These are good thoughts.Matz wrote: ↑Mon Sep 16, 2019 3:24 amI don't see why having no free will and finding meaning in the things you do can't go hand in hand.
I think neuroscience is the "science" of guessing. We know nothing about the brain, the stuff we "know" can't be proven. I don't think we'll ever understand it. Anyone see any breakthroughs when it comes to Alzheimers, Parkinson, psychiatric illnesses etc? No. There has been none, we don't know how to treat any of that stuff. Forget it, it's too difficult.I also think that since neuroscience is the science of the brain, that's where we should look for explanations of the mechanisms by which beings with brains function.
I agree with your first point. Of course most of us actually do have meaning in our lives. That's why we care about things and do things and keep going and undergo suffering and so forth. For many people, religion (or family tradition, or family more generally) is the main source of purpose. For others it might be knowledge (science), or art, or humanitarian work. There are probably as many sources of meaning as there are people (maybe more). There are also people who lose (or have never had) hope and purpose. Many of these people are at risk of suicide or doing very dangerous or bad things. Some people are born into incredibly wretched circumstances, and many of them find hope and a way to continue, but some don't. We might think of those who are susceptible to terrorism or violent religiosity as particularly nihilistic people -- they latch onto extreme views as a source of meaning, perhaps because ordinary sources of meaning aren't cutting it, or aren't available.
So, I don't think the question of whether lack of free will and meaning are compatible in the broadest sense is that interesting. The answer seems to be obviously yes. But some philosophers (including Dan Dennett, as I wrote years ago), are worried about what would happen if we tell most people that they don't have free will. There seems to be something important about seeing your life as your own, and as determined by the choices you make in a way that is in some sense "of your own making" and "up to you", rather than already determined by the physics of the universe. This is what Nietzsche writes about in a lot of his work on nihilism: if God is dead, then Christian morality should go with it too, and then we're left with no source of purpose and no clear overwhelming reason to check our behaviour. His answer is the existentialist one: make our own meaning, make our own morality, etc., so that we don't wallow in self-absorbed nihilism. But I think this can't quite work. This view relies (as Sartre argues) on seeing one's self as free to make oneself. If we have no free will, then we are not absolutely free to make ourselves. The extent to which we can find meaning and purpose in life depends on how our lives have gone, and who we are, and what our brains are like. Some people are attracted to tradition and religion and family, or sports, or art, or intellectual pursuits. But it's not clear that everyone can do this.
The harder problems seem to me to arise when we think about how to change people's minds about what matters most. Moral and political views are very important, even for people who don't consider themselves political. Socially, huge amounts of harm are done when people find meaning in hateful ideology or destructive impulses. Governments, NGOs, priests, parents, teachers, social workers, etc., are all concerned with trying to prevent and solve social ills, and aid victims of bad actions. If there is no free will, then it starts to look very difficult to actually change anything, since if something changes, it had to change, and if it doesn't change, it couldn't, regardless of what we want. What we need to try to understand is what to do with benevolent desires in a deterministic world, where we might see how things will necessarily go (and either see that we will succeed, or see that we can't succeed), or can't see how things will go (and so be unable to know for sure how they will go). The latter seems to be the best hope for doing things we think are important, regardless of how the universe is determined to go. But this would mean it's better to be ignorant about the future? That can't be right. It can't be that ignorance about the future is the source of motivation for people to try to do good things in the world. Surely the better we understand things, the better chance we have of making them go best. This seems right, and yet in many cases the better we understand a situation, the more we realize that there is nothing we can do. And what should we do then? Nothing? Doesn't this seem nihilistic?
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On the question of neuroscience: I agree that there is very little well understood about the human brain. But it's not true that we don't understand anything about it, and it's not true that we're just guessing. Just because there haven't been any "breakthroughs" in certain specific neurological conditions, by your estimation, doesn't mean we don't understand aspects of those conditions very well. We know, for instance, that L-dopa helps Parkinson's patients retain some mobility, for some time, but unfortunately L-dopa doesn't work forever. The lack of a better treatment doesn't mean we're just guessing, it just means that it's really difficult. It's interesting that your last sentence suggests the inverse of your first one: in the first, you admit that free will doesn't necessarily mean we can't have meaning in life; in the second, you seem to suggest that our seemingly intractable ignorance about the brain makes it pointless to continue to try to understand it -- in your words: 'it's too difficult'. But is that right? Why?