Mr. Català,
Thank you for sharing with us the vista of your post #20. There is much there that I hope we can discuss further. The element I would like to zoom in on at present is what you express in the following statements:
The mind must somehow “wing free” from the physical component—the brain, and its electrochemistry. Without this winging free, all would be 100% mechanistic, and choice could not exist.
. . . .
Individual moral decisions, for the fact of being free, can’t have a physical cause.
I think you are selling purely physical contingency short. There is both contingency and necessity in the world prior to the appearance of life or mentality. Life at all levels of organism is only possible because there is both contingency and necessity in the world. Intelligent life also relies on both the contingency and the necessity in the world.
Indeed, intelligent life depends twice-over on the mind-independent contingency and necessity in the world. The body and brain depend on them as all life depends on them. The mind depends on them not only because it requires a brain, but because it must be able to adjust constraints and initial conditions of the lawful unfoldings of parts of the natural world.
With some contingency already in the world and in the brain, the way is open for intelligence and free will in and on a physical world.
Before speaking further to the place of free will in nature, I want to leave an interval for you to respond, if you like, to my view in the preceding. I will add an Appendix below to present and elucidate the definitions of contingency and necessity that I mean. I should mention that the view I present here is contrary to the view of Rand and Descartes. For them intelligent will (human or divine) is the source of any contingency in the world; all else is necessity (simply by nature or by ordinance of divine mind).
APPENDIX [Excerpted from “Volitional Synapses” Part 3 (1996), Objectivity V2N5]
Necessity is: if A, then B, even if C.
Contingency is: if A, then B, unless C.
Necessity and contingency are complementary concepts. Each is relative to certain C. Relative necessity becomes absolute necessity when C is anything whatever, as when we say “Existence exists, whatever else may be the case” or “Angular momentum is conserved, whatever else.” We can exhibit the complementarity of necessity and contingency by the moon’s orbit about the earth. The moon will continue to orbit the earth (if last-year orbiting moon, then next-year orbiting moon), even if the magnetic poles of the earth reverse, even if humans tread on the moon, or even if young men in Verona swear their love by the moon. Relative to those conditions, the continued orbit of the moon is a necessity. On the contingency side, the moon will continue to orbit the earth, unless shattered by a behemoth meteor, unless the sun-earth-moon system enters a chaotic regime, and so forth. Relative to these conditions, the continued orbit of the moon is contingent.
The moon will continue to orbit or not. Suppose it does. Then its continuation was necessary and not contingent? No, necessity and contingency are characters in respect of conditions. Necessity and contingency do pertain to the natures of things. They are matters of fact, albeit conditional facts. Necessity and contingency are not fundamentally epistemological concepts.
By necessity in our present, physical sense, I do not mean necessity in the traditional, “purely” logical or “purely” conceptual senses. Necessity in our current sense does not mean, as it did mean for Leibniz and Hume, something X that obtains and whose denial would be a contradiction of X’s (specific) identity. Denial of a true necessity or a true contingency, in our current sense, would mean contradiction of specific identity. The contradictions could be manifest or obscure, but in any case, they could not serve to distinguish the necessary from the contingent in our present sense. Note for completeness, that, under our new formulation of the necessity-contingency distinction [taken from Ted Honderich 1988], Leibniz’s hypothetical necessities stand as necessities with respect to some conditions and stand as contingencies with respect to other conditions.
Stephen
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