Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

there is no ‘settling of matters’, because all matters were settled at the start of the universe. If determinism is true then there are no agents. For this compatibalism not to be true then there could be no agency and no identity for sentient beings. Effectively, no ‘someones’ only ‘somethings’.

Of course determinists may quibble and say that this is stretching the meaning of compatibalism to include some mysterious choice by agents that somehow intervenes as a cause, even if things then follow through entirely within the laws of nature. Despite the onslaughts of quantum physics and relativity, some will still cling to the notion of ‘classical determinism’. Perhaps the uncertainty of a world built around choice is just too disturbing. Perhaps begging a kind of identity or essence for conscious beings that makes them uniquely capable of agency is just too much of a stretch. So, to be fair to this view, I am not saying that the compatibalism argument given above is proven. I think however that the argument is compelling and I am assuming the truth of free will going forward, as we explore ethics and morality.

One view of value that we noted in an earlier chapter is that the value within the universe is the sum of all the individual choices within it. We can note here that the agent is not separated out from the things on which she acts. A sentient being is not an isolated object like a stone or a table. Sentience, according to some, is not only embodied, but also extended. There is never sentience in isolation, it is always consciousness plus environment — a dynamic process. So, in a radical way, we are the things

199