Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

future is different from the past in a radical way. Determinism cannot really cope with the arrow of time being reversible. That just seems too bizarre and strange to apply to consciousness and our actions in the world.

There is nothing in the lowest levels of particle physics that forces our behaviour — we are free to act and our actions do not break any physical laws. For agents to be the ‘settler of matters’, it is not essential for determinism to be false, but neither does it rule out the falsity of determinism. Somehow determinism is not contradicted by agency. There is something about conscious, sentient, agents that allows us to act freely yet without breaking any physical laws and without even the need to abandon a belief in determinism.

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 we choose and the universe is just all these choices enacted through us, as embodied consciousness. So, in this view therefore, we are utterly free as agents, but also, the universe is utterly compelled by our choices. It’s this that makes value a reality, because on this view value is innate to the universe.

The free will conception gets us right to the edge of that question of whether or not there is some transcendent, mysterian or supernatural

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