OK, I’m back from vacation and well-rested.<\/p>\n
Writing-wise, I’m currently finishing an epistemology paper on inferential justification and skepticism. Reading-wise, I’m wrapping up Trenton Merricks’ interesting book Objects and Persons<\/span><\/a>, in which he defends the interesting thesis that conscious organisms are the only macrophysical objects there are. On his view, things like chairs, statues, brains, etc. don’t exist. Instead, what we have is matter arranged chairwise, statuewise, brainwise, etc. Since all the causal work is done by the microphysical constituents of such ‘objects’, Merricks’ argues that they are ontologically redundant and thus are best eliminated from ontology. But human beings cannot be eliminated, he argues, because we exercise causal powers that are not simply a function of our microphysical constituents.<\/p>\n What I’d like to talk about right now, however, is a tangential argument that occurs on pp. 155-159 of his book. It concerns the relation of quantum indeterminacy (QI) and libertarian free will (LF).<\/p>\n In the first place, it is uncontroversial that QI is not sufficient<\/span> for LF. Acts that are free in the libertarian sense must be suitably under the deliberate control of the free agent, but the brute statistical randomness of microphysical processes according to QI is not tantamount to deliberate control.<\/p>\n In the second place, however, it has seemed to many that QI (or some other sort of physical indeterminacy) might be necessary <\/span>for LF. After all, if QI were false and physical determinism were true, then how could any of our acts be free in the libertarian sense? Though he is a believer in LF, Merricks disagrees. He asks us to consider the following two arguments:<\/p>\n <\/span><\/li>\n Both arguments have the same structure, so if one is valid, then both are. The first argument is a popular argument for incompatibilism (famously dubbed the ‘consequence argument’ by Van Inwagen). Defenders of LF typically endorse the validity of the first argument but deny its soundness by rejecting (1). What Merricks points out that is that they also have to deny one or more of the premises of the second argument:<\/p>\n For if determinism precludes human freedom, then so does bottom-up metaphysics. So, given incompatibilism, human freedom requires (at least) one of the following two things. A person has some choice about what her atoms do or are like (the denial of [5]). Some of a person’s actions fail to be fixed, one way or another, by atomic behaviour or features (the denial of [4]). If we have either, quantum indeterminacy … is not needed for freedom. If we have neither, quantum indeterminacy … won’t help. As a result, quantum indeterminacy … turns out to be irrelevant<\/span> to human freedom.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I think Merricks is right. Affirming QI doesn’t help the defender of LF as long as one affirms a ‘bottom-up’ metaphysics – one in which the mental is merely a supervenient epiphenomenon of the physical or microphysical. LF requires top-down causation in which the free agent exercises causal power that is not merely the vector-sum of his or her physical or microphysical constituents. In other words, LF requires that one deny the causal closure of the (micro)physical. But once one denies that, then whether QI is true or not at the (micro)physical level becomes irrelevant to LF because the causality exercised by free agents lies outside the scope of (micro)physical causation whether deterministic or indeterministic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" OK, I’m back from vacation and well-rested. Writing-wise, I’m currently finishing an epistemology paper on inferential justification and skepticism. Reading-wise, I’m wrapping up Trenton Merricks’ interesting book Objects and Persons, in which he defends the interesting thesis that conscious organisms are the only macrophysical objects there are. On his view, things like chairs, statues, brains,\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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