While I'm waiting

Though I remain posted, I wanted to throw out a couple concerns with Nathanael's latest bit of commentary to make sure we're on the same page as far as the two of us go. I'll let Tom take care of his own end.

First, I want to mention that I think Nathanael meant “Foundationalism” instead of “fundamentalism.” I am also surprised that he declines to mention Reliabilism, though perhaps he considers it a subcategory of Foundationalism. That he doesn’t mention Contextualism surprises me less.

Second, I wanted to address an ambiguity:

I want to admit that, as Nato guessed, I have "not read any of the many answers that scientists have advanced, the models that have grown dramatically in power and fidelity in the last twenty years since the overly-reductive red herring of hard computationalism finally fell by the wayside for good." And I was no doubt too bold in stating categorically that modern ethical philosophers "have been refuted." Frankly, I suspect I could "refute" the recent philosophical efforts if I read them (at least inasmuch as they offer a materialist basis for morality) but I haven't, and I probably won't, which perhaps puts me in an awkward position here, so how can I justify myself?

Nathanael goes on to give a good example of an arena in which one can feel justified in dismissing a whole field of inquiry/theory based on previous experience. He uses computational biblical interpretation as his example where I would probably use perpetual motion, but both apply pretty well. Right off the bat, I can dismiss anything purporting to be a perpetual motion machine as well as anything that purports to predict the future with nonrandom accuracy based on an irrelevant data set. Physics disproves one*, information theory disproves the other. Since I have a great deal of confidence in both, I can dismiss their claim to do things that would disprove either. Anyway, if I didn’t accept this mvoe, how could I remain an atheist in a world with so many different theistic claims that I couldn’t possibly examine them all?

I can understand if Nathanael perceives the position of materialist morality to be analogous. I don’t agree, of course, but I can by no means call the claim out of bounds. Now, if he intends this also to apply to modern theories of mind, then I suggest he’s simply mistaken. His original expression of skepticism:

This whole complex of thoughts, abstract ideas, right and wrong and free will, materialists must somehow explain with reference only to electrical signals bouncing around among neurons. Have they accomplished this? Of course not, not even close. To the question, "If the world is strictly material, then how do we think, and how are our thoughts linked to things in the physical world that we're thinking of, and how can we think abstract thoughts that are not equivalent to anything in real life, and how can ideas be communicated, such that the 'same idea' can exist in two different heads, and if we can make choices, as we seem to be able to do, how can we do that?" the answer is "Somehow." (Perhaps more fancily worded.)

If he has not read modern cognitive neuroscience and cognitive philosophy while dismissing it as handwaving, he is simply engaging in the sort of a priori reasoning that has repeatedly embarrassed philosophers of the past who confidently proclaimed various things impossible until science did them. For good reason has modern analytical philosophy become wary of advancing “self-evidently obvious” empirical claims.

On the other hand, if Nathanael was bracketing the cognition subject and didn’t mean for his crticism to apply to that, never mind.

Nathanael might be leveling the charge that introspection trumps hetereophenomenalism, which might say different things about your cognitive processes than what it seems to you is happening. This makes sense from the perspective that nothing could have a shorter chain of justification that one’s own direct perceptions, but I’ve addressed that mistake before in an old discussion of Chalmers. Dennett’s criticism of Chalmers also addresses the issue.

Finally, on freewill, Nathanael says:

If I am "coerced" to shoot myself, that might mean, 1) you fold your fingers around mine and push them to pull the trigger, or 2) you threaten me with much worse tortures, and persuade me to go the easy way. In the first case, coercion has overcome free will, but it's hard to say then whether I shot myself at all: a better description might be "you shot me, using my own fingers." In the second case, coercion certainly narrowed my options, but I still had free will. Even in the first case I still had free will: my thoughts, my decision to push back, and so on, were still under my control. Free will still exists in a case of coercion, just as it is possible to play baseball without mitts and bases, though each circumstances makes judging the outcome harder. But just as you can never win a baseball game except by scoring the most runs, no matter how many mitts and bases there are, you don't have free will if deterministic molecular interactions predetermine your every move, no matter how absent coercive circumstances are.

Nathanael can define freewill as he likes, saying that it must have a causal force independent of the deterministic stream of cause an effect, but he should explain why he wants that definition rather than the one I propose. To sketch the very broad reason I think one should prefer freewill of my (vaguely described here) definition, when one asks if someone did something of their own free will, they want to know about that person's character. If Mr Convenient Evil Guy threatened Mr Conundrum with the murder of the entire Conundrum family if Mr Conundrum did not shoot himself in the head, then one would draw a different conclusion about Mr Conundrum than if he had shot himself in the head without that threat. Many Christians (for example) might view him as an irresponsible depressive if he shot himself because he was sad, but might view him as heroic to sacrifice his life to save his family. People, Christians and otherwise, are not in the least bit interested in knowing if his decision was microphysically determined or not, and so freewill of my definition participates in a distinction that people care about.

*It’s worth noting that we may eventually find new approaches to “perpetual motion” that achieve that is a totally different way, much like one cannot move faster than the speed of light, but one can fold space so that one travels between two locations before light reaches that place via the conventional route. It seems likely unadorned Utilitarianism and Kantianism are permanently flawed without changing a few basic problems in their framework of assumption, so on those scores I can’t much fault you. However, I do think heuristic morality folds the logical space of the moral problem nicely.