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