Is the apparent conflict between having freewill and being causally determined important?
Some philosophical questions seem of no practical importance, though this can be misleading.
But this one has been taken to have vital practical implications.
Psychologist B.F.Skinner, one of the founders of 'behaviourism', argued that if you believe human behaviour is determined you will organize social affairs differently. "A scientific conception of human behaviour dictates one practice, a philosophy of personal freedom another..." And indeed: 'the present unhappy condition of the world' he says may be traced 'in large measure' to our vacillation between policies based on personal freedom and policies based on science.
An 18th writer expresses I think the same point:
"Ah. you pedants. hangmen. turnkeys. lawmakers, you shavepate rabble, what will you do when we have arrived. ..[at knowledge of the human constitution]? What is to become of your laws, your ethics, your religion, your gallows, your Gods and your Heaven and your Hell when it shall be proven that such a flow of liquids, this variety of fibers, that degree of pungency in the blood or in the animal spirits are sufficient to make a man the object of your givings and your takings away?"
The Marquis de Sade quoted by Roger Smith in Human Sciences, Fontana, London, 1997, p.232.
On a personal level there would seem to be practical implications too - we wouldn't try so hard: or try at all?
But: if things are fixed you will do what you will do, you will think what you will think, you will feel what you will feel, you will come to believe what you will come to believe... ?
Back to the Future: Can we rule out now the possibility of time travel ever taking place?
Can we tell, just by thinking about something, whether it is possible or impossible?
The theory that our knowledge of time is a priori: Kant
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Prepared by VP
| Revised 16:02:09 |