Bondarchuk Nastya, 10.55 – 16.30.

And typically causal explanations don’t just explained how something happened, but they explain quite … happen, they give what philosophers call colossally sufficient conditions given The Loma Prieta earthquake and given the transfer of energy through the Earth crust. They loam they … recycles freeway was bound to collapse.

Now that’s a typical causal explanation and we think all causal explanations have to be like that, but now we have a puzzle. And the puzzle is in our own (in a wrong) case, we think. Well there are any exception to that. And a lot of my behaviour I explain, but I do not explain it in a deterministic fashion, I do not explain it by citing causally sufficient conditions. If you ask me who I voted for at the last election, I can tell you who I voted for and I can give you reasons for voting, why I voted for that person. But the reasons didn’t come … me, I wasn't force a vote, I could vote for the other guy, I happen to vote for that candidate, but I could have voted for the other candidate. It was not like being pushed off cliff, it was up to me, I had a sense of alternative possibilities open.

So, the reason that we have a prom about free will is in our own case we sense a gap between the causes of our decisions in the form of reasons and the actual making of the decision. There is another gap between the making of the decision and the onset of the action. You made up your mind you going to vote for this guy, but you get in to the ballot both and you look at these names on the paper and you handle you still got a whole often do it, furthermore if it say a long sequence of events like swimming the English channel or learning French, then you get a third gap between the onset of the sequence and the continuation, it’s continuation to conclusion.

In short, … (there are) three gaps or more precisely put the three parts of a continuous causal gap of free action and the gap consists in a fact that we sensed alternative possibilities open, we sense that there are genuine choices available to us, that we don’t just have to sit back and watch blind forces operate, that we are capable of acting in the gap. That’s why we have a problem of free will because we all sense alternative possibilities open.

But now the first reaction of that is to say that but maybe it’s all an illusion. All things might be at all illusion. We have a lot of illusions, optical illusions maybe color is an illusion. Why shouldn’t the gap similarly be an illusion? May be it is, but it has an interesting asymmetry with other illusions and that is. You can’t shake it off. You see whenever you make a decision, you have to act on the precept position. That you action is free that you are not compelled by simple blind causal forces the way that they cypress freeway was compelled the collapse by the forces caused by the earthquake.

Take out an imaginary case, you are in a restaurant. And the waiter says to you look. You had a choice between vegetarian dish or the beef dish. That’s all we got, we got the choice between the two, you can’t say, look, I’m a determinist, I just wait and see what I order, I just wait and see what happens. Because notice, if you say that, that’s only intelligible to you the refusal to exercise free will is only intelligible to you, if you assume that it was an exercise of your own free will.

See, I gave a lecture on this month in London and a guy got up in the question period and said look, if determinism were shown to be true, would you accept it? I point out to the guy. Think about the form of the question. The form of the question is if it were demonstrated that there’s absolutely no such thing as free voluntary rational action, would you freely voluntary and rationally except that conclusion? Ok, so we got if you were not doing to get out of it simply, we were not doing to get out of the problem of free will simply ….. so, you know, it’s one of the illusions that we have to live with. Like the ... liar illusion or other sorts of optical illusions, because in those cases we can go through life making our decisions on the assumption that the two lines really are equal even though they look different distance, they look different lengths. We can’t do that with the problem of free will, because even if we become theoretically convinced that all of our behaviour is determined we can’t act on that precept position.

All right, so we got this problem and this is typical philosophical problem. You’ve got two different and conflicting reasons, were you have very powerful arguments for both and don’t see how to give up on eather.

All right, well, a lot of philosophers think there’s an easy solution to this and that is called compatibilism, really free will and determinism are compatible and a lot of famous guys like Human, Harbson, Lock and a lot of XXth century people like Stivenson were compatibilist.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 620