[Wittrs] Re: On Discussions about Free WIll
- From: "Cayuse" <z.z7@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2011 06:25:39 +0100
Sean Wilson wrote:
> May I ask what are the stakes of this discussion? Not so much the
> discussion of what the etymology of "free will" might be, but of the
> need to take a position on "free will" generally. What are the stakes
> of such a thing? It seems to me that this is the same issue for
> philosophy as it is science. Imagine a study that proclaimed: "there
> is no 'free will.'" Or one that said: "we've proved that 'free will'
> exists." What on earth would one even do with such a thing?
I found value in the free will debate in that it brings into question what
it is, or might be, that "has" this putative "free will". The debate led me
to the conviction that there is no such entity. I may be free to choose
some course of action that increases the likelyhood of the future
outcome that I prefer the most, but I don't believe there's anything that
is free to choose my *preferences* in respect of those future outcomes.
The link to Wittgenstein, I think, comes with his analysis of the concept of
'self' in the Tractatus ("There is no such thing as the subject that thinks
or entertains ideas") and in the PI with his "no owner" line of thought.
The concept of self is then stripped back to the useful notion of a unique
organism in its habitat, without the useless accreted notions of an
"agent of free will" and an "subject of consciousness". The value of this
has been a kind of "tidying away" of some messy default ideas that did
nothing more than cloud my thinking. If this is not the kind of result that
Wittgenstein would have advocated, then I have sorely misunderstood him
(a very real possibility here).
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