...a high probability to it being omniscient and omnipotent, a fair probability to it being omnibenevolent...
I realize this is a necromancer post, but I’m interested in your definitions of the above. How do you square up with some of the questions regarding:
on what mindware something non-physical would store all the information that is
how omniscience settles with free-will (if you believe we have free will)
how omniscience interacts with the idea that this being could intervene (doing something different than it knows it’s going to do)
I won’t go on to more. I’m sure you’re familiar with things like this; I was just surprised to see that you listed these terms outright, and wanted ti inquire about details.
Knowing your decisions doesn’t prevent you from being able to make them, for proper consequentialist reasons and not out of an obligation to preserve consistency. It’s the responsibility of knowledge about your decisions to be correct, not of your decisions to anticipate that knowledge. The physical world “already” “knows” everyone’s decisions, that doesn’t break down anyone’s ability to act.
True, but I more meant the idea of theistic intervention, how that works with intercession and so on. The world “knows” everyone’s decisions… but no one intercedes to the world expecting it to change something about the future. But theists do.
I suppose one can simply take the view that god knows both what will happen, what people will intercede for, and that he will or will not answer those prayers. Thus, most theists think they are calling on god to change something, when in reality he “already” “knew” they would ask for it and already knew he would do it.
Reality can’t be changed, but it can be determined, in part by many preceding decisions. The changes happen only to the less than perfectly informed expectations.
(With these decision-philosophical points cleared out, it’s still unclear what you’re inquiring about. Logical impossibility is a bad argument against theism, as it’s possible to (conceptually) construct a world that includes any artifacts or sequence of events whatsoever, it just so happens that our particular world is not like that.)
Logical impossibility is a bad argument against theism, as it’s possible to...
Good point, though my jury is still out on whether it really is possible to parse what it would mean to be omniscient, for example. Or if we can suggest things like the universe “knowing everything,” it’s typically not what theists are implying when they speak of an omniscient being.
...it’s still unclear what you’re inquiring about.
I think I’ll just let it go. Even the fact that we’re both on the same page with respect to determinism pretty much ends the need to have a discussion. Conundrums like how an omniscient being can know what it will do and also be said to be responsive (change what it was going to do) based on being asked via prayer only seems to work if determinism is not on the table, and about every apologetics bit I’ve read suggests that it’s not on the table.
This thread has been the first time I think I can see how intercession and omniscience could jive in a deterministic sense. A being could know that it will answer a prayer, and that a pray-er would pray for such an answer.
From the theists I know/interact with, I think they would find this like going through the motions though. It would remove the “magic” from things for them. I could be wrong.
On another note, I buy the typical compatibilist ideas about free will, but there’s also this idea I was kicking around that I don’t think is really very interesting but might be for some reason (pulled from a comment I made on Facebook):
“I don’t know if it ultimately makes sense, but I sometimes think about the possibility of ‘super’ free will beyond compatibilist free willl, where you have a Turing oracle that humans can access but whose outputs they can’t algorithmicly verify. The only way humans can perform hypercomputation is by having faith in the oracle. Since a Turing oracle is construbtable from Chaitin’s constant and is thus the only truly random source of information in the universe, this would (at least on a pattern-match-y surface level) seem to supply some of the indeterminism sought by libertarians, while also letting humans transcend deterministic, i.e. computable, constraints in a way that looks like having more agency than would otherwise be possible. So in a universe without super free will no one would be able to perform hypercomputation ‘cuz they wouldn’t have access to an oracle. But much of this speculation comes from trying to rationalize why theologians would say ‘if there were no God then there wouldn’t be any free will’.”
Implicit in this model is that universes where you can’t do hypercomputation are significantly less significant than universes where you can, and so only with hypercomputation can you truly transcend the mundanity of a deterministic universe. But I don’t think such a universe actually captures libertarians’ intuitions about what is necessary for free will, so I doubt it’s a useful model.
I’ll have to check into compatabilism more. It had never occurred to me that determinism was compatible with omniscience/intercession until my commenting with Vladimir_Nesov. In seeing wiki’s definition, it sounded more reasonable than I remembered, so perhaps I never really understood what compatabilism was suggesting.
I’m not positive I get your explanations (due to simple ignorance), but it sounds slightly like what Adam Lee presented here concerning a prediction machine; namely that such a thing could be built, but that actually knowing the prediction would be impossible for it would set off something of an infinite forward calculation of factoring in the prediction, that the human knows the prediction itself, that the prediction machine knows that the human knows the prediction… and then trying to figure out what the new action will actually be.
Note that I was pretty new to theology a year ago when I made this post so my thoughts are different and more subtle now.
To all three of your questions I think I hold the same views Aquinas would, even if I don’t know quite what those views are.
on what mindware something non-physical would store all the information that is
How does Platonic mathstructure “store information” about the details of Platonic mathstructure? I think the question is the result of a confused metaphysic, but we don’t yet have an alternative metaphysic to be confident in. Nonetheless I think one will be found via decision theory.
how omniscience settles with free-will (if you believe we have free will)
My answer is the same as Nesov’s, and I think Aquinas answers the question beautifully: “Free-will is the cause of its own movement, because by his free-will man moves himself to act. But it does not of necessity belong to liberty that what is free should be the first cause of itself, as neither for one thing to be cause of another need it be the first cause. God, therefore, is the first cause, Who moves causes both natural and voluntary. And just as by moving natural causes He does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes He does not deprive their actions of being voluntary: but rather is He the cause of this very thing in them; for He operates in each thing according to its own nature.”
how omniscience interacts with the idea that this being could intervene (doing something different than it knows it’s going to do)
I think my answer is the typical Thomistic answer, i.e. that God is actuality without potentiality, and that God cannot do something different than He knows He will do, as that would be logically impossible, and God cannot do what is logically impossible.
“Free-will is the cause of its own movement, because by his free-will man moves himself to act. But it does not of necessity belong to liberty that what is free should be the first cause of itself, as neither for one thing to be cause of another need it be the first cause. God, therefore, is the first cause, Who moves causes both natural and voluntary. And just as by moving natural causes He does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes He does not deprive their actions of being voluntary: but rather is He the cause of this very thing in them; for He operates in each thing according to its own nature.”
I don’t think this is satisfying. Suppose there are two ways in which something may be a cause, either by being an unmoved mover or a moved mover (‘moved’ here is to be understood in the broadest necessary sense). If God is the first cause of our action, then we are not unmoved movers with reference to our action. If we nevertheless have free will, just because we are the causes of our actions, then we have free will in virtue of being movers but not in virtue of being unmoved movers.
But when we act to, say, throw a stone, we are the cause of our arm’s movement and our arm (a moved mover) is the cause of the stone’s movement. Likewise the stone, another moved mover, is the cause of Tom’s being injured. Now God is the unmoved mover here, and everything else in the chain is a moved mover. If being a mover is all it takes to have free will, then I have it, my arm has it, the stone has it, etc. But surely, this is not what we (assuming neither of us is Spinoza) means by free will.
If being a mover is all it takes to have free will
That wasn’t claimed; the necessary preconditions of free will weren’t in the intended scope of the passage I quoted. If you want Aquinas’ broader account of free will, see this. It’s pretty commonsensical philosophy.
That wasn’t claimed; the necessary preconditions of free will weren’t in the intended scope of the passage I quoted.
Granted, but the implication of your quotation was that it would do something to settle the question of how to reconcile God’s omniscience or first-cause-hood with the idea of free will. But it doesn’t do anything to address the question (you quoted the right bit of Aquinas, so I mean that he does nothing to answer the question). In order to address the question, Aquinas would have to show why free will is compatible with a more prior cause of our action than our own reasoning. All he manages to argue is that our reason’s being a cause of our action is compatible with there being a prior cause of same. And this at a level of generality which would cover (as he says) natural and purportedly voluntary causes. But this isn’t in doubt: in fact, this is the premise of his opponent.
The opponent is arguing that while we are the cause of our actions, we are not the free cause, because we are not the first cause. So the opponent is setting up a relation between ‘free’ and ‘first’ which Aquinas does nothing to address beyond simply denying (without argument) that the relation thus construed is a necessary one. In short, this just isn’t an answer to the objection.
So there are two levels of movement going on here. God moves the will to self-move, but does not move the rock to self-move, He only moves the rock. The objector claims that being moved precludes self-moving, but Aquinas claims that this is a confusion, because just as moving doesn’t preclude being fluffy, moving doesn’t preclude self-moving. This seems more like a clarification rather than a simple restatement of opposition: Aquinas is saying roughly ‘you seem to see a contradiction here, but when we lay the metaphysics out clearly there’s no a priori reason to see self-moving-ness as different from fluffiness’. It seems plausible that the objector hadn’t realized that being moved to self-moving-ness was metaphysically possible, and thus Aquinas could feel that the objector would be satisfied with his counter. But if the objector had already seen the distinction of levels and still objected, then in that case it seems true that Aquinas’ response doesn’t answer the objection. But in that case it seems that the objector is denying common sense and basic physical intuition rather than simply being confused about abstract metaphysics. I may be wrong about that though, I feel like I missed something.
The objector claims that being moved precludes self-moving, but Aquinas claims that this is a confusion, because just as moving doesn’t preclude being fluffy, moving doesn’t preclude self-moving.
The objector is making what seems to me to be a common sense point: if something moves you, then in that respect you don’t move yourself. I grant that there is nothing incompatible about being fluffy and being moved by some external power, but there’s no obvious (nor argued for, on Aquinas’ part) analogy between this kind of case and the case of the self mover. And there’s an at least apparent contradiction in the idea of a self-mover which is moved by something else in the very sense that it moves itself.
And we’re not concerned with the property of being a self mover, but of whether the idea that a given action is freely caused by me is incompatible with the idea that the very same action is (indirectly) caused by some prior thing. It does us no good to say that we have the property of having free will if every action of ours is caused in the way that a thrown stone causes injury.
Really, Aquinas’ objection seems to turn on the observation (correct, I think) that reasoning to an action means undertaking it freely. This is the point that needs some elaboration.
This kind of argument just seems to be bad philosophy, involving too many unclear words without unpacking them. Specifically, going through your comment: “moves”, “external”, “the very sense”, “property”, “freely caused”, “prior thing”. Since the situation in question doesn’t seem to involve anything that’s too hard to describe, most of the trouble seems to originate from unclear terminology, and could be avoided by discarding the more confused ideas and describing in more detail the more useful ones.
The article you link to makes a fine point about humility, but it doesn’t tell me anything about how to become a good philosopher. Do you think you could point me in the direction of becoming a good philosopher? Or to someone who can?
Specifically, going through your comment: “moves”, “external”, “the very sense”, “property”, “freely caused”, “prior thing”.
It’s important, I think, not to try to over-explain terminology. For example, all I mean by ‘moves’ is some relation that holds (by Will’s premises) between God and a free action indirectly, and ourselves and a free action directly. Further specifying the meaning of this term would be distracting.
I think if you can make a specific case for the claim that some disagreement or argument is turning on an ambiguity, then we should stop and look over our language. Otherwise, I don’t think it’s generally productive to worry about terminology. We should rather focus on being understood, and I’ve got no reason to think Will doesn’t understand me (and I don’t think I misunderstand him).
And there’s an at least apparent contradiction in the idea of a self-mover which is moved by something else in the very sense that it moves itself.
When I think of moving something to move itself I think of building an engine and turning it on such that it moves itself. There seems to be no contradiction here. I interpreted “what is free is cause of itself” as meaning that self-movement is necessary but not necessarily sufficient for free will. If an engine can be moved and yet move itself, just as an engine can be moved and yet be fluffy, then that means our will can be moved and yet move itself, contra the objection. Which part of this argument is incorrect or besides the point? (I apologize if I’m missing something obvious, I’m a little scatterbrained at the moment.)
Well, the objection to which Tom is replying goes like this: if a free cause is a cause of itself, and if our actions are caused by something other then ourselves, and given that God is a cause of our actions ((Proverbs 21:1): “The heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord; whithersoever He will He shall turn it” and (Philippians 2:13): “It is God Who worketh in you both to will and to accomplish.”) then we do not have free will.
In other words, the relation being described in the objection isn’t like the maker, the machine, and the machine’s actions. The objection is talking about a case where a given action has two causes: we are the direct cause, and God is the indirect cause by being a direct cause on us. God is a direct cause on us not (just) in the manner of a creator, but as a cause specifically of this action.
So I grant you that there is no incompatibility to be found in the idea that self-movers are created beings. I’m saying that the objection points rather to an incompatibility between a specific action’s being both freely cause by me, and indirectly caused by God. In the case of the machine that you present, you are correctly called a cause of the machine and the machine’s being a self-mover, but I think you wouldn’t say that you’re therefore an indirect cause of any of the machine’s specific actions. If you were, especially knowingly so, this would call into question the machine’s status as a self mover.
I still can’t parse the maze of “direct” and “indirect” causes you’re describing, but note that an event can often be parsed as having multiple different explanations (in particular, “causes”) at the same time, none of which “more direct”, “more real” than the other. See for example the post Evolutionary Psychology and its dependencies.
but note that an event can often be parsed as having multiple different explanations (in particular, “causes”) at the same time, none of which “more direct”, “more real” than the other.
Fair enough, but they can often be parsed in terms of more and less directness. For example, say a mob boss orders that Donny kill Jimmy. Donny is the cause of Jimmy’s death directly: he’s the one that shot him. But if the boss is the indirect cause by ordering Donny: an alternative is that the boss kills Jimmy himself, and then the boss is the cause of Jimmy’s death directly.
The reason we don’t need to get too metaphysical to answer the question ‘Is Aquinas’ reply to objector #3 satisfying?′ is that the nature of the causes at issue isn’t really relevant. The objector is pointing out that God is a cause of my throwing the stone in the same way (it doesn’t much matter what ‘way’ this is) that I am the cause of my arm’s movement. If we refuse to call my arm a free agent, we should refuse to call me a free agent.
Now, of course, we could develop a theory of causality which solves this problem. But I don’t think Aquinas does that in a satisfactory way.
(Additional bizarre value to this conversation is gained by me not caring in the least what Aquinas thought or said...)
The reason we don’t need to get too metaphysical to answer the question ‘Is Aquinas’ reply to objector #3 satisfying?′ is that the nature of the causes at issue isn’t really relevant. The objector is pointing out that God is a cause of my throwing the stone in the same way (it doesn’t much matter what ‘way’ this is) that I am the cause of my arm’s movement. If we refuse to call my arm a free agent, we should refuse to call me a free agent.
What does “the same” mean? What is a “way” for different “ways” to be “same” or not? This remains unclear to me. How does it matter what we agree or refuse to call something?
Perhaps (as a wild guess on my part) you’re thinking in terms of more syntactic pattern-matching: if two things are “same”, they can be interchanged in statements that include their mention? This is rather brittle and unenlightening, this post gives one example of how that breaks down.
Additional bizarre value to this conversation is gained by me not caring in the least what Aquinas thought or said...
I think attempts to clarify my argument will be fruitless in abstraction from its context: if you take me to be positing a theory of causality, or to be making general claims about the problem of free will, then almost everything I say will sound empty. All I’m saying is that objector #3 has a good point, and Aquinas doesn’t answer him in a satisfying way.
This isn’t a special feature of my argumentation: in general it will be hard to make sense of what people are arguing about if we ignore both the premises to which they initially agreed (i.e. the terms of the objector’s objection, and of Aquinas’s response) and the conclusion they are fighting over (whether or not the response is satisfying). No amount of clarifying, swapping out terms, etc. will be helpful. Rather, you and I should just start over (if you like) with our own question.
Fair enough, and I’ve heard that before as well. The typical theistic issue is how to reconcile god’s knowledge and free will, hence why I don’t think we need to continue in this discussion anymore. You are responding to my questions based on things being determined, which is not what I think most theists believe.
But that’s not the discussion I think we’re having. It’s shifted to determinism and omniscience, which I think is compatible, but I’m still not on board with some kind of mind that could house all information that exists, or at least that mind being consistent with what theists generally want it to mean (it caused the universe specifically for us, wants us to be in heaven with it forever, inspired holy books to be written, and so on.)
I realize this is a necromancer post, but I’m interested in your definitions of the above. How do you square up with some of the questions regarding:
on what mindware something non-physical would store all the information that is
how omniscience settles with free-will (if you believe we have free will)
how omniscience interacts with the idea that this being could intervene (doing something different than it knows it’s going to do)
I won’t go on to more. I’m sure you’re familiar with things like this; I was just surprised to see that you listed these terms outright, and wanted ti inquire about details.
Knowing your decisions doesn’t prevent you from being able to make them, for proper consequentialist reasons and not out of an obligation to preserve consistency. It’s the responsibility of knowledge about your decisions to be correct, not of your decisions to anticipate that knowledge. The physical world “already” “knows” everyone’s decisions, that doesn’t break down anyone’s ability to act.
True, but I more meant the idea of theistic intervention, how that works with intercession and so on. The world “knows” everyone’s decisions… but no one intercedes to the world expecting it to change something about the future. But theists do.
I suppose one can simply take the view that god knows both what will happen, what people will intercede for, and that he will or will not answer those prayers. Thus, most theists think they are calling on god to change something, when in reality he “already” “knew” they would ask for it and already knew he would do it.
Is it any clearer what I was inquiring about?
Reality can’t be changed, but it can be determined, in part by many preceding decisions. The changes happen only to the less than perfectly informed expectations.
(With these decision-philosophical points cleared out, it’s still unclear what you’re inquiring about. Logical impossibility is a bad argument against theism, as it’s possible to (conceptually) construct a world that includes any artifacts or sequence of events whatsoever, it just so happens that our particular world is not like that.)
Good point, though my jury is still out on whether it really is possible to parse what it would mean to be omniscient, for example. Or if we can suggest things like the universe “knowing everything,” it’s typically not what theists are implying when they speak of an omniscient being.
I think I’ll just let it go. Even the fact that we’re both on the same page with respect to determinism pretty much ends the need to have a discussion. Conundrums like how an omniscient being can know what it will do and also be said to be responsive (change what it was going to do) based on being asked via prayer only seems to work if determinism is not on the table, and about every apologetics bit I’ve read suggests that it’s not on the table.
This thread has been the first time I think I can see how intercession and omniscience could jive in a deterministic sense. A being could know that it will answer a prayer, and that a pray-er would pray for such an answer.
From the theists I know/interact with, I think they would find this like going through the motions though. It would remove the “magic” from things for them. I could be wrong.
On another note, I buy the typical compatibilist ideas about free will, but there’s also this idea I was kicking around that I don’t think is really very interesting but might be for some reason (pulled from a comment I made on Facebook):
“I don’t know if it ultimately makes sense, but I sometimes think about the possibility of ‘super’ free will beyond compatibilist free willl, where you have a Turing oracle that humans can access but whose outputs they can’t algorithmicly verify. The only way humans can perform hypercomputation is by having faith in the oracle. Since a Turing oracle is construbtable from Chaitin’s constant and is thus the only truly random source of information in the universe, this would (at least on a pattern-match-y surface level) seem to supply some of the indeterminism sought by libertarians, while also letting humans transcend deterministic, i.e. computable, constraints in a way that looks like having more agency than would otherwise be possible. So in a universe without super free will no one would be able to perform hypercomputation ‘cuz they wouldn’t have access to an oracle. But much of this speculation comes from trying to rationalize why theologians would say ‘if there were no God then there wouldn’t be any free will’.”
Implicit in this model is that universes where you can’t do hypercomputation are significantly less significant than universes where you can, and so only with hypercomputation can you truly transcend the mundanity of a deterministic universe. But I don’t think such a universe actually captures libertarians’ intuitions about what is necessary for free will, so I doubt it’s a useful model.
I’ll have to check into compatabilism more. It had never occurred to me that determinism was compatible with omniscience/intercession until my commenting with Vladimir_Nesov. In seeing wiki’s definition, it sounded more reasonable than I remembered, so perhaps I never really understood what compatabilism was suggesting.
I’m not positive I get your explanations (due to simple ignorance), but it sounds slightly like what Adam Lee presented here concerning a prediction machine; namely that such a thing could be built, but that actually knowing the prediction would be impossible for it would set off something of an infinite forward calculation of factoring in the prediction, that the human knows the prediction itself, that the prediction machine knows that the human knows the prediction… and then trying to figure out what the new action will actually be.
Note that I was pretty new to theology a year ago when I made this post so my thoughts are different and more subtle now.
To all three of your questions I think I hold the same views Aquinas would, even if I don’t know quite what those views are.
How does Platonic mathstructure “store information” about the details of Platonic mathstructure? I think the question is the result of a confused metaphysic, but we don’t yet have an alternative metaphysic to be confident in. Nonetheless I think one will be found via decision theory.
My answer is the same as Nesov’s, and I think Aquinas answers the question beautifully: “Free-will is the cause of its own movement, because by his free-will man moves himself to act. But it does not of necessity belong to liberty that what is free should be the first cause of itself, as neither for one thing to be cause of another need it be the first cause. God, therefore, is the first cause, Who moves causes both natural and voluntary. And just as by moving natural causes He does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes He does not deprive their actions of being voluntary: but rather is He the cause of this very thing in them; for He operates in each thing according to its own nature.”
I think my answer is the typical Thomistic answer, i.e. that God is actuality without potentiality, and that God cannot do something different than He knows He will do, as that would be logically impossible, and God cannot do what is logically impossible.
I don’t think this is satisfying. Suppose there are two ways in which something may be a cause, either by being an unmoved mover or a moved mover (‘moved’ here is to be understood in the broadest necessary sense). If God is the first cause of our action, then we are not unmoved movers with reference to our action. If we nevertheless have free will, just because we are the causes of our actions, then we have free will in virtue of being movers but not in virtue of being unmoved movers.
But when we act to, say, throw a stone, we are the cause of our arm’s movement and our arm (a moved mover) is the cause of the stone’s movement. Likewise the stone, another moved mover, is the cause of Tom’s being injured. Now God is the unmoved mover here, and everything else in the chain is a moved mover. If being a mover is all it takes to have free will, then I have it, my arm has it, the stone has it, etc. But surely, this is not what we (assuming neither of us is Spinoza) means by free will.
That wasn’t claimed; the necessary preconditions of free will weren’t in the intended scope of the passage I quoted. If you want Aquinas’ broader account of free will, see this. It’s pretty commonsensical philosophy.
Granted, but the implication of your quotation was that it would do something to settle the question of how to reconcile God’s omniscience or first-cause-hood with the idea of free will. But it doesn’t do anything to address the question (you quoted the right bit of Aquinas, so I mean that he does nothing to answer the question). In order to address the question, Aquinas would have to show why free will is compatible with a more prior cause of our action than our own reasoning. All he manages to argue is that our reason’s being a cause of our action is compatible with there being a prior cause of same. And this at a level of generality which would cover (as he says) natural and purportedly voluntary causes. But this isn’t in doubt: in fact, this is the premise of his opponent.
The opponent is arguing that while we are the cause of our actions, we are not the free cause, because we are not the first cause. So the opponent is setting up a relation between ‘free’ and ‘first’ which Aquinas does nothing to address beyond simply denying (without argument) that the relation thus construed is a necessary one. In short, this just isn’t an answer to the objection.
So there are two levels of movement going on here. God moves the will to self-move, but does not move the rock to self-move, He only moves the rock. The objector claims that being moved precludes self-moving, but Aquinas claims that this is a confusion, because just as moving doesn’t preclude being fluffy, moving doesn’t preclude self-moving. This seems more like a clarification rather than a simple restatement of opposition: Aquinas is saying roughly ‘you seem to see a contradiction here, but when we lay the metaphysics out clearly there’s no a priori reason to see self-moving-ness as different from fluffiness’. It seems plausible that the objector hadn’t realized that being moved to self-moving-ness was metaphysically possible, and thus Aquinas could feel that the objector would be satisfied with his counter. But if the objector had already seen the distinction of levels and still objected, then in that case it seems true that Aquinas’ response doesn’t answer the objection. But in that case it seems that the objector is denying common sense and basic physical intuition rather than simply being confused about abstract metaphysics. I may be wrong about that though, I feel like I missed something.
The objector is making what seems to me to be a common sense point: if something moves you, then in that respect you don’t move yourself. I grant that there is nothing incompatible about being fluffy and being moved by some external power, but there’s no obvious (nor argued for, on Aquinas’ part) analogy between this kind of case and the case of the self mover. And there’s an at least apparent contradiction in the idea of a self-mover which is moved by something else in the very sense that it moves itself.
And we’re not concerned with the property of being a self mover, but of whether the idea that a given action is freely caused by me is incompatible with the idea that the very same action is (indirectly) caused by some prior thing. It does us no good to say that we have the property of having free will if every action of ours is caused in the way that a thrown stone causes injury.
Really, Aquinas’ objection seems to turn on the observation (correct, I think) that reasoning to an action means undertaking it freely. This is the point that needs some elaboration.
This kind of argument just seems to be bad philosophy, involving too many unclear words without unpacking them. Specifically, going through your comment: “moves”, “external”, “the very sense”, “property”, “freely caused”, “prior thing”. Since the situation in question doesn’t seem to involve anything that’s too hard to describe, most of the trouble seems to originate from unclear terminology, and could be avoided by discarding the more confused ideas and describing in more detail the more useful ones.
Any help would be much appreciated. I would never, ever claim to be a good philosopher.
Just become one, and claim away!
The article you link to makes a fine point about humility, but it doesn’t tell me anything about how to become a good philosopher. Do you think you could point me in the direction of becoming a good philosopher? Or to someone who can?
It’s important, I think, not to try to over-explain terminology. For example, all I mean by ‘moves’ is some relation that holds (by Will’s premises) between God and a free action indirectly, and ourselves and a free action directly. Further specifying the meaning of this term would be distracting.
I think if you can make a specific case for the claim that some disagreement or argument is turning on an ambiguity, then we should stop and look over our language. Otherwise, I don’t think it’s generally productive to worry about terminology. We should rather focus on being understood, and I’ve got no reason to think Will doesn’t understand me (and I don’t think I misunderstand him).
When I think of moving something to move itself I think of building an engine and turning it on such that it moves itself. There seems to be no contradiction here. I interpreted “what is free is cause of itself” as meaning that self-movement is necessary but not necessarily sufficient for free will. If an engine can be moved and yet move itself, just as an engine can be moved and yet be fluffy, then that means our will can be moved and yet move itself, contra the objection. Which part of this argument is incorrect or besides the point? (I apologize if I’m missing something obvious, I’m a little scatterbrained at the moment.)
Well, the objection to which Tom is replying goes like this: if a free cause is a cause of itself, and if our actions are caused by something other then ourselves, and given that God is a cause of our actions ((Proverbs 21:1): “The heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord; whithersoever He will He shall turn it” and (Philippians 2:13): “It is God Who worketh in you both to will and to accomplish.”) then we do not have free will.
In other words, the relation being described in the objection isn’t like the maker, the machine, and the machine’s actions. The objection is talking about a case where a given action has two causes: we are the direct cause, and God is the indirect cause by being a direct cause on us. God is a direct cause on us not (just) in the manner of a creator, but as a cause specifically of this action.
So I grant you that there is no incompatibility to be found in the idea that self-movers are created beings. I’m saying that the objection points rather to an incompatibility between a specific action’s being both freely cause by me, and indirectly caused by God. In the case of the machine that you present, you are correctly called a cause of the machine and the machine’s being a self-mover, but I think you wouldn’t say that you’re therefore an indirect cause of any of the machine’s specific actions. If you were, especially knowingly so, this would call into question the machine’s status as a self mover.
I still can’t parse the maze of “direct” and “indirect” causes you’re describing, but note that an event can often be parsed as having multiple different explanations (in particular, “causes”) at the same time, none of which “more direct”, “more real” than the other. See for example the post Evolutionary Psychology and its dependencies.
Fair enough, but they can often be parsed in terms of more and less directness. For example, say a mob boss orders that Donny kill Jimmy. Donny is the cause of Jimmy’s death directly: he’s the one that shot him. But if the boss is the indirect cause by ordering Donny: an alternative is that the boss kills Jimmy himself, and then the boss is the cause of Jimmy’s death directly.
The reason we don’t need to get too metaphysical to answer the question ‘Is Aquinas’ reply to objector #3 satisfying?′ is that the nature of the causes at issue isn’t really relevant. The objector is pointing out that God is a cause of my throwing the stone in the same way (it doesn’t much matter what ‘way’ this is) that I am the cause of my arm’s movement. If we refuse to call my arm a free agent, we should refuse to call me a free agent.
Now, of course, we could develop a theory of causality which solves this problem. But I don’t think Aquinas does that in a satisfactory way.
(Additional bizarre value to this conversation is gained by me not caring in the least what Aquinas thought or said...)
What does “the same” mean? What is a “way” for different “ways” to be “same” or not? This remains unclear to me. How does it matter what we agree or refuse to call something?
Perhaps (as a wild guess on my part) you’re thinking in terms of more syntactic pattern-matching: if two things are “same”, they can be interchanged in statements that include their mention? This is rather brittle and unenlightening, this post gives one example of how that breaks down.
I think attempts to clarify my argument will be fruitless in abstraction from its context: if you take me to be positing a theory of causality, or to be making general claims about the problem of free will, then almost everything I say will sound empty. All I’m saying is that objector #3 has a good point, and Aquinas doesn’t answer him in a satisfying way.
This isn’t a special feature of my argumentation: in general it will be hard to make sense of what people are arguing about if we ignore both the premises to which they initially agreed (i.e. the terms of the objector’s objection, and of Aquinas’s response) and the conclusion they are fighting over (whether or not the response is satisfying). No amount of clarifying, swapping out terms, etc. will be helpful. Rather, you and I should just start over (if you like) with our own question.
This statement, taken on its own, argues only definitions.
I think not believing something different from what He does (i.e. something incorrect) is a better turn.
Fair enough, and I’ve heard that before as well. The typical theistic issue is how to reconcile god’s knowledge and free will, hence why I don’t think we need to continue in this discussion anymore. You are responding to my questions based on things being determined, which is not what I think most theists believe.
This is why many attempts have been made to reconcile free will and omniscience by apologists.
But that’s not the discussion I think we’re having. It’s shifted to determinism and omniscience, which I think is compatible, but I’m still not on board with some kind of mind that could house all information that exists, or at least that mind being consistent with what theists generally want it to mean (it caused the universe specifically for us, wants us to be in heaven with it forever, inspired holy books to be written, and so on.)