Albert Camus: Humanism and Tragedy
hopkinsreview.jhu.edu
hopkinsreview.jhu.edu
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.”
"You can't understand. You're using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions."
"Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus | Existentialism, The Absurd & Escape | Philosophy Core Concepts"
"Il me reste à vous remercier , du fond du cœur ,et à vous faire publiquement en témoignage personnel de gratitude, la même et ancienne promesse de fidélité que chaque artiste vrai , chaque jour, se fait à lui-même dans le silence."
What the true nature of the mind is - and it may simply lie beyond human understanding - makes no difference to the phenomenological experience of being a first-person subjectivity, and the struggle to live that we all must lead. Do you confront the world without a predetermined purpose? Yes. Then for the existentialists you are radically free and, inescapably, have to choose who you want to be.
No it could be an emergent property that arises from physical processes but is not reducible to them (emergentism). It could be that the mental and the physical are not independent substances but different elements of the same thing, and thus one does not need to be reducible to the other (neutral monism). Or you could be a dualist and claim that the mind really is separate from the physical world.
Or, more sensibly, you could be agnostic because we lack any solid grounds for belief in any theory of the mind.
And again, as I just said, this ontological problem is separate from the phenomenological problem with which the existentialists were concerned. For what the mind is, ontologically, makes no difference to our subjective experience as radically free beings without a predetermined essence.
Taking physicalism to be true, imagine that determinism is false. What is non-determinism but randomness? And how can one's actions being partly random be called "free will"? So regardless of whether one's actions are pre-determined or not, they're not "free" because that notion breaks down under close examination. Either actions are determined or they are wholly or partially random. This is the case if you're a physicalist, but also if you're a dualist. If the mind exists in some realm other than the physical world, that realm operates either deterministically or partly or wholly randomly. The same line of argument applies to neutral monism.
Emergentism is the only one that works differently, but I don't put much stock in gesturing vaguely at the morass of mind and matter and saying "the explanation is somewhere in here". In any case, if an emergentist can give a description of a component of mind that isn't reducible to matter, the same argument will apply to it.
My sense of what you have said is that you're simply making a distinction between two kinds of physical causation, one which is predictable and one which is not. Saying that any theory of mind must conform to one of these two modes of explanation simply begs the question: the question is whether our normal understanding of causation based on the physical world applies to the mind in the first place.
I'd say that the way I conceived of it, I was making a distinction between events that were determined by antecedents (physical or otherwise) on the one hand and events whose outcome was uncaused, or random, on the other. In my mind the two are dichotomous and exhaustive.
I don't pretend to understand randomness on any sophisticated level, but it is my understanding that a phenomena being random does not mean that it is uncaused. It simply means that it cannot be known ex ante.
>"The idea of a system to which causality doesn't apply is interesting. My intuition is that that doesn't make sense, and my secondary intuition is that the first intuition is unjustified."
Materialism is the paradigmatic way of understanding the world today. It is the basic ontological assumption of the scientific revolution over the last several hundred years. So it is natural to think that anything which deviates from it is implausible, or even inconceivable. But given that, from within this paradigm, we lack even the most basic understanding of what the mind is, it is at least possible that it can only be understand from without it. Of course, it could also be that we simply lack sufficient understanding from within materialism. My point is that we simply aren't in a position to know.
I would also point out an area that we already know of where causality seems to break down: the physical constants. For materialists, this is simply were the explanatory buck stops.
In other words, every one of these positions rejects the idea that we are imprisoned by a physical nexus of 'cause & effect'.
I called them substantive because they are worked out philosophical theories, as opposed to agnosticism, which is simply the suspension of belief.
(on a personal level, if you seriously feel this way and want to talk, feel free to email me, aeontech at gmail).