, by its own right, in a metaphysical sense? — Mww
But it doesn’t follow from that, that your “that sense just is freedom from determinism”, which if indeterminism is no threat because determinism is the case, contradicts itself. Indeterminism is freedom from determinism, but the metaphysical sense of free will makes determinism necessary, so indeterminism IS a threat to the metaphysical sense of free will. — Mww
Ok, so.....indeterminism is no threat because....or, iff....the will is free as a determining functionality. How, then, does it follow that the metaphysical sense of free will is not a useful sense of the term? How is it that the metaphysical sense is not the only possible sense of free will there can be, without getting involved in that damnable “....wretched subterfuge of petty word-jugglery...” (CpR, B1,C3, Para 45, 1788)? — Mww
Isn’t there a need to distinguish kinds of determinism? If physical determinism is not true with respect to the metaphysical sense of free will, I don’t agree indeterminism is therefore true, under the same conditions. Given the metaphysical sense of free will, it is logically consistent that the sense of determinism should itself be metaphysical, in which case, determinism must be true if it be the case that the metaphysical sense of free will abides exclusively in its law-giving functionality. I don’t think it is reasonable to suppose that because a metaphysical sense of determinism is not susceptible to inductive support in the same way as physical determinism, that the conception is therefore inherently flawed. — Mww
Correct, like all philosophy, like all art and all science... Like cars or computers, or zillions of other things. — Olivier5
We'd have to discover that the universe already had that strongly emergent feature to it, and then take advantage of that. — Pfhorrest
It was always possible to arrange bits of metal etc together into a steam engine, even if nobody did it until relatively recently. — Pfhorrest
Isn’t there a need to distinguish kinds of determinism?
— Mww
I'm not clear what you mean here, but it sounds like you're talking about determinism in the physical world versus determinism in some kind of non-physical world that interacts with the physical world. I deny that any such non-physical world could possibly exist in the first place, but even if it did, that wouldn't solve any problems with regard to free will. — Pfhorrest
The non-physical agent would still either make the decisions it makes on the basis of prior facts (....), or else it makes its decisions without regard to the facts, at random, in which case its decisions are undetermined. — Pfhorrest
That's "strong emergence", and that's the only thing I've been arguing against with you. — Pfhorrest
In short: Moral egoism; moral narcissism. — baker
I’ve not read where you deny the metaphysical domain of human reason — Mww
so I wonder how you can categorically deny the possibility of some kind of non-physical world here — Mww
What of the possibility that determinations can be made without regard to facts, but with regard for law? In such case, those determinations cannot be in any way random. — Mww
And thus they do not contradict previous laws. They just ADD something new to them. — Olivier5
That is emergence, properly conceived. — Olivier5
None of the examples you gave add new laws; they are just inevitable consequences of the laws that already existed. — Pfhorrest
That's how you conceive it, but it's not how anyone in the philosophical literature conceives of it. — Pfhorrest
That is simply not true. Life created new laws, like the laws of genetics. — Olivier5
It's how it is conceived by biologists. — Olivier5
genetics is not just an inevitable consequence of molecules doing what molecules do, when the right molecules come together the right way, but in addition to the laws that govern those molecules, the universe has entirely separate "laws of genetics" that it invokes when molecules get together like that? — Pfhorrest
Citation needed. — Pfhorrest
Whether natural laws exist or not by themselves is a matter of dispute. But it cannot be disputed that human beings have identified regularities in the working of nature, which they call laws. Some of these laws pertain to how genetics work. Get used to it. — Olivier5
These, by the way, are most probably NOT inevitable. Other rules could work just as well. You could replace the bases serving as letters in DNA by other bases for instance. The genetic code is arbitrary, just like any code. — Olivier5
The concepts of systems and the possibility of their emergence are all over biology. — Olivier5
Of course we've identified laws of genetics — Pfhorrest
if we'd have to program the model with those laws of genetics in addition to the laws of chemistry (etc) in order to see the same behavior on the complex system of molecules that we see in real life -- then that's strong emergence and that's the only thing I'm against. — Pfhorrest
I don't at all deny human reason, only that it depends at all on some kind of non-physical stuff. — Pfhorrest
That is I suppose the crux of your argument. Factually speaking, it is NOT TRUE that we can model, derive or compute the laws of genetics from the laws of chemistry. It hasn't been done yet. Likewise, we cannot really derive the laws of chemistry from those of QM. — Olivier5
I don’t see why we can’t say reason depends on non-physical stuff, if only because reason is itself non-physical — Mww
This is actually a much clearer way of formulating my objection to strong emergentism, so this has turned out to be a productive conversation after all; I'll make a note to myself to phrase it this way in the future. — Pfhorrest
At no point in my (admittedly non-specialist) education in these fields were any specific problems where something could not be clearly reduced to something simpler ever detailed, so I'd be curious to hear about some. — Pfhorrest
I don’t see why we can’t say reason depends on non-physical stuff, if only because reason is itself non-physical
— Mww
That's begging the question there. — Pfhorrest
You might as well, because all this talk about weak and strong emergence is cheap. — Olivier5
The main problem I see with reductionism (the actual name for this idea of yours; an idea from the 19th century) is the elusive bottom: there's no reason to assume that there is some rock bottom somewhere on the path to the infinitely small. — Olivier5
Another problem is that our present understanding of biology contradicts reductionism, in that in a living being, the structure is more important than the elements, and in fact manages its own elements. This is evidence of top-down causation, an anathema for reductionists. — Olivier5
Finally, reductionism is tragically penny-wise dollar-stupid. It makes the quest of truth about some sort of sad bean counting. By that I mean that instead of taking the human condition seriously, it makes gestures in the direction of muons and quarks, assuring us that one day, we will know who we are by looking at our smallest pieces... This is alienating, and may explain the tragedies of the 20th century. After all, if human beings are nothing more than clusters of atoms, one might as well kill them en masse.
Reductionism is a death cult. — Olivier5
Your refusal to acknowledge that we're talking about different things is the root of this entire disagreement. — Pfhorrest
Reductionism is much older than the 19th century, — Pfhorrest
You can understand that human beings are fundamentally just really complex patterns of excitations in quantum fields, and still also understand that their lives have moral value; because one has nothing to do with the other. — Pfhorrest
I suspect you use this distinction between strong and weak donkeys to muddy the water and avoid facing the existence of real donkeys. Because you and I happen to agree on the impossibility of transluminous donkeys. Where we disagree is where you say "weak emergence is trivial". I believe it is massively important and non trivial, as it created you and me. — Olivier5
A theory of everything would include some description of life, societies, language, literature, science, philosophy, and the likes, and therefore would need to account for their emergence. The TOE won't be just about muons. — Olivier5
Quantum fields have moral values? Since when? — Olivier5
being able in principle to zoom into the details of someone on one level of abstraction and see a complex arrangements of things on another lower level means we never have any discontinuities in our understanding of things: we can understand how all of these different kinds of objects at different scales relate to each other. — Pfhorrest
Weak emergence is just the converse of that: if you zoom out and ignore the details on the smaller scale you'll begin to see new structures on a larger scale, just as a natural consequence of those smaller-scale things doing what they do. Strong emergence OTOH is the claim that those higher-level structures are not such a natural consequence: that there are special higher-level rules that explicitly cause those higher-level structures to exist, and as a consequence if you zoom in too far ("reductionism") you lose information. — Pfhorrest
If your form of reductionism is not like that, if it can find ways to calculate moral values based on the Schrödinger equation — Olivier5
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