Re: Flourishing

[Ted Winslow <WINSLOW@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Herb says:

>	Evolution is materialist, but not determinist.

I don't think you can escape the difficulties pointed to in my
questions by interpreting the materialism underpinning Darwinian
evolutionary theory in a way that makes randomness an irreducible
aspect of reality itself rather than of our theories of reality (if this
is what you mean by disconnecting the materialism involved from
determinism).  (Some scientists prefer the determinist
interpretation - see, for instance, Steven Weinberg in
_Dreams of a final theory_  pp. 37 and 77-85 and E.O. Wilson in _On
human nature_ chap. 4.).

You haven't given a role to self-determination - to "choice" - in the
determination of belief and behaviour when you add an irreducible
stochastic element to the process of determination.   When we claim
that our beliefs are the product of rational choice, for example, don't
we mean something different from the claim that they are to some
degree random?

>
>	I don't understand all this. I long ago gave up on the debates
>about free will and determinism. But I certainly never said that
>choice is determined by genes and environment. How would I know that?
>We couldn't possibly know that until we had an extremely well
>developed theory of human behavior, which we are very far from having.
>

If you re-examine what I said, you'll see it was "preferences" rather
than "choice" that I was taking you as treating as the strictly
determined product of genes and environment.  By definition, choice
cannot be such a product.   (You, however, seem to suggest that it
could be.   Apart from the logical impossibility of explaining choice in
this way, if the premise of the theory you envisage was true, there
would be no "we" to develop it since there would be no entities able
to arrive at their beliefs through rational choice.)

As I said before, these points are made in Marx's third thesis on
Feuerbach.  The thesis also associates the materialism in question
with the incoherent and, as this century has shown, very dangerous
political practice of "dividing society into two parts, one of which is
superior to society".  No room is left for a coherent conception of
society as potentially "an association in which the free development
of each is the condition for the free development of all".

Ted Winslow