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From: mmar@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Mitchell Marks)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Free will - some new reading.. (digression)
Message-ID: <1001@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 18-Aug-85 01:54:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: sphinx.1001
Posted: Sun Aug 18 01:54:25 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 20-Aug-85 21:57:34 EDT
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Organization: U Chicago -- Linguistics Dept
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>                     I've seen it happen all too many times, where people
> readily quote some author whom they agree with without having actually
> understood what was said, merely because they liked the conclusion.
> -- 
> 				Rich Rosen  ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr
> 

But Carnes, at least subsequently, did give an account of the book --
its arguments, not just conclusions.  If you remain suspicious, because
he seemed to agree with Dennett, then heed the angle Michael Ellis has
mentioned, which I will echo here.  Basically I don't like Dennett's 
conclusions, and studied the book in the spirit of trying to dispute him
at every step.  That's hard to do, because he's a powerful reasoner and
(part of the time) a damn good writer.  But I ended up grudgingly granting
him more than I wanted to.
	So, we are not endorsing this book because it makes us oh so comfy
by telling us just what we want to hear -- but because it presents an
interesting perspective and several powerful chains of argument.  It may
well take a place as a major modern statement on the question.
	And Dennett is by no means a softie on free will.  Don't be misled
by the subtitle: the varieties of free will worth wanting, per Dennett,
are carefully constrained on all sides.  If all you're interested in is
a yes/no answer, then you might as well blast Dennett without reading the
book, bacause ultimately he more or less accepts something which is more
or less some form of free will.  But if you're interested in more than a
friends/enemies list, you ought to dig into the details and discover that
Dennett is much closer to your position than you think.  Oddly (it's
odd by my lights, anyway), he also more or less accepts something more
or less like causal determinism.
	What?  How can that be?  Free will and determinism are incompatible!
Well Dennett argues that they're not.  (If you care for labels, that makes
him a ``compatibilist''.)  The loophole that allows this is that the varieties
of free will worth wanting are not the "I am captain of my fate, master of
my soul" kinds but more modest kinds.
	All of this needs to be hedged with the comment that I'm doing some
interpreting and extrapolating to reach what I take to be Dennett's
stands.  He rarely announces them pointblank, more often argues under one
hypothesis for a while and another for a while.  I wouldn't be surprised
if other readers challenge my statement that he accepts determinism; perhaps
he actually allows micro-indeterminism.  The point, for Dennett, is that
that decision doesn't finally matter too much; in either case, those of
us who clamor for free will shouldn't be distressed.  (He collapses these
two positions via a group of arguments including the one cited by Michael
Ellis, about an advanced AI system which might have either a radioactive
sample somewhere to produce real quantum randomness or else a precomputed
list of pseudo-random numbers.)

Regards,
Mitch Marks

P.S.  You might find the "Control and Self-Control" chapter of interest
for the parallel debate going on in net.singles.

-- 

            -- Mitch Marks @ UChicago 
               ...ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!mmar