[FRIAM] Subjective experience & free will

Sun Feb 28 12:45:32 EST 2021

Baruch ("blessed in Hebrew) de Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632.  His
grandfather, Abraham, was a refugee from the Inquisition in Portugal.

My mother helped edit a biography of Spinoza written by Abraham Wolfson,
published in 1932 by Modern Classics Publishers.  (I have a copy dedicated
to my mom.) A facsimile reprint came out in 2007, published by Kessinger
Publishers, because "this scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of
the original.  Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks,
notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is
culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment
for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature..."

Chapter XIII is especially interesting to me and begins with a quote from
Goethe:  "Truth is a torch, but a terrible one...The natural instinct is to
give a sideglance, lest, looking it fairly in the face, the strong glare
might blind us."

On Sun, Feb 28, 2021 at 7:08 AM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think Spaniards think Spinoza was a Spanish Jew (Espinoza).  I realize
> this could probably be resolved to my satisfaction by Wikipedia.
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Sun, Feb 28, 2021, 6:50 AM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:
>
>> Spinoza, a Dutch contemporary of Leibniz, argued as well in his book
>> "Ethics" that it is the lack of knowledge & awareness that helps to create
>> the illusion of freedom:
>>
>> "Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe
>> themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and
>> unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined".
>>
>> What I like about these 400 year old philosophers is that they have
>> tackled the really big questions. And they worked interdisciplinary,
>> because fields like psychology or physics have not been invented yet.
>>
>> -J.
>>
>>
>>
>> -------- Original message --------
>> From: Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>
>> Date: 2/28/21 06:05 (GMT+01:00)
>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
>>
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjective experience & free will
>>
>> Skinner had the book "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" (1971) that made a
>> similar argument. Basically, he argued that while we didn't have full
>> explanations of behavior yet, we had made enough progress to be confident
>> that behavior could be explained in various ways - development, immediate
>> causation, etc. - in all situations. If we can agree on that, or even
>> mostly-agree on that, what happens to concepts like "freedom", which seem
>> to be applied primarily in situations where we can't obviously explain
>> someone's behavior?
>>
>> When I train a rat to press a lever when the light in the cage
>> illuminates, is the rat free? If your life has trained you to put on your
>> right sock first, then the left, are you free? Etc., etc. And certainly
>> sometimes people feel as if their choices are more "free" or less "free",
>> but what do we do with that? Presumably we can also train people to
>> generally feel free or not, under ostensibly identical current
>> circumstances? (Note how many conversations about White Privilege, or
>> Wealth Inequality, focus on how people who were given great benefits early
>> in life often feel as if they were independently successful based on
>> initiative and merit.)
>>
>> The issue of variation in feeling "free" under ostensibly similar
>> circumstances, is a huge dilemma for me, as I don't feel social pressures
>> in many situations where others do. "I wasn't free to talk in the meeting",
>> someone says. And I look confused, because so far as I could tell they were
>> clearly *free *to talk in the meeting, but *chose *not to for
>> various reasons.
>>
>> "You don't understand how hard it is to X, under circumstances Y!"
>> Well... I *do *understand why it might *feel *hard... but that sounds
>> like an explanation for why you *chose *not to. We aren't talking about
>> how hard it is to run a sub-6-minute mile, or sing an Opera, we are talking
>> about how it can feel hard to call someone out for a racist comment in the
>> middle of a meeting (or something like that). In fact, I often have people
>> come to me before key meetings and ask me to bring up points they don't
>> feel free to bring up. Am I "free" because I find that relatively easy? Are
>> they "not free" because they find it hard? Does it matter that, as Jochen
>> points out, one could certainly look into my and the other person's past,
>> or into my and the other person's physiology, and construct an explanation
>> for why each of us behave-in-meetings the way we do now? Or is it, as
>> Skinner suggested, time to just move "beyond" such questions?
>>
>>
>>
>> <echarles at american.edu>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 27, 2021 at 4:29 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:
>>
>>> I am reading a book about Leibniz and started to wonder if the hard
>>> problem of consciousness could be the reason why we have the illusion of
>>> free will and can not predict how others will act.
>>>
>>> From the outside a person seems to have free will in principle. From the
>>> inside everybody feels something different and is controlled by emotions
>>> based on subjective experience, which is unknown to others, because the
>>> individual is not transparent and the history is not known.
>>>
>>> Once we investigate the life of a person, for example by a detective as
>>> part of a criminal investigation, or as movie viewers in a cinema, we start
>>> to understand why a person acts they way it does. The more we step into the
>>> footsteps of a person, the better we understand the feelings, goals and
>>> motives.
>>>
>>> Could it be that the same thing which  prevents us from understanding
>>> the subjective experiences of others also creates the illusion of free will?
>>>
>>> -J.
>>>
>>>
>>>
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-- 
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  (303) 859-5609
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
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