From: Dace (edace@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu 13 Mar 2003 - 05:03:16 GMT
> From: "Scott Chase" <ecphoric@hotmail.com>
>
> To end on a more positive and topical note...has anybody read Dennett's
new
> book (IIRC on the evolution of free will)? I thumbed through the index at
> the bookstore tonight, noticing memes get a portion of the book devoted to
> them (pulling Dennett's puppet strings as they like to do). Maybe I'll get
> around to buying it soon.
>
> Any reviews or basic comments on the book that I might benefit
> from...anybody?
Dennett's premise is that freedom can exist in a deterministic universe as
long as it evolves into being. He proposes that our chief mistake is to
equate determinism with inevitability. Even in a deterministic universe,
organisms can evolve the capacity to avoid certain dangers. Anything which
is avoidable is not inevitable. Therefore not everything in a deterministic
universe is inevitable.
It's a pretty bizarre argument. He doesn't seem to realize that whatever
evolves in a deterministic universe is pre-determined to evolve. More to
the point, no one is suggesting that everything in a deterministic universe
is inevitable. What's inevitable is only that which has been determined.
That which is not inevitable is precisely that which has not been
determined. The fact that not everything in a deterministic universe is
inevitable has no bearing, one way or the other, on the question of freedom.
Dennett's confusion is especially clear when he runs into time. He says the
outcome of an event is fixed once the event has actually happened, "and
nothing can change that in a determined world-- or in an undetermined
world!" He misses the point of time. An event is determined when it's in
the past. An undetermined world is whatever hasn't already happened. To
speak of an event that's already happened in an "undetermined world" is to
reveal no understanding whatsoever of reality.
Dennett follows the physicalist assumption that the future, in a sense,
already exists, and that a hypothetical omniscient being could perceive the
future by simply tracing it out from current conditions. How can there be
freedom in a world in which the future is as set as the past?
If there's any lesson on memetics from this book, it's that allegiance to a
meme (in this case the meme of determinism) can give rise to the most
astonishing feats of self-delusion as we try to fit our fixed ideas with
what we recognize to be true (that we have the capacity for freedom).
Ted
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