(I previously had Gregg Caruso's video here in this post, but then realized Dr. Oliver already had it in the quiz post. So, instead I decided to include this video from Owen Flanagan.)
I'm really, really enjoying this book on neuroexistentialism! So far, it's helping me to conceptually wrestle with what I take to be the likely consequences of a truly physicalist outlook. Since to most this amounts to a rather grim prospect, the talk by Caruso comes off as encouraging.
I've also read some stuff by the other editor, Flanagan, and he's apparently been at this grindstone for a while. He wrote a book some years ago called The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (2007), in which he struggles with the fact that "we are finite material beings living in a material world, or, in Flanagan's description, short-lived pieces of organized cells and tissue." However much we might feel to be more than this--and therefore, very importantly, above and beyond the determining forces that both encompass and enliven the natural world--I'm just not convinced that we are in fact.
The question for me then becomes: isn't it pragmatically desirable to act as if we are freer than such a materialist view logically permits? Here I go back to Caruso, whose talk points to a way out of this conundrum. Looking forward to our discussion about this subject!
("One Enchanted Being: Neuroexistentialism and Meaning,"a brief but very informative response by Flanagan to some critics of the above book, can be found here.)
A quick peek at the archive shows that we read that Flanagan book in this course in 2014...
ReplyDelete"isn't it pragmatically desirable to act as if we are freer than such a materialist view logically permits?" Yes,but maybe our notions what materialism logically permits should be reconsidered. Matter does support all the possible forms of human expression our experience reveals, ex hypothesi. Matter thinks, matter loves, matter dreams, matter chooses, IF anything does, ventures the materialist/physicalist. Why not explore that proposal, at least?
"To any one who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. . . . That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities."
DeleteSure, I agree with you about matter's possibilities. And I'm not pushing for a view that denies our experiences, many of them being quite awesome and grand. I'm saying that if, in neither their origin or expression, these experiences--particularly our experience of ourselves--escape the overdetermined workings of the natural world, then said experiences--love, dreams, choices--are not free, at least according to how "free" is popularly understood.
DeleteI don't think there has to be a problem with this though. We can still meaningfully love, dream, choose--all while knowing that these actions are overwhelmingly determined by the material conditions in which we exist. There's no deus ex machina that gets us out of this, because the mind is the brain, not some spirit that floats above the determinations of the natural world while at the same time--mysteriously--being able to interact with said world.
I think that you are correct in thinking that, pragmatically, it is better to assume that we are more free than a materialist perspective allows for. A necessary assumption for holding people accountable for their actions is that they made a bad decision of their own free will and volition.
ReplyDeleteI think encouraging a perspective that doesn't assume freedom and autonomy creates a slippery slope which would make it hard to hold people accountable for their malicious behaviors.
I feel you, Ben. And this is what Caruso directly addresses in the video, where he suggests that if we spent less time focused on punishing what someone "freely" did, then we could focus more on the social determinants behind their action. This would look more like rehabilitation rather than punishment.
DeleteI'm glad this video references Madonna because every time someone says materialism, I instantly get "Material Girl" stuck in my head.
ReplyDeleteTo answer the question: it is probably more reassuring to oneself if, when your first instinct is to respond to something with "amoral" thoughts or actions, you instead are able to step back and re-strategize. Maybe you could call that free will--making a decision that you've thought through rather than responding instinctively. I don't think those decisions could be made apart from your genetic composition or prior experiences, however, which is probably more what people are thinking of traditionally with the concept of free will.
Yes, that "step[ing] back" is something that characterizes our unique form of awareness. But, as you go on to say, that awareness is still largely determined by biology, society, etc. There just doesn't seem to be any getting away from that to me.
ReplyDeleteI think so much of our aversion to the perceived limitations of matter and materialism must be due to the long habit of assuming the coherence of an actual alternative. If there's nothing but matter, though, then matter clearly is capable of doing all the things we've errantly attributed to that elusive and mysterious immaterial something-we-know-not-what. If we're hung up because we can't conceive how a material being can exercise free agency, perhaps that's because of a correlative long habit of thinking that free agency must stand apart from the causal nexus. But if nothing does, and if our experience still cannot shake the feeling of independent agency, then we're left with the project of formulating some conception of compatiblism we can live with. Isn't that pretty much where these debates stand, at present? We possess a strong feeling of agency, but as yet have not devised a compatibilst account that satisfactorily rationizes that feeling. And this is precisely the sort of predicament that pragmatists find so inviting, and that they resolve by proposing that we go with whatever would be better for us to believe as gauged by all the practical exigencies of living.
ReplyDelete