- ficino
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- Posts: 188
Re: Mental agency
Thanks for the link. I shall read your linked post soon.
I sort of chuckled at the quotation from Chesterton on your page. He is saying that the truth is stranger than fiction. But I get the sense from Feser and others that in the last analysis, they hold to A-T metaphysics because they think without it, reality is too strange to describe. E.g. here: "Efficient causality becomes unintelligible without final causality." (Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide, p. 44). In the end, I'm left with the sense that their ultimate explanation of reality is "God did it." How is this different from "It is the will of Allah"? Maybe some stuff IS unintelligible. That's part of the point of the Swerve, as I understand it. Heh heh.
I am not the person to give advice about how to prove that A-T metaphysics is true and materialism generally is false. I haven't worked out all this stuff, and I may not live to do so. And I'll never know whether a Cartesian evil demon is not messing with my cognitive faculties. I think in the end we are all in the same boat; we seek explanations, but totality eludes us.
But I'm not yet at the point where I can prove that it's not the case that I simply fail to understand Aquinas.
Anyway, I'll look forward to reading your linked blog post later today.
Last edited by ficino (11/11/2017 7:21 am)
- FrenchySkepticalCatholic
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Re: Mental agency
ficino wrote:
But I get the sense from Feser and others that in the last analysis, they hold to A-T metaphysics because they think without it, reality is too strange to describe. E.g. here: "Efficient causality becomes unintelligible without final causality." (Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide, p. 44). In the end, I'm left with the sense that their ultimate explanation of reality is "God did it." How is this different from "It is the will of Allah"? Maybe some stuff IS unintelligible. That's part of the point of the Swerve, as I understand it. Heh heh.
You killed it. I forgot that if there is a brute fact, any analysis of the reality is false. Thanks for the reminder!
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Thread Starter- Freakazoid
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Re: Mental agency
I advise you to stay well away from Greenblatt's book. It received pretty scathing reviews.
- ficino
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Re: Mental agency
But I get the sense from Feser and others that in the last analysis, they hold to A-T metaphysics because they think without it, reality is too strange to describe. E.g. here: "Efficient causality becomes unintelligible without final causality." (Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide, p. 44). In the end, I'm left with the sense that their ultimate explanation of reality is "God did it." How is this different from "It is the will of Allah"? Maybe some stuff IS unintelligible. That's part of the point of the Swerve, as I understand it. Heh heh.
You killed it. I forgot that if there is a brute fact, any analysis of the reality is false. Thanks for the reminder!
Thank you for linking your essay on Epicurus. It's very well written (a few French expressions I didn't quite understand). At the time in my life when I got into Epicureanism, I found a lot of its perspectives helpful. I haven't really been thinking about it much in the last 15 years or so.
- seigneur
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Re: Mental agency
c) The old "standard argument against free will", which denies that free will is possible since it's either random but free, or determined but not free.
Would you not agree that there are at least two kinds of free will: relative and absolute. The kind of free will we have is only relative. Our free will only extends to the end of our fingertips and it's only as powerful as our willpower, which is generally not much.
Consider the freedom that a billiard ball has. When you allow it to drop, it can freely break through the air and it keeps speeding up by virtue of its own gravity and the ability to break through the air. But when it hits the ground, its fall stops, because it encountered a bigger object that has its own freedom to exercise.
Sure, this scenario is generally called determinism, not free will, but there is some freedom, as in free motion and free space for objects in relation to each other. People's free will is analogical - strictly restricted between people, not absolute, so it's not squarely contradictory to physical determinism. Not to mention that free will (of mind) occupies a different realm that deterministic (inert physical) objects, so there is no reason why they should clash.
Emphasis mine:
a) Reality appears to be timeless (block universe or something else), our consciousness would be only "following a program" (akin to epiphenomenalism), and our mental representations are like a movie when we watch something ;
b) Intentionality only appears post-experimental : you're aware of wanting something, but you're never aware of you doing something. If we decompose the experience, we plan on doing something and then we do it.
Whenever anything appears, the existence of consciousness is demonstrated, even if warped by the senses. (But consciousness, when exercised rigorously, can straighten out whatever is warped by the senses, so we can figure out appearance versus reality.) If there were no consciousness or free will, you should never need the word "appears".
Last edited by seigneur (11/13/2017 10:10 am)