Following up on documenting our discussion of determinism, here is CVM’s response to the previous post:
As to dualism, that is my model, yes, even though I’d be the first to admit that it is unlikely that there is any “real” sense in which the two fundamentally different substances exist.
Never read “Einstein’s Dreams“. I read “Time Travel and Papa Joe’s Pipe” and was turned off by his poetic conflation of memory and physics. However, I have seen the book and was intrigued — next time it comes up I’ll take a look.
Your argument about determinism and relatively is interesting and new to me — indeed, most texts I have read have suggested that the theory of relativity is firmly deterministic, as indeed the great man himself seems to have believed, but then again, he seems to have believed quantum mechanics is deterministic too, so there you go.
However, your arguments about relativity smack a bit to me of Hume — yes, in principle I agree that the universe need not, perhaps is not, deterministic, but then again there are those pesky measurements, testing both quantum mechanics and relativity, that repeatedly agree with both theories down to the, I don’t know, trillionth decimal place or something (Feynman had some kind of analogy about the precision was as if you could measure the distance between New York and L.A. with the precision to the width of a human hair). That of course is no guarantee of future performance, but I wouldn’t bet a lot that your mileage may vary- while there may very well be influences in our absolute elsewhere, they don’t seem to have had much impact so far.
Strangely, though your arguments invoke science, they seem metaphysical to me. The problem I put before you was that we hold humans morally accountable in a way we don’t hold other beings, yet there is not reason to believe humans are less (or in your case, more) deterministic than other beings. So what’s the difference? The gist of your argument seems to be that since we don’t live in a deterministic universe, there is no barrier to ascribing moral responsibility. That’s got promise, but then we have to address why conscious beings are reasonably held morally responsible, but, for examples, computers are not (unless you want to go all Philip K. Dick on me). As we have discussed, in my model at least computers behave deterministically, though you somewhat snarkily evaded this hypothesis. How, then, about a clock?
An interesting solution might be that moral responsibility only makes sense in the context of conscious belief in free will (whether or not that belief is true, so we need not get into ontology). That would rule out clocks, and possibly even variously incapacitated humans, but maybe not electric androids. If one then accepts your argument against determinism (which however doesn’t explain clocks) this would neatly solve the problem.
As to a Buddhist treatment of free will, I’m all ears. As I suggested before the dissolution of the self goes a long way toward solving the problem, and, though I agree that this a profound idea, it’s tough to put into practice. It’s interesting however what the dissolution of the self does to the concept of free will: doesn’t make much sense then does it? I mean, what then is said to be free?
Looking forward to your further disquisition on Buddhism and moral responsibility- and also a description of your personal Buddhist praxis (e.g., meditation?).
CVM