From: Kharin (kharin@kharin.com)
Date: Thu Aug 21 2003 - 06:28:24 MDT
I've posted a piece on the bbs discussing problems with Daniel Dennett's attempt to provide a naturalistic model of free will through an instrumentalist account of agency:
http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=29075
"Well, given the instrumentalism, Dennett is able to argue that some creatures are agents, but only in the thin sense that viewing them as such is a reliable heuristic for predicting their behaviour. Agency doesn't, therefore, require creatures that actually act out of their preferences. It doesn't even require creatures that actually have preferences. All it requires is creatures that behave as though they had and whose behaviour is therefore interpretable 'from the intentional stance'. There is, however, the usual price to be paid when theories, psychological or otherwise, are instrumentally construed: there's no logical space for a distinction between true ones and the ones that merely save the appearances. That higher organisms seem to be free agents is, after all, no news; it's common ground in the present discussion. What worries determinists is that the appearance is illusory. If this possibility keeps you awake at night, Dennett's defence of freedom won't cure your insomnia...
Dennett's particular contribution to this line of thought - is that if, by instrumentalist assumption, the evolution of agency is just the evolution of sufficiently agent-like behaviour, then whether or not you are an agent is independent of how your behaviour is caused."
I'd be interested to know what the opnion of the congregation is upon problems of this kind.
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