This is a thread for discussing philosophical views and philosophers.
I guess I’ll start off with some of my own views:
Human consciousness arises from physical activities within the brain. When a person’s brain stops functioning, their consciousness ceases to exist.
Humans and other animals are essentially biological machines. I.e., they obey the laws of physics. While not classically deterministic, they operate according to a stochastic process whose distribution is theoretically knowable. This is a long-winded way of saying that free will (at least as the term is commonly used) is an illusion.
Ethics in the sense of good and evil do not exist in the absence of subjective experience. That is not to say that ethics itself is entirely subjective in the sense that all ethical systems are equally valid. My own ethics lean toward consequentialism (this is the broader category that includes utilitrainism), but I’m not sure if I would go 100% consequentialist.
You might say that the first two points here are scientific rather than philosophical views. But I think they can be quiet alienating and that it can be useful behave as if free will exists. If it doesn’t, then you didn’t really have any choice about it anyway.
good thread, I’m interested in the free will part of it having read some of Sam Harris’ work on the topic in his “Waking Up” book although i haven’t read his book “Free Will”. It made sense to me though, basically in the way that you don’t choose to think something, the thought just appears in your consciousness which is really mind blowing to be honest. I’ve also been reading a lot about it in the last couple weeks as I’m trying to read “Why Buddhism is True” and at least the first 30% of the book deals heavily with self and how it exists and where thoughts come from and such. My meager understanding so far is that thoughts arise from feelings which arise from evolutionary triggers. At any one time you might have a bunch of “thoughts” bouncing around in your head from different feelings in different parts of your brain but whichever one “overpowers” the others at any given time is the one you will “think”. And some triggers are much stronger than others.
The only thing that makes a life go better is pleasure, and the only thing that makes a life go worse is pain. Well-being is calculated by adding up pleasure and subtracting pain.
We might think that something like knowledge, or family, or art makes a life better for a different reason, but these things are only instrumentally valuable. They make a life go better when they add pleasure to a life.
We might think that there are good pains – like running a marathon or anguishing over a tough math problem. But these things are good because they add pain in the short term but pleasure in the long run. If they add only pain, they make a life worse.
I haven’t read any of Sam Harris’s books, so I will look into those.
A couple interesting books on free will and consciousness from a scientific perspective are Daniel Wegner’s “The Illusion of Conscious Will” and Stanislas Dehaene’s “Consiousness and the Brain.”
The first talks about a lot of experiments where psychologists can essentially force a subject to do something. Interestingly the subjects think they had a choice and make up a rationale for their actions.
The second talks about what the author calls “neural correlates of consciousness.” Essentially these are measurable patterns of brain activity that can be used to detect when someone is conscious of something. For example, you can exposes subjects to stimuli for varying lengths of time. Some will be long enough for them to consciously observe and others won’t. This type of research helps explain the parts of the brain involved in conscious perception, although it doesn’t actually show us what consciousness is. But it has some interesting implications for patients in vegetative states.
A really great book about consciousness (and several other topics) from a completely different perspective is Douglas Hofstadter’s “Gödel, Escher, Bach.”
A book that I can’t really recommend is Daniel Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained.” It’s basically a drawn-out argument that consciousness and subjective experience are illusory.
Several of the books i have read including the one I’m currently reading reference the split brain experiments where they makeup reasons for what the other half of the brain is doing. Also subliminal experiments which is more reflective of what you were talking about with them measuring brain activity.
I forgot to mention I read “Why Buddhism is True.” I picked it up in part because I had enjoyed “Nonzero,” another book by the same author. But I found the title to be a little misleading. “Why Meditation Works” would have been a more accurate title. It’s been a while since I read it, so I may be overlooking some things.
I kind of hate the topic of free will but I don’t know anyone who bridges serious philosophy and general readability on the subject better than Dennett. Harris is basically ok, but he lacks the nuance and sophistication of Dennett.
There’s tons of philosophy on consciousness in the last 25 years. if one actually wants to engage with it, a recent anthology or course syllabus is probably the best route. Anything by chalmers is a good starting point, but his primary hard/easy problem distinction isn’t universally accepted. I think he maintains a now huge database of papers/writings related to consciousness. I personally like zombie thought experiments–much more interesting than free will.
Churchland’s matter and consciousness is a good intro to some of the materialism/cog sci stuff.
free will debates are an outgrowth of disputes over christian doctrine and turn largely on what one means by ‘free’ and ‘will’. Dwelling on the subject is a waste of philosophical horsepower.
To paraphrase Kant, no argument against free will is stronger that the sense of free will. After that its just about the size and shape of the continent or island of free will is, and how small the island is.
I’m happy to call free will something like actions (rationally) performed in pursuit of a conscious goal. Is that ‘free’ or ‘not free’. That’s largely semantics.
I like to think both philosophy and science have made a lot of progress since Kant’s day.
I would further submit that a discussion of free will isn’t a waste of time for normies who think there is a homunculus at a control board inside their heads like the movie “Inside Out.” Instead, it can be a gateway to further philosophical considerations.
I actually thought of inside out the other day while reading Why buddhism is true, It strikes me as accurate in that your feelings are fighitng over which one gets to control you, but obviously not in the same way.
That’s just because things stop being philosophy once they’ve been generally accepted. It’s an oversimplification, but there was only one “department” in the first academy, philosophy. Now there’s math, law, medicine, government, physics, chemistry, computer science, etc. They’re just stealing fire from the philosophers and claiming it as their own. Got a PhD, what’s the “Ph” stand for? [Actually rhetoric preceded philosophy, but then some wags were like, “well, what if we not only want to be convincing but also truthful in what we say.”]
I think the only folks untouched by philosophy, from ancient egypt to modern day, are engineers.
I agree with you. The free will debates/discussions that I’ve read/heard break down to semantics, where both sides of the arguments can be compelling, as long as you use their definitions of the terms.
What would you say are the subjects most worthy of our philosophical horsepower?
On consciousness, I’ve been drifting away from physicalist based theories for a while (like Dennett’s eliminative materialism), although I’m not ready to declare in favor of panpsychism or dualism either. I used to be more interested in philosophy of mind than I am now, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the idea that humans are too dumb to figure out consciouness, a view held to one degree or another by some big name contemporary philosophers like Thomas Nagel, Jerry Fodor, and Noam Chomsky (and also by, apparently, some dark web dork whose name pains me to mention).
On free will, I take a super aggro position that not only does it not exist, but that it is literal nonsense. Or with a little more nuance, libertarian free will is literal nonsense and compatibilist free will is a bait-and-switch scam.
On ethics, I’m more interested in metaethics than normative ethics, so my view here is that most of us live as if moral realism is true, but in reality it’s probably error theory all the way down.
