Friday 6 July 2007

Dodgy Reasoning Says You

If absolute pre-destination were not the law of being then all that has happened was not bound to happen in the exact manner in which it has. However, all this has indeed happened in exactly this manner, thus showing that it was indeed pre-destined to occur exactly so.
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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

ah, now you're bringing Time into it...

Dante talks cogently about this stuff. Have you read the Divine Comedy? i suspect you'd find it interesting once you get past the initial boredom. John Sinclair's prose translation is good.

i remember having a sort-of argument with Ann Loades, a Theology prof at Durham Uni, about free will. i argued that we should logically accept predestination as true, but then discard it as of no consequence for actual human life. She thought if something was logically upheld, it had to be considered as valid in human life; but human conciousness seems fundamentally structured around free will, or the sense thereof, and i decided it is impossible to come to any sane conclusions about humanity without assuming that people are metaphysically free (if not psychologically).

6 July 2007 at 20:23
Neil Forsyth said...

You are becoming increasingly, worryingly eccentric, Andrew. Get out more. Predestination is no excuse.

6 July 2007 at 21:26
Big Chip Dale said...

Damn! I guess I destined to leave a comment. Just why couldn't I have been fated to say something intelligent for once?

7 July 2007 at 02:13
Andrew said...

Just the roll of the dice, Chip. Next time perhaps.
I don't think it's exactly eccentric, Neil; just a slightly amusing exercise in dodgy reasoning.
I'd agree, Elberry, that predestination & free-will are questions whose answers are irrelevant as they're not questions you can do anything with. I'd also agree that especially in profounder moments, our innate freedom is felt to be real. However, at a deeper level I'd start connecting the whole issue to that long post about the self that is seeminlgly created by the exercise of thought or reason, and that this self is by its very nature an artificial being separate from life. And the questions of free-will & predestination are themselves diseased concepts artificially imposed on life by a kind of hallucinated entity. I came up with a line that isn't meant to cover all philosophy but certainly covers alot of it:
Philosophy is the creation of mental problems, the solution to which is forbidden, unless it is seen that the solution gives birth to a new problem.

Free-will or lack of doesn't exist as a problem until the reasoning mind invents it, and it's essentially a useless paranoid concept.

7 July 2007 at 06:07
Anonymous said...

i like your line about Philosophy. There's some philosophy that is about life, and some that's about abstractions about life.

i liked the first Matrix film, which i saw as being a good action stomp about the prison of the 'real world' (going to work). i thought it a pity that the free will/choice stuff was so lamely-handled in the sequels, though there was one good line "You have already made your choice: now you must understand it", which is i think true of our lives.

7 July 2007 at 19:13

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