I think it is not only a clash of intuitions, since the success rates of pre-scientific theory and folk psychology are poor. This should urge caution in keeping concepts that seem to give rise to much confusion. I would argue that the default attitude towards pre-scientific concepts that have been shrouded in confusion for thousands of years, with still no clarity in sight, should be to avoid them when possible.
When you say that you haven’t seen evidence that puts “soul” on shaky grounds, do you mean that assuming determinism and what we know of human physiology that you believe there are still good reasons for positing the existence of a soul? If so, please explain what you mean by the term and why you think it is still a valuable concept. I think the notion of “soul” arose out of ignorance about the nature of living things (and how human beings were different from non-humans in particular) and that it not only serves no positive purpose but causes confusion, and I suspect that “choice” would never have arisen in anything like the form it did if we were not also confused about things like “free will” and the nature of thought.
Regarding “fire” and that it persists as a term, the only aspects of fire that continue to exist from ancient times are descriptions of its visual appearance and its obvious effects (that is, just the phenomenology of fire). Everything else about the concept has been abandoned or re-explained. Since the core of the concept (that it has the distinctive visual appearance it does and “it burns stuff”) remain, it is reasonable to keep the term and redefine the explanation for the core aspects of the concept.
The case with choice is quite different, as the phenomenology is much more complex, it is less direct, and it is “mental” and not visual (and thus much more likely to be confused/confusing). Things like “fire” and “thunder” and “rain” and “sun” can easily be re-explained since the phenomenology was reasonably accurate and that was the basis for the concept, but we don’t all agree on what is meant by choice or what the concept is supposed to explain.
Eliezer:
If determinism is true, what is the difference between “I could reach state X by taking action Y, if I wanted” and “I could reach state X by taking action Y, if 1=2″?
If determinism is true, then I couldn’t have wanted to do X, just as it couldn’t have been the case that 1=2, so the conditional is vacuously true, since the antecedent is false and must be false.
This doesn’t seem to me like a plausible explanation of possibility or could-ness, unless you can explain how to distinguish between “if I wanted” and “if 1=2″ without mentioning possible worlds or possibility or even reachability (since reachability is what you are defining).
Robin Z:
I think it is not only a clash of intuitions, since the success rates of pre-scientific theory and folk psychology are poor. This should urge caution in keeping concepts that seem to give rise to much confusion. I would argue that the default attitude towards pre-scientific concepts that have been shrouded in confusion for thousands of years, with still no clarity in sight, should be to avoid them when possible.
When you say that you haven’t seen evidence that puts “soul” on shaky grounds, do you mean that assuming determinism and what we know of human physiology that you believe there are still good reasons for positing the existence of a soul? If so, please explain what you mean by the term and why you think it is still a valuable concept. I think the notion of “soul” arose out of ignorance about the nature of living things (and how human beings were different from non-humans in particular) and that it not only serves no positive purpose but causes confusion, and I suspect that “choice” would never have arisen in anything like the form it did if we were not also confused about things like “free will” and the nature of thought.
Regarding “fire” and that it persists as a term, the only aspects of fire that continue to exist from ancient times are descriptions of its visual appearance and its obvious effects (that is, just the phenomenology of fire). Everything else about the concept has been abandoned or re-explained. Since the core of the concept (that it has the distinctive visual appearance it does and “it burns stuff”) remain, it is reasonable to keep the term and redefine the explanation for the core aspects of the concept.
The case with choice is quite different, as the phenomenology is much more complex, it is less direct, and it is “mental” and not visual (and thus much more likely to be confused/confusing). Things like “fire” and “thunder” and “rain” and “sun” can easily be re-explained since the phenomenology was reasonably accurate and that was the basis for the concept, but we don’t all agree on what is meant by choice or what the concept is supposed to explain.
Eliezer:
If determinism is true, what is the difference between “I could reach state X by taking action Y, if I wanted” and “I could reach state X by taking action Y, if 1=2″?
If determinism is true, then I couldn’t have wanted to do X, just as it couldn’t have been the case that 1=2, so the conditional is vacuously true, since the antecedent is false and must be false.
This doesn’t seem to me like a plausible explanation of possibility or could-ness, unless you can explain how to distinguish between “if I wanted” and “if 1=2″ without mentioning possible worlds or possibility or even reachability (since reachability is what you are defining).