John C. Wright's Journal

Part of an ongoing conversation. A reader with the obscure yet tenebrous name of The Shadow voices reservations about my claim that there is no conflict nor paradox when the mind and the body are regarded as two aspects of one underlying reality.

Now if brain states follow deterministic physical laws – and I’ll admit that I’m not as sure as I used to be that even classical physics is deterministic – then it seems we have a problem. For if my brain states are determined *entirely* by physical factors (and it seems this is what you are claiming), then it would seem that they cannot be expressing my thoughts. Just as if I wrote a program to produce text by a set of rules, even the rules of English grammar, it would express my thoughts, or anyone’s, only by accident.

So it would seem that either you haven’t really addressed the mind-body problem, or else that some unknown means arranges for your brain states to have that minimum correlation with your thoughts in order to think them. And the only means that readily come to mind would be either 1) your own mind, or 2) God or some secondary cause ordained by him (other than yourself).

My philosophy might be labeled “harmonist”  since I do conclude that, despite appearances, determinism and indeterminism are out of harmony with each other.

I have also heard this philosophy called “methodological dualism” since I hold that, in speak, we are forced to deal with deterministic statements about the mechanical causes of matter being moved by using the category of cause and effect, or mechanical cause; whereas we are likewise forced to deal with indeterministic statements about the meaning and purpose, morality and beauty and truth of living things moving themselves by using the category of ends and means.

The fact that living things are things creates a nearly inescapable ambiguity.

The question is one our language and the categories of our thinking is particularly apt to leave mysterious. Let me try again.

Look at the example of the book and the story in a story book.

Read the remainder of this entry »

My argument is that the irreconcilability of determinism and so called indeterminism is an illusion based on a confusion of categories.

I do not violate any laws of nature when I raise my hand and snap my fingers. The mechanics of the motions of bones, muscles and nerves in my arm and hand and the neurochemical changes in my brain can be precisely described by a biologist.

If you ask him why I snapped my fingers, he will look at you dumbfounded, and announce that, as a biologist, his discipline is confined to empirical statements about empirical reality, that is, things open to the senses.

Likewise, if you ask a lawyer or a father confessor why I snapped my fingers — let us assume for the sake of argument that this snapping was sinful or illegal — they will answer in terms of free will and malice aforethought. They will answer in terms of ends and means, that is, offer as statement about what I meant to achieve and how I mean to achieve it by the act of snapping.

All discussion of ends and means is non-empirical. The empirical facts have little or nothing to do with such discussions. They are two different ways of describing two difference faces of reality, the seen and the unseen.

Asking how physical determinism and moral choice can coexist, in effect, asking how can the inside of a cup exist if the outside exists.

Myself, I do not see how one is possible, or imaginable, without the other.

Read the remainder of this entry »