On Freewill;BB post;FRDB

My position is as follows (and bear in mind these are my present beliefs. If Determinism is true and all of our actions are wholly determined by natural laws of cause and effect, and if in fact we are not free agents, and if in fact the sense of having two or more realizable courses of action in a given situation is an illusion, then there is no freewill period, a possibility which I do not believe to be the case but which I do not discard out of hand):

Freewill, if it exists at all, is in full swing throughout virtually every waking moment of a person's life, given that we are talking about a normal, intelligent, rational, healthy individual. Life is an ongoing process of action and reaction, of thinking and deciding, of planning, reflecting, speculating, shifting perspectives, changing one's mind, reexamining things, evaluating and reevaluating situations, all the time, on a major or minor scale. Freewill is the ability to consciously choose a course of action from among two or more realizable alternatives. This applies to each and every situation, each and every event, however minute, in a person's conscious, waking life. It does not suddenly cease to exist when a person is in a crisis situation. In fact, it exists even more so, since a crisis situation requires - to a much greater degree than watching a movie or eating a bowl of ice cream - clear thinking and careful decision making. What you are suggesting is precisely the opposite, that when a person is compelled to make a decision (or forced to do something he would rather not do and which he would not have done had not the circumstance necessitated it) in a moment of crisis is exactly the time that that person is not acting of their own freewill. This position of yours makes no sense. Imagine trying to convince a soldier or a policeman, for instance, that they are not acting of their own freewill as they go about their jobs on a daily basis, because their jobs put them in situations of crisis as a matter of routine, situations which require intense training and extraordinary decision making skills? Is the couch potato thumbing through channels on TV acting of his own freewill? Yes? He is, but the man who dives from a bridge into icy water to save a drowning victim is not? If this is the case, then the words free and will are bereft of any meaning they could possibly have. At least for me.

As for the mugging victim, the facts are simple: Y forces X to make a decision. X can literally do any number of things, depending on what X is capable of. He can fight Y, he can take the gun and shove it up Y's fundament, he can run off (many muggers will not shoot if a victim runs, they are thieves, not killers), or he can try to talk Y out of it. Do you see this, kennethamy? This is one of those moments of crisis that require clear thinking and careful decision making. This is one of those moments where freewill comes into play, in a major way, not a minor one. This is a moment where the ability to chose wisely from various options is most crucial. Freewill is far more intensely in operation and is far more vital to one's survival here than when one is at a restaurant wondering which entree to go for. Can you see this?

In this situation X is compelled to act, but is not compelled to any particular action. In other words, I do not see compulsion and freewill as being mutually exclusive. One can be compelled to act and yet free to act. As in my mountainside/boulder/tree/man analogy. The tree is not an agent, it is not free to move away from the boulder, it cannot be compelled to move away; the man is an agent, he is free to move. You can say he was free to move or he was compelled to move, it amounts to the same thing: the ability to move. Freewill is the ability to choose and act, whether under compulsion or not. Compulsion is irrelevant to the issue, unless we are talking about acting freely in a political and not a metaphysical sense.

I'm reminded of Sartre's expression, "condemned to be free." I suppose some people do feel that way, because being a free individual confers upon a person an enormous responsibility, a lifetime of action and decision making. Many people choose to opt out of this responsibility and escape into determinism: I couldn't help it. It's not my fault. It wasn't to be. It wasn't in the cards. Others do not. They take their freedom as a rare and precious opportunity to do something extraordinary. I wish I were more like them.

Thoughts on Hume; FRDB

My main objection to Hume is one that I've voiced before on FRDB, which is, I think he's full of hot air.

It's easy to say, and I will copy your paraphrase, TP: there is nothing in our sensory experience corresponding to our ordinary notion of the causal relation..., but it's quite a difficult matter to invest any kind of truth in the words. In my experience, I can't imagine what Hume means by saying such a thing. I remember when I first read Hume, when I was new to philosophy: I took his propositions to be true, because he is a large historical figure and one of very high esteem and reputation. I remember reading in the introduction where the author said that Hume had "taken a wrecking ball" to the old and established axioms and presuppositions that had held sway in his time. Who was I to argue? I read the words and tried to reconcile them to my experience in life, but when I failed to be able to do that, I didn't blame Hume, the great philosopher, I blamed my tiny little brain instead.

Being older now, and having read a great deal more, I suggest that Hume's skepticism is little more than a bloated, naked emperor swaggering flatulently down the road to human understanding. The idea that the data we collect from our senses, and the manifest proofs of the objective reality of that data, which occur across every moment of every day in our normal lives, cannot give us any real knowledge of causation, is completely without support, and utterly devoid of reason.

If you want to feel more secure in your understanding of cause and effect in the material world, if you sincerely take David Hume's pronouncements seriously, all you need to do is take a sharp knife, put the cutting edge to your palm, and draw the blade downwards toward your wrist, while applying a good amount of pressure. You will instantly have all the proof you need that extremely acute metal objects will, in fact, cause an incision in your skin and flesh, and a subsequent loss of blood, not to mention a strikingly vivid and unpleasant sensation in the area incised.

I know, that's the same as Sam Johnson's famous refutation of Berkeley, kicking at the stone. But that is really all that's required. And that's the truth of the matter. Of course this takes all the fun away from people who like to pretend that they make reality up in their heads, who, for some unknown reason, need to believe that the massive and beautiful engines of the cosmos depend on their own miniscule wink of consciousness for their very existence.