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From: rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Rich Rosen)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Free will - some new reading.. (digression)
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Date: Mon, 19-Aug-85 22:57:44 EDT
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Posted: Mon Aug 19 22:57:44 1985
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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.

Just excerpts.  And excerpts containing conclusions for which I found
flaws in the reasoning leading up to them.

> 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.

I'm passingly familiar with some of Dennett's other work.  The point is
that in the long run he makes the same fallacy that people in this
newsgroup insist upon making:  the Humpty Dumpty position that says "I
can take this word and redefine it to mean this and no one will be any
the wiser".  You can't get away with that in this life.

> 	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.

Which in fact do not qualify as "free will" by the definition, but apply
more to things that Torek and I and others have talked about AND agreed
about regarding their existence.  None of this means I don't admire the
man (I've found what you say about him is true) as a writer and thinker,
nor that I don't intend (one of these days) to read both Brainstorms and
Elbow Room, but I still found an apparent problem with his conclusion.
If the readers of the book got so much out of it, then they should easily
be able to say "No, Rich, what about this..."  No one has stepped forward
with a serious explanation of what I might have missed that THEY have
learned from the book, and that says something.
-- 
Life is complex.  It has real and imaginary parts.
					Rich Rosen  ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr