| | In Post 96, Ed wrote, Bill,
What you are doing -- and what I am complaining about -- is hypothetically freezing someone's thoughts (on the last thought that they had immediately prior to an action). Ed, this is nonsense. I'm not "freezing" anybody's thoughts. Obviously, thinking is a process, but at a particular moment in time, one can choose to raise one's awareness from a lower to a higher level. Is this news to anyone on this list, besides you? What I am saying here is fully in accord with the Objectivist view of free will. The only difference between my view and Peikoff's (as he presents it in OPAR) is that I hold that people make this choice for the sake of a value, and that their valuation determines their choice, whereas Peikoff says that "there can be no motive or value-judgment which precedes consciousness and which induces a man to become conscious [i.e., to focus his mind]." But as I pointed out in a previous post, if the choice to think does not proceed from any value-judgment, then a person cannot be held morally responsible for it, in which case, he cannot be blamed for the failure to focus. This is impermissible. It's fine to hypothesize about the same person in the same external situation, in order to examine their choices and what-not. But when you over-determine the context by trying to include their intellectuality -- their moment-by-moment thoughts -- then you are merely postulating arbitrary data to fit your theory. If you can't identify the same situation (the same in all respects, not just the same external situation), then you can't posit a theory of free will, because you can't acknowledge that in that situation a person could have chosen differently. The very idea of free will requires that one could have chosen differently under the identical circumstances. You say that thinking is a process and cannot be frozen in time, but this view applies to the external conditions too, since they are also in process, so on what grounds do you recognize sameness in the external conditions but not the internal ones? The same person in the same external situation may choose differently because of different, instantaneous thoughts. What's an "instantaneous thought"? You just said that a thought can't be frozen in time, because thinking is a process. But if so, then there's no such thing as an "instantaneous thought." You can't have it both ways, Ed. Thoughts are the key to decision-making, not feelings -- feelings are dependent on prior and current thoughts. Then what is the motive for the initial choice to think or to focus one's mind? According to Rand, "an infant or young child learns to focus his mind in the form of wanting to know something -- to understand clearly." (Ayn Rand Answers, p. 154) In other words, the infant's desire to know is the motive for his choice. Contrast Rand's view with Peikoff's in OPAR in which he says that "there can be no motive or value-judgment which precedes consciousness and which induces a man to become conscious." He further states that "it is invalid to ask: why did a man choose to focus? There is no such 'why.' There is only the fact that a man chose: he chose the effort of consciousness, or he chose non-effort and unconsciousness." (p. 60) Thinking is a process, not a still-picture which can be isolated. I agree, but the process of higher level thinking is initiated at some point in time by the choice to focus. If you don't know that, then you don't understand the Objectivist view of free will. And, as Rand observes, the choice to focus is motivated by the desire to know or to understand.
- Bill
(Edited by William Dwyer on 1/05, 6:57pm)
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