Regarding morality. Systems can have properties that their parts alone do not. Morality is an objective property of a system that consists of a person that utters moral statements and the specific entity in, or feature of, the world that the statement identifies or denotes. Yet all all this can be explained in terms of lower level interactions. This does not contradict.
Regarding free will. Free will is a middleman. Consciousness between cause and effect. The intelligent refinement of causation into an effective agent. The sun at your back—your shadow in front. You are the shadow player. Nevertheless, to claim sovereignty is trying to get ahead of your own shadow. You imprint reality with a pattern of volition. But not without its implicit consent.
Some quotes that might highlight other problems, including consciousness :
Science is not in principle committed to the idea that there’s no afterlife or that the mind is identical to the brain (…) If it’s true that consciousness is being run like software on the brain and can – by virtue of ectoplasm or something else we don’t understand – be dissociated from the brain at death, that would be part of our growing scientific understanding of the world if we discover it (…) But there are very good reasons to think it’s not true. We know this from 150 years of neurology where you damage areas of the brain, and faculties are lost (…) You can cease to recognize faces, you can cease to know the names of animals but you still know the names of tools (…) What we’re being asked to consider is that you damage one part of the brain, and something about the mind and subjectivity is lost, you damage another and yet more is lost, [but] you damage the whole thing at death, we can rise off the brain with all our faculties in tact, recognizing grandma and speaking English!
One compelling reason not to believe the standard-issue God exists is the conspicuous fact that no one knows anything at all about it. That’s a tacit part of the definition of God – a supernatural being that no one knows anything about. The claims that are made about God bear no resemblance to genuine knowledge. This becomes immediately apparent if you try adding details to God’s CV: God is the eternal omnipotent benevolent omniscient creator of the universe, and has blue eyes. You see how it works. Eternal omnipotent benevolent omniscient are all simply ideal characteristics that a God ought to have; blue eyes, on the other hand, are particular, and if you say God has them it suddenly becomes obvious that no one knows that, and by implication that no one knows anything else either.
— Ophelia Benson on divine hiddenness.
The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
— Stanley Kubrick
What can we make of someone who says that materialism implies meaninglessness? I can only conclude that if I took them to see Seurat’s painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” they would earnestly ask me what on earth the purpose of all the little dots was.
A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
More generally, many of the objects demonstrated to be impossible in the previous posts in this series can appear possible as long as there is enough vagueness. For instance, one can certainly imagine an omnipotent being provided that there is enough vagueness in the concept of what “omnipotence” means; but if one tries to nail this concept down precisely, one gets hit by the omnipotence paradox. Similarly, one can imagine a foolproof strategy for beating the stock market (or some other zero sum game), as long as the strategy is vague enough that one cannot analyse what happens when that strategy ends up being used against itself. Or, one can imagine the possibility of time travel as long as it is left vague what would happen if one tried to trigger the grandfather paradox. And so forth. The “self-defeating” aspect of these impossibility results relies heavily on precision and definiteness, which is why they can seem so strange from the perspective of vague intuition.
Regarding morality. Systems can have properties that their parts alone do not. Morality is an objective property of a system that consists of a person that utters moral statements and the specific entity in, or feature of, the world that the statement identifies or denotes. Yet all all this can be explained in terms of lower level interactions. This does not contradict.
Regarding free will. Free will is a middleman. Consciousness between cause and effect. The intelligent refinement of causation into an effective agent. The sun at your back—your shadow in front. You are the shadow player. Nevertheless, to claim sovereignty is trying to get ahead of your own shadow. You imprint reality with a pattern of volition. But not without its implicit consent.
Some quotes that might highlight other problems, including consciousness :
— Sam Harris’ Argument Against the Afterlife
— Ophelia Benson on divine hiddenness.
— Stanley Kubrick
— The scourge of perverse-mindedness
— Arthur Schopenhauer
— Terence Tao, The “no self-defeating object” argument, and the vagueness paradox