Q&A: Understanding the Libertarian Picture of Free Judgment
Understanding the Libertarian Picture of Free Judgment
Question
With God’s help,
I’m asking again (great-debate), after I found some time and devoted a bit of effort to digging into the issue, cross-referencing information from a few more posts and from the answers you referred to there.
If I understand correctly, your attack against determinism is only directed at the determinist’s computational system. But seemingly you do not also attack his sensory system (like sight/hearing), where all skepticism toward him would be called negative.
If so, based on your definition of the faculty of judgment, which you claim is of a different kind — it is not a thinking system but a system that “sees”/“understands.” Just like deciding between two values, which is basically a process of “contemplating” ideas, then your approach is understandable and clear: it can be attacked only in a negative way. Just like the sensory system.
But I still didn’t really understand the idea that judgment is seeing. Because if it does not operate under basic criteria (which themselves would trigger an attack of positive doubt), then how does it “hit” the truth? I assume you would argue that just as choice is a different process from randomness, so too here this is not an arbitrary process.
But still, part of the definition of the concept of correctness and truth is that it indeed “exists” outside. But if so, shouldn’t we expect judgment to operate according to defined criteria in order to identify what is true and what is not? (And that would bring us back again to the skeptical claim.) You also argued that judgment contemplates my mechanism (the box), but here too the question arises: how does it know how to decide whether the box is accurate or not if it operates without criteria!?!
Second, if judgment is so fundamental that it can examine conclusions, decide between approaches, and choose methods for solving things (although it seems that in later columns you backed away from this idea?), then isn’t it strange that it also cannot choose what the correct option is without the computational system? It feels to me like a detached and slippery concept, intentionally so, in order to solve the philosophical problems that arise from not using it. (Perhaps that is more of a complaint than a question.) On the other hand, one cannot ignore the expression “it seems right to me,” which seemingly points quite explicitly to this intuitive idea.
Answer
I didn’t understand the question. I’ll only note that my attack is also directed at his sensory perception and not only at his thinking.
Discussion on Answer
Too bad — I wrote a detailed reply and it got deleted..
Seemingly, in what was written about determinism, your claim is not about specific facts but mainly about general claims.
In any case, you wrote in column 175 that in order to deal with the skeptical claim that most systems of thought will operate incorrectly, and likewise most basic assumptions and criteria will not be correct, one must assume a different kind of reality that resolves these things, and you called it “judgment.”
What characterizes judgment is that it is not built according to criteria, but is completely free and operates by way of creation out of nothing.
But what is hard to digest in this picture is the question of how a system that operates without criteria corresponds to factual reality. This is not a case of free choice, where every act is valid simply because you chose it, but rather a factual claim that is supposed to hit the truth.
For example, when the control system looks at the mechanism of sight and determines that it is reliable, and as a result you trust the appearance before you — how does it check this without clear criteria for what is a reliable visual system and what is not, etc.?
I’m on the verge of complete exhaustion, but I’ll go over it one more time, even though this has already been explained here more than once and I don’t understand what I’m supposed to add. Really, no explanation is needed here; you’re simply quoting me incorrectly. A libertarian system does not operate by way of creation out of nothing. Absolutely not. It takes reality into account and is influenced by it, but it is not determined by unknown mechanical circumstances.
As I understand it, your attack is seemingly only against sensory perception, or at least the understanding derived from sensory perception, as you mentioned that your claim is not about specific facts but mainly about general claims like induction.
In any case, you mentioned in column 175 that in order to deal with the skeptical claim that most machines will work incorrectly — and likewise most criteria for machines will yield incorrect results — one has to assume that outside the thinking system there exists a subject that verifies the correctness of the system. And in order not to push the same attack one step backward toward that same subject, one has to add the assumption that judgment does not operate by calculation in light of criteria, but rather in a completely free way. (Elsewhere you mentioned that it is more like seeing than thinking.) It operates by way of creation out of nothing, in the sense of “He spoke, and it came to be.”
But the difficulty embedded in this approach is that, unlike choosing between two actions, where each action is valid in itself, here this decision is supposed to correspond to factual reality. And I am asking: how does that happen without defined criteria, and still provide a non-arbitrary result? Or how does the control system look at the mechanism of sight and determine that it is reliable without a defined criterion of what counts as reliable eyes?