Materialism revisited
---------------------
Greetings to newly arrived sundogs rak[1] and nermagermalous[2] over
at the Republic! It's wonderful to see newcomers who already have
content in their gopherholes.
rak seems to be a shortwave listener[3]. I've not written anything
about my SW DXing in a long time, but I'm hoping that will change
within the next week or two. I am looking forward to testing a setup
for field recording using my OpenBSD eeePC[4], and will describe it in
a phlog post. Stay tuned!
nermagermalous' first phlog post[5] is a response to an older post of
mine[6] about materialistic theory of mind, part of a small
conversation that happened at the start of this year. The rest of
this post will be a response to that response.
nermagermalous notes, very correctly, that in that post I don't appear
to come down clearly as having strong feelings, be they good or bad,
about materialism. This is not because I don't, but because I was
actually a little nervous writing that post at all. Talking very
bluntly about philosophy of mind can, experience has taught me, upset
some people, and combining the discussion with a consideration of
mental illness only increases the risk. For whatever reason I just
couldn't resist making the logical point that I wanted to make, but I
tried to read carefully in doing it - probably not achieving much
beyond making my message unclear. Certainly I did that, because the
reconstruction of my argument is not *quite* what I had in mind. At
any rate, I certainly appreciate the clear and thoughtful and
respectful tone of the response.
My intended argument was not "if you subscribe to the idea that belief
formation is a deterministic process, not under the control of
'free-will', then you cannot criticise anybody for their beliefs
without contradicting yourself". I'd be guilty of inconsistency
myself if that argument held! Rather, my intended argument was "if
you scubscribe to [the same idea], then you cannot criticise anybody
for their beliefs *and* justify criticising those people on the basis
that those people are freely choose their opinions and, therefore,
bear some kind of moral responsibility for them". The broader context
of the discussion, as I recall, was the question of when it becomes
acceptible for a comedian to make fun of somebody. I think a lot of
people would endorse an argument along the lines of "it's not okay to
make fun of disabled people, because nobody chooses to be disabled
and so it's "not their fault", but it's perfectly okay to make fun
of anti-vaxxers or flat Earthers, etc., because those people's
opinions are under their control, so it's "their own fault"". I think
everybody has encountered this argument before, in some form and
context or another, probably more than once.
I don't subscribe to either of the two hidden premises mentioned,
especially not 2! Belief formation being deterministic certainly
does't mean that it cannot be influenced by external stimuli. If that
argument held water, I think fewer textbooks on philosophy of mind
would be published! Education is a thing that can happen, and I don't
deny it.
For the record, I am - or was, last time I checked, i.e. seriously
thought about it - a materialist, computationalist and a functionalist
when it comes to philosophy of mind, and counted Putnam and Fodor
amongst my homeboys. I don't, intellectually, believe in free will,
but I hypocritically use it as a model in day to day life for thinking
about and interacting with other people, because it works very well
and makes life *so* much easier Everybody else is doing it, anyway.
[1]
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/1/~rak
[2]
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/1/~nermagermalous
[3]
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~rak/misc/radiolog
[4]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/openbsd-on-an-eeepc-1005ha.txt
[5]
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~nermagermalous/phlog/20190612-theory-of-mind.txt
[6]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/discrimination-and-philosophy-of-mind.txt
