Re: Free Will FWIW

From: JPL Verhey (matterDELminds_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 10/14/04 

Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 13:31:02 +0200

"Lester Zick" <lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:416dd5b5.85130071@netnews.att.net...
> On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 23:59:40 +0200, "JPL Verhey"
> <matterDELminds@hotmail.com> in comp.ai.philosophy wrote:
>
>>
>>"Lester Zick" <lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
>>news:416d93b2.82422121@netnews.att.net...
>>>
>>> Free Will FWIW
>>> ---------
>>>
>>> Let's put the issue of free will to rest once and for all. It
>>> doesn't
>>> really matter what people think they mean in using the term, nor
>>> does
>>> it matter very much what people have thought they meant in using the
>>> term. It only matters what people can demonstrate of the term
>>> itself.
>>>
>>> What justifies putting the two words together, "free" and "will"?
>>> This
>>> is only justifiable if "free will" represents a subspecies of
>>> "will".
>>> Otherwise, we're dealing with "free, will" or some kind of "willful
>>> freedom", the meaning of which would be anybody's guess.
>>
>>Well, I don't think there is much to this issue - "free will" is
>>simply
>>what it means to most people when they use the term, and this can be
>>investigated by polling enough people. Then you probably get a fairly
>>accurate picture of what "free will" means.
>
> Apart from behaviorism science rarely solicits popular opinion to
> define its subject matter. Me, I deal in explanations and not majority
> logic. Free will is not simply what anybody or everybody thinks it is,
> at least as a matter of science.

Perhaps - but science has, unfortunately, one down side: it negates the
way things are by "explaining them" in other terms where the explanation
is *believed* to be ontologically of higher ranking than the phenomena
itself. A simple example, but the list is endless:

Green. That's how we name a certain visual experience of color. Now
comes in science that offers different explanations, negating the
original:

"Green"??
- No! It's an EM wavelength that we just "experience" as green.
- No! It's just a word we learned to attach to a visual experience in
which there is no "green" at all.
- No! It's brain activity.
- No! "Green" is the result of non-Green differences due to paralel
mechanics in the brain and elsewhere.
- No! It's just brainphysiology that mediates *behavior*.

In the mean time, of course, Green has died. Not officially, and
scientist will probably acknowledge that Green is still there, but the
effect of this obsession with science, which you appear to have too,
mesmerizes the eye of the beholder into the "hypnosis of knowlegde"
resulting in a loss of ability to just see.. Green.

>
>>I am getting a bit sceptical, Lester, on the efforts here to "look
>>behind the curtain" hoping to know what things "really are"
>>behaviorally, mechanically or otherwise.
>
> What would you have science do instead? Fiddle with its experimental
> apparatus, mope along with the status quo, and faint echoes of "better
> luck next time, old boy"? The British disease.

I'm against the obsession with science and knowledge. It is not
different from a religious obsession. Science is about creating tools
that solve some of our problems and serve our basic needs. Obsession
leeds to analysing to death and negating into nothingness the facts and
quality of our lives - it becomes a religion.

>>All that happens, it appears to me, is that something-else is created,
>>supposedly serving as an explanation for A, or A in mechanical terms..
>>but there is no proof that A and "something-else" are any more related
>>than, say, the price of milk and the sound of a cow.
>
> Something else is created. However the point of the something else is
> to explain things in terms of one another mechanically by means of the
> something else. Otherwise we're just going round in circles. Of course
> nothing is proved if one ignores explanations. When we get around to
> using majority logic to establish scientific meanings and significance
> we just abdicate the role and purpose of science.
>
> Regards - Lester

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