Can something exist which is not either a) an irreducible component of the explanation of how things are in terms of causation, or b) an abstract object (or, possibly only a)? What I mean is this: if A and B jointly cause C, and are both necessary and sufficient for C's existence and everything that it does, does C exist? More specifically, let us assume (perhaps problematically) that if F and G necessarily/sufficiently cause H which necessarily/sufficiently causes I, then I can be explained without reference to H. So, why talk about H, except as a shorthand, a practical tool for accounting for a particular aggregate of the effects of F and G?
Where am I going with this is the following: if determinism is true, do we exist? If for every action X which I perform, X occurs due to a set of necessary and sufficient conditions which do not need to include me, then could actually be considered a being?
If I am not a being at all, let alone an agent, let alone a moral agent, could I be held responsible for my actions? Would it be just for God to simply create pain states for their own sake in hell? I think that I could make some sense of our being in heaven: we don't exist per se, but God loves our particular aggregates, and so God's action toward us differentiates us even though we would have no intrinsic existence. So, I could be a universalistic/annihilationistic determinist. However, punishing an aggregate just makes no sense to me.
3 comments:
Isn't all this the point of reductionism? According to a metaphysical naturalist, say one who is a realist about physical objects and properties (& maybe relations) and globally a reductionist about everything else, isn't it the case that "non-natural", i.e. non-physical things--such as persons, minds, propositions, symphonies, abstracta--exist only as shorthand for the physical realities on which they supervene?
...On the other hand, take someone who is a global idealist. Someone who goes beyond a Berkeleyan belief that "God and other minds", and their ideas are all that exists, and believes rather that God & God's ideas (private and public) are all that exist.
This sounds more like what you're suggesting. One important question is, what distinguishes God and God's creation, ontologically? (Actually, I guess this is *the* question you're raising, isn't it.) Well, for one thing, God is a mind and everything else is an idea (or some form of mental content). Yet we would say, I think, that God deliberately and freely chose to create--this is the "God's ideas made public" notion (does this come from Edwards or Berkeley?).
I think any form of theism is going to maintain that God is more real than we are, in some sense, right? I mean, God is necessary being; everything else is dependent (on God), and could be uncreated and go out of existence.
I've always been troubled by Berkeleyanism (Spiegel's, at least)I think because of issues of causation/determinism and agents bearing responsibility for events. It seems to me that non-divine agents (personal and impersonal) exist. Still, I have to admit that these agents are all in some sense dependent upon God's agency--God is creator and sustainer.
However it is articulated, we are what we are. Human agency is what it is. If moral responsibility makes sense, it makes sense in the context of human agency. Why shouldn't God hold aggreagates responsible? I think I'm giving up too easily, though. And I think I'm talking like a nominalist.
But then, I never have been confident concerning my understanding of metaphysical issues.
I remember once suggesting to Spiegel that while Berkeley avoids the mind-body problem, it raises a mind-mind problem. Of course, I guess the problem of how one mind communicates to another and the related problem of how mental content (propositions, concepts) relates to the world (another sort of mind-body problem I suppose) exists in a non-idealist metaphysics as well.
(Sorry if the stream-of-consciousness writing is annoying at all. :))
You're right, idealism is a key target of this post. I'm actually going to write another post as soon as I'm done with this comment, on supervenience and a way in which maybe one can make sense of differing levels of reality.
What I am most against is the complete flattening of reality which seems to be entailed by determinism, in particular theological determinism. On the one hand, I'm not sure how it escapes pantheism; there wouldn't be anything other than God with his rather detailed thoughts. On the other hand, even if retributive justice is coherent, it seems to only apply to enduring things (that is, the justice applies to the same thing that performed the action). An aggregate person doesn't endure, and so could never be responsible for actions, although corrective and preventative justice would still be applicable.
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