| | Bill,
To be sure, people can "evade" focusing on information they suspect may threaten their values or their preconceived ideas, but that's not the same as refusing to believe something that they already know is true. I think I disagree, although you might over-qualify your statement here until it becomes meaningless. I think people can recognize something is true, and decide they don't want to believe it anyway. They can evade that knowledge. Part of this process could be coming up with some piss-poor excuse for not accepting it as a fact. "Logic isn't everything!" "We aren't perfect! We can't be sure of anything!". "How am I to know?" And then they can try to ignore it and pretend it isn't true.
The over-qualification would be saying that they no longer conclude it's true if they've added these qualifiers. It doesn't deal with the fact that they can evade any knowledge, no matter how overwhelming the evidence or even how sure it might be true. They just need a motivation, and they can step out of the circle of 'knowing it is true'.
Can someone evade the fact that 2+2=4? Yes! But it's seriously unlikely that they'd have the motivation. But how about doubting if the earth is round? Crazy! Yet suddenly a lot easier to imagine. There are many facts that people are willing to evade or deny. The denial gets used when they accidently do focus on it, but the evasion is still there because they're intentionally blurring their mind whenever the topic comes up.
As for 'choice', it really is two entirely different things. One is a recognition by our active minds that there are multiple options in front of us, and focusing our will on a particular one. Jeff Perren had an excellent post here on it. But by determinism, some other factors make the decision. It's not a choice, just as a rock is not choosing which side of a hill to roll down. It's an automatic, passive process. Using the word "choice" to describe which way the rock falls down is no different from using "choice" to describe a deterministic action.
Remember, a value is an object of an action; it is what the person wants to achieve by taking the action.
I get that. Really. But it's simply a description, after the fact, of what the person chose (my language, not yours). If he voted for Bidinotto, he did it because he wanted a President that is tough on crime. Fine. But it doesn't tell you that there was some magic thing called a value that forced his choice or made his choice for him, or more accurately from a determinists position, "determined his action". It's only a description of what he decided was the most important factor. It's only a description, after the fact, of what happened.
The free-will version says that we could have chosen otherwise under the same conditions; the determinist version says that we could not have done so.
I've already stated that I reject this view of free-will. Free will does not reject Identity. It does not imagine that our results are causeless and random, and that if all else is equal, it will be a random result each time. That's indeterminism, and it's a travesty that anyone would try to equate it with free will. It is closer to determinism, as the results are caused by some outside power, in one case a deterministic thing outside your mind, and in the other a non-deterministic thing outside of your mind. In both cases, your mind is seen as a mere product of these other forces. An illusion that makes you feel like you are in control and are exerting energy to focus, but is in fact just the simple playing out of these other forces. But whether your mind is an illusion controlled by deterministic forces or non-deterministic forces is not particularly interesting. They both have the same effect.
No. A proper view of free will has nothing to do with indeterminism. It is not about having everything be equal, and different results. It's about having everything but your mind be equal, and recognizing that the results will vary, depending on how you work at it in your mind. Do you focus on the problem? Do you focus on the more important values? Do you blur your mind and go with whatever seems easier. Do you blur your mind and forget about the fact and go with your emotions? Do you decide to base your choice on some random event? Everything is possible.
With this kind of choice, we really have more than one option. The process of deciding which to choose is real, not some kind of illusion. Our minds are not pushed around by "values". We focus it. We run through relevant information. We look at various reasons for or against. Both choices are real, and we can go with either. We're not secretly compelled to go one way, and rationalize it as we find ourselves inexplicably moving in that direction. Instead, we choose. This is free will. Our minds are the decision makers. They are the cause.
None of this is compromised by the fact that our minds have Identity. Free will does not mean indeterminism, so Identity does not invalidate it. Free will is the fact that our minds really are functioning as we experience them. We really are weighing options, focusing on problems, exerting ourselves. It isn't an illusion. The fact that our minds have Identity doesn't mean that choices aren't real, as that would be based on some faulty view of choices being a product of indeterminism. No. Choice does not require indeterminism. Instead, choices are a product of our minds. It is an actual occurrence, that happens how we experience it. Our minds really are going through a selection process. The final result is based on how we focused our minds through this process.
Determinism, on the other hand, is just a claim that our minds are passive and automatic processes. That some outside power shapes our thoughts and decides the course of thinking. That any experience that we are in control is an illusion. It latches on to the purposes our minds decide on, and claims those purposes somehow created the effect and our minds merely rationalized the choice. It latches onto the factors that we focus on and accept, and claim they are in control. It latches on the fact that our mind has identity to claim that its not real.
I always think of a parallel for determinism. It's the idea that our brains are just chemical reactions, that it's those reactions causing our "choices", and that the experience of our minds is some non-relevant phenomena that makes us feel like we're in charge. Sounds plausible, since our minds really are just our functioning brains. It is a complex chemical reactions. The problem comes from looking at our deep understanding of the world, enough to build skyscrapers, put men on the moon, and cure diseases. Is this a random firing of our brains? No. It only makes sense when we recognize that somehow, in some unknown way, our consciousness emerges from the physical processes of the brain. And it is only because of this consciousness that we gain the knowledge to do these wondrous act. It can't be explained as simple random firings. Only consciousness can direct this process to understand the world and make plans to do these things.
The determinist is stuck at the level of the physical brain. He wants to ignore that consciousness is a real phenomena. He wants to ignore the ability to choose. He wants to try to explain these human advances by ignoring or discounting the source. He wants to say that because the choice is made by an agent with Identity, it isn't really a choice at all.
Even the value determinism doesn't do any better. It simply claims there are other non-conscious factors that are the real drivers of this process. Values are claimed to run our lives, as if memes were real things that somehow decide our actions, like rocks falling down a hill. The mind is just our experience of these forces playing themselves out, like a rock wobbling on the tip of the hill, getting ready to go down one side or another.
I have no expectation that this will sway you at all. It's was more for my benefit, and possibly others who might appreciate it. But I think the point you need to take away from this is that your view of free will is a straw man. I'm sure you'll find plenty of people who accept it as an accurate description, but that just shows what a couple thousand years of confusion on a topic can bring.
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