[FRIAM] Subjective experience & free will

Sun Feb 28 14:31:36 EST 2021

I would have to research my preferred choices--all women :) Hannah Arendt
and Mary Wollstonecraft come immediately to mind.

On Sun, Feb 28, 2021 at 11:48 AM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:

> Oh this Spinoza biography looks like an interesting book. If I would have
> a time machine, then Darwin, Pascal and Spinoza would be on the list of
> persons I would like to visit, although I do not understand French. Gauss,
> Goethe, Humboldt and Leibniz too.
>
> Who would be on your list? George Washington or Abraham Lincoln? Herman
> Melville or William James?
>
> -J.
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Merle Lefkoff <merlelefkoff at gmail.com>
> Date: 2/28/21 18:46 (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjective experience & free will
>
> 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
> twitter: @merle110
>
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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
twitter: @merle110
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