[lit-ideas] Re: The Final Finger of Fate
- From: John Wager <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2006 22:14:42 -0500
Mike Geary wrote:
Didn't mean to send that so fast.
You'll also note in that same message that I told of 4th & 5th graders
questioning the compatability of free will with an all merciful God.
I don't see how there can be such a thing as free will -- as I've said
so many times in this arena -- but we have no choice except to live as
though we're free in our choices. Thankfully the variables are so
multitudinous that we never suspect we had to choose what we did.
As Chris Bruce is so fond of bring Kant into the discussion, let me
expand a bit on Kant and bring Kant's main follower Karl Jaspers into
the discussion. We are not
just objects in the universe, we are beings that know objects in the
universe. This may not seem like much of a difference, but "Man is
always more than he can know about himself" (as Jaspers was fond of
saying).
The relevance here is that our knowledge of our own motives has to be
included in the list of "causes" for our actions, making human actions
quite unpredictable even if they are all "caused." If we specify all
the conditions before a billiard ball is whacked across the table, we
can predict where it will wind up. But if the billiard ball is US, one
of the "conditions" we must specify is the knowledge the billiard ball
has of its own actions, and of course this changes the list of things we
must include, but by the time we go back and include THAT knowledge of
the billiard ball, we also must add in the knowledge that the billiard
ball knows, and then the knowledge that the billiard ball has that it
knows that it knows, every layer of which makes the action much less
predictable.
We may not KNOW the noumenal world, but we ARE noumenal.
The result? The entire world LOOKS deterministic, everywhere and always,
but human beings' actions cannot be explained the same way from within.
--
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"Never attribute to malice that which can be
explained by incompetence and ignorance."
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John Wager john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx
Lisle, IL, USA
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