Our November meeting is on the knotty old problem of freewill and determinism suggested by Huw Thomas some while ago. Huw and I (Rob Wheeler) will be having a conversation/argument about freewill and determinism which you are invited to join in.
Are we just animals driven by fundamental instinctual drives or robots whose behaviour is determined by simple input and output systems? Or are we beings who are responsible for our actions. Or is the feeling that we are originators of our actions just an illusion a bit like the spume on a wave thinking it is pulling the wave along?
If we aren’t free agents and everything is explicable by our genetic make up, envirnment and previous experience where does that leave morality and the law? Praise and blame look to be redundant.
Here are some pithy quotes quotes from great thinkers on the topic to get us started.
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“We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past could be present before its eyes.”
~ Pierre-Simon Laplace (A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities) ~
Laplace wrote this in the Eighteenth Century as a kind of thought experiment and it has subsequently become known by philosophers as Laplace’s Demon. It captures the idea that science is about precise prediction and explanation of the whole of Nature viewed as a closed deterministic causal system. Pure determinism seems to have been undermined by quantum physics but is ‘indeterminism’ any better?
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“Thus determinism, with its correlatives, pessimism, cowardice, and bad faith, is not an intellectual doctrine but a moral attitude. It is an attitude of excuse; it is the claim that we are not responsible for our being, for our character, our passions, or our actions.”
~ Jean Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le Néant, 1943) Part IV, Chapter 2, Section 1) ~
Sartre was writing in Paris during WW2 where he saw many Parisians collaborating with the Nazis. Their excuse was that they didn’t have a choice. Sartre argues that there is always a choice and that we cannot evade our freedom.
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“In the free will context a lot is at stake; it’s a very big deal. Notions like punishment and human self-respect, justification for very important social practices and human interaction, the way we see ourselves and the way we see people that we appreciate or respect.”
~ Saul Smilansky ~
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“If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequence of laws of nature and events in the remote past. Since it’s not up to us what went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are, it would therefore follow that the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us. And it just seems obvious that we cannot be responsible for what is not up to us.”
~ Peter van Inwagen (American philosopher) ~
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“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”
~ George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four) ~
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