Heidegger

>and the risk of being Rene’s echo, Jud this is just metaphysics. pk

and you know what’s so funny Peter, that it’s Jud who is defending
this position. Eliminative determinism is the thesis that our folkish
common-sense conception of psychological phenomena (pleasure,
pain, desires, reasons, beliefs etc.) is a radically false theory, which
is so fundamentally defective that both the principles and ontology
of that theory will eventually be displaced by a materialist theory of
neuroscience (cf. Churchland c.s.). Because the elimination of our
common-sense conception of psychological phenomena implies that
we should drop the ordinary language vocabulary of psychological
terms, eliminativism is the royal road to a determinist materialism.
Simply said, according to an eliminative determinist, all human
behaviour is nothing other than the effects of materially based and
blind causal mechanisms in the brain, of which the person has no
conscious awareness nor any free influence: i.e. what we have here
is the neuroscientific version of a Darwin-machine.

Philosophically speaking there is nothing wrong with the theory of
eliminative determinism, it is just one among the many competing
theories that try to explain human behaviour. There is however an
interesting and important corollary of eliminative determinism and
that is that it ontologically denies the possibility of freedom, i.e. the
existence of a free will in human behaviour is impossible if human
beings are ultimately determinated by the physical mechanisms that
rule the psychological processes of the brain. But, as determinism
holds, if there is no room nor necessity to postulate the phenomenon
of the free will, then moral notions like accountability, responsability,
guilt and punishment become pointless and meaningless. In the world
of the eliminative determinist our behaviour is pre-programmed, our
destiny is inevitable, and thus, the eliminative determinist will contend,
moral discours and morality in general are nonsense, because they are
based on the illusion of human freedom. But is Heidegger then really
guilty of Nazi-affiliations (and worse) as ‘eliminative determinist’ Jud
so often is hammering at with tireless zeal ? For the true eliminative
determinist this conclusion would be false. One is only guilty if one
could be guiltless also. If human behaviour is predestined, it makes no
sense to talk about guilt or innocence, thus moral discours (i.e. blaming
someone for this or that) does not apply here. Human freedom is an
a priori condition for the possibilty of moral behaviour and the absence
of freedom, as the eliminative determinist maintains, implies that moral
judgements are impossible and if uttered plain nonsense. As with every
dilemma you can’t have it both ways, either Jud should stop with his
anti-Heidegger ranting and become a consistent eliminative determinist
or leave his eliminative determinist pose and keep enjoying us with the
stylistic beautiful prose of his tirades.

I’m off to the greek isles, see you all back in september.

yours,
Jan

Posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 2:30 am
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