The man is responsible, ultimately, or the designer of the shovel, or the maker of the shovel, or is it the shovel? No, a shovel is not an agent, it's a tool. The designer and maker aren't involved in the use of a shovel. So the agent is the user. Proximally, it's the adapter of a shovel who gets callouses from using a shovel (but he could have got them from using the pickaxe, too). The adaptation of a shovel or similar tool is the agent responsible. Right. Someone who uses a screwdriver is also an agent. What about the person who sold it, or lost it, or found it? How about you have a try at one of mine: If you found an odd-looking bit of metal somewhere (because your genes gave you a big brain, and you're good at spatial reasoning and shape-recognition), would you think it might be useful for some purpose that you could adapt it to? Or, since it isn't in any store, it can't be any use? P.S. "further" and "better", are quite distinct in meaning. but hey, when did the meaning of words ever get in the way, huh?
Sure - choice implies purpose... but does the opposite also hold? Does purpose imply choice? i.e. if you have no choice - do you have a purpose other than that which someone (who makes the choice) applies to you? Did you have a choice to exist? I didn't. My parents made that choice. But I didn't. I choose to continue to exist - because I give my own life purpose - but does existence, per se, have a choice? And thus does existence itself have a choice, and thus a purpose? Things WITH life only get a choice about ENDING their life - not about starting it. There is absolutely zero choice a person has about moving from a state of non-existence to existence - only the other way round. And you now need to start defining "life" - as opposed to "non-life". I know you may think it obvious, but some see very little difference - just a matter of complexity and emergent behaviour (oops - there's that word!) Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! My thought process in asking this: if non-life has no choice about existing, then its existence per se has no purpose. The only purpose a non-life has is that applied to it by something able to make a choice (i.e. life). But, if life is defined merely as biological / chemical / physical then there is no (evidence for a) difference between life and non-life other than complexity. And if one says that non-life has no choice about existing, then nor does life. Which it doesn't - only in ending that existence. Or am I confusing matters?
Exactly, "The purpose of the universe is, to exist" is a rather void statement.. which is exactly why I asked Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I think thr difference betwen us is that you are using agent in a particular sense, which I would not deny. Going back to the guy with the shovel, however, there are multiple factors involved. The softness of his skin, the texture of the handle, fitness for purpose of the tool he is using, how effective it cuts, the resistance of the substance he is working on, etc. So we can now consider multiple agencies in addition to that of the man. We can equally talk of environment and response. Now if that guy marries into a family of quarry workers and the process goes on for a sufficient length of time, babies may well appear with hands which are gradually adapting to hard manual work many generations later. There will have been a change in the gene pool. I am saying that this process is blind. Only in a very loose sense, as I previously suggested, can the man who originally wielded the shovel be regarded as the agent of all that subsequently happened. The process is essentially blind. Otherwise, we can go all the way back to some single-celled organism and claim that it was the agent, in the sense in which I believe you are using that word, of why we are as we are today. I should, perhaps, mention that I regard the man as being as blind as the other agents, unless it can be shown that he was digging for the purpose of acquiring callouses.
I have done some homework and now withdraw the implication that the man's callouses are heritable. This invalidates the above argument, so I concede defeat.
Yes, it can. Someone digging with a shovel is purposefully acquiring callouses, absolutely. Callouses are part of a "shovel-use event". When someone sits on a chair - the purpose of sitting was to deform the chair (as far as the chair is concerned). If there's a calculator on the chair, and some deformation to the calculator occurs, this is also part of the purpose (inadvertent - blind, whatever). Someone sitting blindly on a calculating device is purposefully using it, because they are using the chair (which is also a calculator). Someone using a shovel is also "inadvertently" getting callouses - purposeful behaviour.
Haven't you heard of the gentlemanly way of doing things ? Guy with sword at your throat. " Dost admit defeat ? " You (if you have any sense) " I do" I do not debate for the purpose of winning an argument, which is not to suggest that you do. But some ?
I firstte prodused mye shovelle Thenne prodused myne screwe-driverre I sayde "Standde ayndde deliverre, ere the deville he mayye tayke ye!"
And so where in a determinstic universe is either choice or purpose. They may be 'useful' words to describe illusions, but.....
What does "no choice" imply though? If someone else makes a choice that "applies to" you, they're using you (as an agent). ...but is the universe deterministic? We appear to be able to choose, whether we can or not (philosophically), practically, or "in reality" that's what we do (so does every other form of life).
I don't know if the universe is deterministic. I doubt it, but I do not know. I think the reign of this idea comes from first separating out the self from the universe, noting Newtonian impacts, and then reinserting the self back in the universe. I am speaking phenomenologically - why it seems so obvious, or that free will bears the onus of proof. But if determinism is true, I think a lot of discussions like this one are absurd, whatever position you take. It sometimes seems like demystication must always be toward one's own comfort point.
And like it might be sometimes past one's own comfort point.? But what is "the mystery"? Of existence? Of the appearance of this and that "thing" or class of substantive phenomena we can see, i.e. the material and the "non-material", in exactly the same sense as E=mc^2...? Or that life appears to be autonomous, in the "limited" sense of using/not using? Then what is "use"? Agency is the problem, yet we see this class of observables, in "observation space". You can't observe the universe without an observer. Like a bit player, the observer needs something to observe (a world), that also provides a stage for the "role". An individual observer does not have, or cannot be meaning(ful), without many observers also (a duality). If there is "one-ness", then necessarily there is "many (ones)-ness". An observer implies other observers.
There are causes. Purpose to me implies an agent - I can see where if your definition of purpose is different we are having a semantic issue. An agent being one who chooses amongst options. In a deterministic universe there are two problems with this. An agent does not choose amongst options. It does what it does because it is compelled along with everything else. Second, in a deterministic universe we have perspectives in matter that you could call centers. But there is no reason to separate out this body from the rest of the matter of the universe and call it an individual. Consciousnesses get to watch what simply unfolds around them in the shifting total mass of the universe. Things change. Period. The whole choosing from alternatives would be an illusion. If you want to call what happens purpose, then it seems to me purpose is little more than vector or trajectory - however complicated the 'task'.
I found most philosophies past my comfort point, say in my twenties and thirties. It seemed like hardly anyone noticed the horrible ramifications of their own philosophies. They might notice some, but cherished activities always 'made sense' to them, despite the contradictions with their philosophy. In other words a deterministic atheist might proclaim that fear is the root of the belief in God - with the implication that they are braver - but might not notice how much of what they do has the life sucked out of it by their beliefs also. Of course they can claim they have a split, or it feels better to live 'as if', but I have rarely heard a determinist say: Oh, of course you are right. I engage in this kind of conversation, no doubt, simply because I am compelled to do so. This is the irony I live with. I think there are a lot of mysteries. WEll, most scientists would say you are being a metaphysicist here. Of course it may later turn out that unviverses MUST have observers and what seems the obvious neutral point - that no observer is needed - is actually an extreme philosophy not justified by this or that. And so might it be with 'having others'. It is hubris to think that 'I know the neutral point of obviousness from which I can determine what needs justification and what does not.' We all share this hubris, some are more willing to acknowledge it as such.
so i dont have choice because i am made of atoms and atoms dont choose? but atoms dont think or have emotions either. do i therefore not think or have emotions? isnt choosing simply part of thinking?
Choosing is an illusion. A choice is made and you think you are in the driver's seat. If determinism is correct what will happen tomorrow was determined in the big bang. It is and always has been absolutely inevitable. Where the use for the word choice? Why would it apply to you and not a stone rolling down a hill? Both are shifting in response to ineluctable causal chains. If you are choosing it now, then it was not determined back then.
