I’m pretty sure that no amount of modification of our gun policy (in any direction) is going to fix things as long as we live in a society where anger and despair are equally foreseeable responses to conditions that seem unlikely to ease. We probably won’t end the spectacular forms of senseless tragedy without ending the tragically systematic senselessness.

“This contract [wherein labor hires capital] can say just about anything, stipulating how the capital is used down to any detail. How is this different from an employment contract?”

Well, if the details in question go as far as being functionally identical to employment, it wouldn’t be very different. In fact, it would be an employment contract. What makes a contract an employment contract isn’t that the words “Employment Contract” are written at the top. What a contract is or isn’t is going to be a matter of the reality of the situation it brings about. So if employment contracts are not seen as valid contracts in a given society, then they can’t “say just about anything, stipulating how the capital is used down to any detail.” It’s not about avoiding the “magic words” but about actually eliminating the renting of people, explicitly or through legal gamesmanship.

‎”Every possessor of lands, houses, furniture, machinery, tools, money, &c., who lends a thing for a price exceeding the cost of repairs (the repairs being charged to the lender, and representing products which he exchanges for other products), is guilty of swindling and extortion.” – Proudhon

The quotation was accompanied by a skeptical set of examples (following Proudhon’s list) meant to appeal to the reader’s intuition and, I presume, lead them to conclude that Proudhon was full of it and that there is nothing wrong with charging for the use of something you own. The upshot is that today’s mutualists, if they agree with Proudhon, are full of it too.

With regard to “land” (actually improvements to such), the example was a parcel of land converted into a parking lot that then charges locals a parking fee. How could mutualists think this is “swindling and extortion”?

Proudhon doesn’t appear to be saying anything more or less here than that rental prices should be in line with competitive arbitrage:

C – S/(1+r)ⁿ = RKa(n,r)

where C is the current market value of the capital asset, S is the scrap value after n years of use, R is the current market rent for K units of capital services, and a(n,r) is an ordinary annuity of one. If no one is “guilty of swindling and extortion,” viz. “under competitive conditions, arbitrage between buy and lease markets would enforce equality between the present values of the outlays to obtain the same real services through buying and leasing.” [1]

So in the case of improvements to land? Let’s say you could sell the lot for $300,000 immediately on the market. So C = $300,000. Let’s say you plan for the lot to operate for 50 years, so 50*K units of capital services will be used by those parking on the lot. If the market indicates that you could expect $50,000 for a lot in that condition in 50 years, the present value of the scrap would be $18,397.65 if r is, say, 2%. Doing a little algebra, your arbitrage-enforced annual rental income RK = $8,961.49. At this level of annual nominal income, you would essentially be slowly selling the lot, and it’s hard call that “swindling.”

This all amounts to an income stream of about $448,000 (plus “scrap”) over the whole time horizon before repairs, which the possessor may or may not choose to do. But arbitrage assures that this is equivalent to $300,000 in present value. Seen in this way, it’s no more true that no one would ever build such a lot if all they got in return was what Proudhon allows than that no one would ever build such a lot if they were only allowed to sell it outright. Which you choose to do would be determined by whether you want your labor to manifest as wealth or income.

As for repairs, if you kept the lot up, you would be producing what amounts to a new asset, C’, worth $250,000 to add to your scrap value. This would renew your income stream but it would have been the result of additional labor and cost as it should be. I realize this is grossly oversimplified but the general point isn’t changed.

It should be clear from this example how it plays out with houses, furniture, machinery, and tools. The same goes for money, where the stream reduces to r, as you would expect.

So am I just saying that Proudhon or mutualism in general is just capitalism described in socialist-sounding language? After all, nothing I’ve said so far about capital assets yielding an income stream wouldn’t be enthusiastically endorsed by most bourgeois economists. In short, no, because there are different ways in which owning an asset can do this. What we’ve considered thus far is the “passive” use of a capital asset. Capitalism, however, legitimizes another “active” way. Capitalist economists apply this capitalization theory to cases where, instead of hiring out capital, capital hires in labor, a product is produced and the income generated in imputed to the capital asset. This capitalized value is C + profit*a(n,r) or (what amounts to the same thing) the capital asset plus the value of the stream of labor’s whole product. By doing this, they are “guilty of swindling and extortion” because that stream is not what you are purchasing when you buy an asset. That stream depends on future contracts that may or may not be made and furthermore, those contracts (i.e. employment contracts) aren’t even legitimate. This stream must be appropriated as new property based on the actual satisfaction of a legitimate contract of hired inputs.

Now, I’m not claiming that mutualists are never heard decrying passive capital asset income streams, or even that Proudhon didn’t. What I’m saying is that separating passive and active income streams in the theory is important to any analysis of the matter of lending and that, in my opinion, the passive streams don’t conflict with the spirit of mutuality and reciprocity central to mutualism.

Where does occupancy and use fit into this, you might wonder? In the language I’ve been deploying, occupancy/use theory is usually seen as arguing that the only legitimate enjoyment of a capital asset is in realizing it as wealth (“use it or sell it”), but not a stream of income (“but don’t rent it out”). I would argue that the spirit is better captured by arguing that the only legitimate enjoyment of a capital asset is by realizing it as wealth or a stream of passive income (viz. by realizing either the market value C or rental-plus-scrap), but not active income. To put that in occupancy/use language, the whole product stream cannot accrue to a party that isn’t occupying and using the capital asset, viz. whoever hires the asset appropriates the  whole product, which includes the “negative” product (liability for the passive stream to the owner) and the “positive” product (the residual from its use as an input to production).

[1] Ellerman, David. Economics, Accounting, and Property Theory. Lexington: Lexington Books, 1982.

If society adopted some kind of bizarre model with no firms, no division and specialization of labor, no significant accumulation of capital, I guess I would not call it capitalist.

Kinsella has now elaborated on that idea, fully embracing (along with Marx) the notion of “capitalistic patterns of ownership and control” as distinct from “a free market in land and the means of production,” including  “employers and employees and employment.” He sees the link as inevitable (as may, arguably, Marx and unlike me*) but at least we seem to agree that POOTMOP, by itself, is too vague to distinguish what capitalists mean by “capitalism” from what they don’t.

Glad that’s cleared up.

* I not only see it as not inevitable but unlibertarian and thus precluded conceptually by the term “free market.”

If an armed band of brigands is determined to take your land, or your crops, or your resources, or impress you and your friends and family into slavery, or establish some other kind of permanent control or direction over all of you, you can hardly prevent them from doing so just by ignoring them. You have to repel them and defeat them.

Now I suppose you can succeed here and there in repelling and defeating threats by adventitiously banding together temporarily into an organized, rule-governed unit for that limited purpose, and then dissolving back into a less organized form of existence. But the threats are persistent and many, and it’s both inefficient and ineffective to keep forming and dissolving units of organized power only when threats arise. For one thing, you will want to deter threats from acting against you in the first place, rather than continue paying the high price of only banding together and acting once threats have arisen, and have begun to do their damage. The practical thing to do is to preserve the band as an organized society; to debate, refine and improve the rules under which you live and organize your cooperative activity and common life; and to establish settled practices for keeping these rules and in place. And then you are a government.

Nope. This is the problem underpinning Dan Kervick’s whole line of thinking here (along with that of people like Gus diZerega and others in the state-as-self-organizing-network camp). He has convinced himself that anarchism is the lack of persistent institutions or organizations because he seemingly defines governments or states as any persistent institution or organization. Either that or he thinks this is the case in matters of large-scale defense. But why should we accept this? I find that to be a weird way to think of it.

If you’re going to tell an anarchist that they don’t really oppose the state if they support any kind of “organized, rule-governed unit” for defense (as Kervick suggests is prudent), then it probably helps to know what they mean by a “government” or “state”:

I won’t hazard a definition of either “government” or “state” here, but some essential features can be described. States have governments, and governments, as such, claim authority over a defined range of territory and citizens. Governments claim the right to issue legitimate orders to anyone subject to them, and to use force to compel obedience. But governments claim more than that: after all, I have the right to order you out of my house, and to shove you out if you won’t go quietly. Governments claim supreme authority over legally enforceable claims within their territory; while I have a right to order you off my property, a government claims the right to make and enforce decisive, final, and exclusive orders on questions of legal right—for example, whether it is my property, if there is a dispute, or whether you have a right to stay there. That means the right to review, and possibly to overturn or punish, my demands on you—to decisively settle the dispute, to enforce the settlement over anyone’s objections, and deny to anyone outside the government the right to supersede their final say on it. Some governments—the totalitarian ones—assert supreme authority over every aspect of life within their borders; but a “limited government” asserts authority only over a defined range of issues, often enumerated in a written constitution. Minarchists argue not only that governments should be limited in their authority, but specifically that the supreme authority of governments should be limited to the adjudication of disputes over individual rights, and the organized enforcement of those rights. But even the most minimal minarchy, at some point, must claim its citizens’ exclusive allegiance—they must love, honor and obey, forsaking all others, or else they deny the government the prerogative of sovereignty. And a “government” without sovereign legal authority is no government at all.

-Charles “Rad Geek” Johnson, “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism”

Kervick has not demonstrated that simply reaching the point where an institution is “preserved,” where there are “settled practices,” or where there is enough continuity to “deter threats” requires anything of the sort Rad Geek describes. If an organization hangs together despite lacking these essential features, then it is not a state, but anarchy. If we accept, as Kervick says further down, that “[objectionable forms of bondage or coercion] are only actively prevented by an organized power that has more coercive heft than the potential oppressors” then why must we also accept that this can only take the form of something with sovereign legal authority?

For example, all kinds of forms of male domination and female subjugation that existed just a few decades ago have been altered and pushed back in the US and other societies.  That’s in large part because many of the constitutive practices of male domination are now illegal, and the institutions and claims of right that once underpinned these practices have been abolished.  Those who seek to engage in those practices, and there are many who do, are now thwarted by the law and by the imposition of punishment, or at least the threat of punishment, on a continuing basis.  So if this is a triumph on behalf of liberty, it is a triumph of democratic government and the rule of democratic law.

Why is this any more likely to be the case than the idea that the Civil Rights Act is in large part the reason that many of the constitutive practices of racism “have been altered and pushed back in the US and other societies”?

And none of these changes would ever have occurred without the extension of the voting franchise to women.

Yes, it’s probably true that legislative changes would not have occurred without the extension of the voting franchise to women. That’s very different from saying that any change would never have occurred without the extension of the voting franchise to women. (I say this not to suggest that women shouldn’t have obtained the right to vote when men continued to have it, but rather that a sovereign legal authority that uses voting shouldn’t exist and that this state of affairs would be better at ending patriarchal domination.) Yes, men face threats of legal force to curb their domination. To the extent that this domination is a violation of rights, they should. But to the extent that it isn’t, they “should face a force much fiercer and more meaningful—the full force of voluntary social organization and a culture of equality.”

In addition to these kinds of consequentialist considerations, (to quote Rad Geek again, somewhat out of context):

But even if you concede that immediate repeal of statist controls, without the preconditions in place, would eventually result in disaster, rather than cultural adaptation … you would need to add some kind of further moral argument that would show that people are entitled to continue invading the rights of other people in order to maintain a particular standard of living, or to stave off aggression that would otherwise be committed by some unrelated third party at some point in the future.

Rad Geek is speaking here against gradualism as a strategy for moving toward statelessness but I think the moral (no pun intended) applies as well to the question of whether we should move there at all. From the perspective of the anarchist, you are arguing that we should trade coercion for coercion, and that, in light of the idea that it doesn’t need to be a choice, isn’t a very appealing argument.

On abortion, I just recognition [sic] as a physician and scientist that life does exist prior to birth. There is a legal right to it and there is a biological definition of it. And most people don’t think about it, that if you say the woman has a right to do what she wants with her body and what is in her body, that means that an eight-pound baby a month before birth can be destroyed and the doctor be paid for it.*

There is something awfully bizarre about a society that says oh, that’s OK because it’s a woman’s body. And every argument for all abortion endorses the principle that you can take that life and abort it and kill it. And I had to witness this. It’s very, very disturbing.

So I think that somebody has to speak for the meek and the small. And they do have legal rights. If you’re in a car accident and a woman’s pregnant and her baby dies, you’re — this is homicide. You’ve committed a very serious crime. You killed a life.

So, this whole thing that is simple to woman’s right to do what she wants with her own body — no, you have to deal with the fact. You have to decide is there a real life there? And there is a real life there.

I’m liable as a physician. If a woman comes in and if she’s a week pregnant or 10 months, pregnant, or was eight, nine months pregnant — if I do something wrong, rightfully, so I can be liable for injuring the fetus. So, if I give her the wrong medication, I’m liable for this.

To pretend that life doesn’t exist, that’s like putting blinders on.

And I don’t talk a whole lot about it. But I’ve made the emphasis the other day that if you truly care about liberty, you have to understand life because how can I defend a woman’s or any individual’s right to lead their own life as they choose and even do dumb things and drink raw milk or whatever they want to do, at the same time say that life is not precious?

And we can throw away a life even if it weighs eight pounds because it’s within the woman’s body.

I believe in property rights. I believe that a baby in a crib deserves protection, even though I honor property. And a house is our castle.

But nobody, nobody would say oh, a woman after the baby’s born, we can kill it. And today, we have this — all these abortions. But if a young girl is in a desperate situation and she happens to deliver her baby and kills it, she is arrested immediately. But if she had done it a day before, there was no crime and the doctor gets paid money.

That — even if you divorce this all from the law and enforcement of law, but morality. Our society has to decide whether that’s morally right or wrong in dealing with this.

I have high respect for life. Therefore I have high respect for liberty. And it’s hard to separate the two.

I’m going to defer to Paul’s experience “as a physician and scientist that life does exist prior to birth” and then I’m going to explain why that doesn’t matter at all when it comes to whether or not women have the right to abort a pregnancy on demand and without apology. In fact, I’ll even raise the stakes and say that we know for a fact that the baby (yes, ‘baby’, since we’re accepting Paul’s premise for now) will grow up to cure cancer and bring about total world peace.

[TRIGGER WARNING for descriptions of hypothetical rape.]

And we can throw away a life even if it weighs eight pounds because it’s within the woman’s body.

Now, let’s imagine that, instead of an eight-pound baby, a one hundred ninety pound man is within the woman’s body. In particular, his penis is in her vagina.

At this point, I haven’t said who this man is. I’d like to offer two possibilities:

1. The man is her lover and they are engaged in enthusiastically consensual intercourse, or
2. The man is a raping her.

On self-defense and stopping a rape, I just recognize as a physician and scientist that life does exist after birth. There is a legal right to it and there is a biological definition of it. And most people don’t think about it, that if you say the woman has a right to do what she wants with her body and what is in her body, that means that a one hundred ninety pound man in the prime of his life can be destroyed and the police be paid for it.

There is something awfully bizarre about a society that says oh, that’s OK because it’s a woman’s body. And every argument for all self-defense endorses the principle that you can take that life and abort it and kill it. And I had to witness this. It’s very, very disturbing.

My analogy between fetuses and rapists will strike many opponents of abortion rights as absurd. Doesn’t this analogy ignore a vitally important difference – namely, that the fetus is innocent? The fetus did not choose to violate its mother’s boundaries; the violation occurred as a result of natural processes over which the fetus, in the nature of the case, could have no control (since these are the same natural processes that produced it).

Yes, this is of course an important difference; but it is not important in the relevant way. An unwanted fetus is an innocent threat, but is a threat nonetheless. A boundary-violation does not cease to be a boundary-violation just because the boundary-violator was acting involuntarily; nor does such involuntariness transform a profoundly personal intrusion into a minor inconvenience. Proposition 20 [“Every person has the right not to have her boundaries violated, and also not to have her boundaries invaded unless such invasion is necessary to end some wrongful boundary-invasion of hers, and such invasion is also not disproportionate to the seriousness of her boundary-invasion”] therefore licenses the killing of innocent threats in self-defense. To be sure, considerations of the threat’s innocence or guilt may legitimately affect judgments of the moral proportionality of the response. But when the threat is as personal and intrusive as an unwanted pregnancy, it is difficult to see how the innocence of the fetus could make enough of a difference to justify forcing the mother to quietly endure nine months of what is tantamount to rape. Analogously , even if someone has been involuntarily hypnotized into becoming a literal rapist, his victim still has the right to kill him in self-defense.

So, this whole thing that is simple to woman’s right to do what she wants with her own body — no, you have to deal with the fact. You have to decide is there a real life there? And there is a real life there.

I’m liable as a physician. If a woman comes in and if she’s a week pregnant or 10 months, pregnant, or was eight, nine months pregnant — if I do something wrong, rightfully, so I can be liable for injuring the fetus. So, if I give her the wrong medication, I’m liable for this.

But nobody, nobody would say oh, a woman after the baby’s born, we can kill it. And today, we have this — all these abortions. But if a young girl is in a desperate situation and she happens to deliver her baby and kills it, she is arrested immediately. But if she had done it a day before, there was no crime and the doctor gets paid money.

Remember our first possible man above? The lover? If the police came in and shot him, they’d be liable, right? That’s because he is crossing her boundaries, but he isn’t violating them. The police are violating the male lover’s boundaries, however, because the police action “is not necessary to end any boundary-invasion” on the lover’s part. Surely, Paul gets this. Yet when it comes to abortion, he just can’t seem to figure out why we would be liable in one set of circumstances (no boundary violation) and not another (boundary violation), or why a woman can’t kill a baby that is no longer violating her boundaries. Here is a politician who supposedly founds his entire platform on the idea that we have a right to do what we want unless we are violating another’s rights, yet he can’t tell the difference between killing someone who is violating rights and someone who isn’t.

Here’s the key, Ron: we know the difference by checking for consent or the necessity to end another invasion, and when we don’t find either, we have a rights violation. Since I don’t see how a pregnancy can possibly count as necessary to end an invasion of the baby on the mother’s part, that leaves consent AKA choice, a woman’s choice. Not qualified consent. Just consent, on demand and without apology.

There is one apology needed, however. Paul should apologize to all women everywhere for his desire to deny them the same libertarian rights he would fight for in any other situation. You might be glad to get that off of your conscience, Ron. You might feel eight pounds lighter.

* I’m not going to focus on this but just stop with this tired, underhanded, misogynist example already.

Seems like “the debate” is often structured so one has to either believe in some “exception” to cause and effect, or that that our preference for a Belgian triple ale with tonight’s dinner is merely fall-out from the big bang. I’m in the “hard-wired to choose” camp.

(Shawn P. Wilbur)

(University of Texas at Austin philosophy professor David Sosa talking in his office in the movie Waking Life)

Transcript (click here if you want to skip to the rest of the post):

In a way, in our contemporary world view, it’s easy to think that science has come to take the place of God. But some philosophical problems remain as troubling as ever. Take the problem of free will. This problem has been around for a long time, since before Aristotle in 350 B.C. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, these guys all worried about how we can be free if God already knows in advance everything you’re gonna do. Nowadays we know that the world operates according to some fundamental physical laws, and these laws govern the behavior of every object in the world. Now, these laws, because they’re so trustworthy, they enable incredible technological achievements. But look at yourself. We’re just physical systems too, right? We’re just complex arrangements of carbon molecules. We’re mostly water, and our behavior isn’t gonna be an exception to these basic physical laws. So it starts to look like whether its God setting things up in advance and knowing everything you’re gonna do or whether it’s these basic physical laws governing everything, there’s not a lot of room left for freedom.

So now you might be tempted to just ignore the question, ignore the mystery of free will. Say “Oh, well, it’s just an historical anecdote. It’s sophomoric. It’s a question with no answer. Just forget about it.” But the question keeps staring you right in the face. You think about individuality for example, who you are. Who you are is mostly a matter of the free choices that you make. Or take responsibility. You can only be held responsible, you can only be found guilty, or you can only be admired or respected for things you did of your own free will. So the question keeps coming back, and we don’t really have a solution to it. It starts to look like all our decisions are really just a charade.

Think about how it happens. There’s some electrical activity in your brain. Your neurons fire. They send a signal down into your nervous system. It passes along down into your muscle fibers. They twitch. You might, say, reach out your arm. It looks like it’s a free action on your part, but every one of those – every part of that process is actually governed by physical law, chemical laws, electrical laws, and so on.

So now it just looks like the big bang set up the initial conditions, and the whole rest of human history, and even before, is really just the playing out of subatomic particles according to these basic fundamental physical laws. We think we’re special. We think we have some kind of special dignity, but that now comes under threat. I mean, that’s really challenged by this picture.

So you might be saying, “Well, wait a minute. What about quantum mechanics? I know enough contemporary physical theory to know it’s not really like that. It’s really a probabilistic theory. There’s room. It’s loose. It’s not deterministic.” And that’s going to enable us to understand free will. But if you look at the details, it’s not really going to help because what happens is you have some very small quantum particles, and their behavior is apparently a bit random. They swerve. Their behavior is absurd in the sense that its unpredictable and we can’t understand it based on anything that came before. It just does something out of the blue, according to a probabilistic framework. But is that going to help with freedom? I mean, should our freedom be just a matter of probabilities, just some random swerving in a chaotic system? That starts to seem like it’s worse. I’d rather be a gear in a big deterministic physical machine than just some random swerving.

So we can’t just ignore the problem. We have to find room in our contemporary world view for persons with all that that entails; not just bodies, but persons. And that means trying to solve the problem of freedom, finding room for choice and responsibility, and trying to understand individuality.

Challenge accepted.

While the following should serve quite well as a response to this clip, it’s actually from a conversation I had a while ago in another venue. I’m just going to repost the conversation here (cleaning it up and stitching it together for readability) and, hopefully, it should end up forming a pretty coherent response to Prof. Sosa. Please note that most of the content is a prose rendering of Roderick T. Long’s lecture notes on the subject but everything here represents my current view on the matter.

But the fact that we have neurons, axons, neuro-transmitters, etc delivering all external messages to the brain only leads me to ask: why do we have a brain in the first place.

We might as well ask why it is that every time we come across a cube, we find certain facts about composition, temperature etc. that seem necessary to hold a cubical shape. So if the geometer’s definition of a cube as “a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex” is what a cube is, why do we have physical cube-shaped lumps of matter in the first place?

The truths of logic and mathematics do not depend on the nature of matter, so logical relations cannot be explained in purely physical terms. Therefore, nothing capable of grasping logical relations can be explained in purely physical terms either, which includes human beings, particularly their minds. That’s not a matter of practicality or technological limitation but fundamental.

So we can make a distinction between enabling conditions (those that make something’s existence possible) and constitutive conditions (those that determine something’s identity). For example, what composition, temperature, etc., are needed to keep a cubical shape? This is a question for physicists and chemists, i.e. a question about enabling conditions. What properties must a thing have to count as being a cube? This is a question for geometers, i.e. a question about constitutive conditions.

It is more than a lack of time and effort that prevents us from reducing geometry to physics and chemistry. Constitutive conditions cannot be reduced to enabling conditions. Logic and psychology deal with the constitutive conditions of mind and neurophysiology deals with the enabling conditions of mind.

Then why are there subjects like psycho-physiology then or neuro-psychology? These subjects alone sort of contridict what you are saying. I do not have the book on me at the moment but in The Essential Chomsky, Chomsky talks about in the section of “Brain and Language” about how different areas of discourse and study were coming together to essentially solve matters of language and its relationship with the brain. For example, he talks about Chemistry and Biology and now we have Bio-Chem. I understand what you are saying but I do not neccessarly agree. Yes, a chemist has an area of experieties and are answering different questions than an astronomer. This does not mean that chemistry cannot serve as a suitable purpose to Astronomy or that it may be vital to certain aspects of about knowing about the universe. (an example will be about dying stars and how the development of Iron is a way of knowing how long a Large Star has to live) or the area in the universe as to where there is completely nothing but thick gas and clouds [where it is believed to be the orgins of the big bang]). Does that make any sense?

My point is has nothing to do with the taxonomy of university departments and interdisciplinary studies. It’s more fundamental than that. Just coming up with a field of study called geometric physics isn’t going to get you any closer to expressing what a cube is by describing the physics of all actually-existing cubes. I propose the the same goes for minds and brains. “Neuropsychology studies the structure and function of the brain related to specific psychological processes and behaviors.” Fine, that doesn’t contradict anything I’ve said. It might as well read “Neuropsychology studies the structure and function of the brain that are the enabling conditions of specific psychological processes and behaviors.”

So to return to your question, the answer to why we have a brain at all is the answer to the question “Why does the brain serve as enabling conditions of mind?” It simply is a different question from “What constitutes mind?”

So the dualists aren’t full of “just plain bullshit” when they say that the mind cannot be explained in purely material terms. But the materialists are also not crazy for saying that to explain the mind, we do not need to posit a non-material component. They do, however, both make the same mistake. They both assume that if the mind has only material enabling conditions, then it can be entirely explained in material terms.

Materialism says the mind does have only material conditions and, therefore, it can be explained in purely material terms. Dualism says the mind cannot be explained in purely material terms and, therefore, it must have some non-material enabling conditions.

But a cube’s geometrical properties are not additional physical components alongside mass and chemical composition. Likewise, mental phenomena are not non-material enabling conditions in addition to the mind’s material enabling conditions. Mental phenomena are not enabling conditions at all; they’re constitutive conditions.

Creatures with minds are made of matter and maybe always will be found to have brains. That is an empirical finding about what seems to enable thought. It tells us that brains apparently have the physical properties that are compatible with our mental properties. Our physical properties do not have to explain our mental properties.

The fact that when I think, I realize that my thoughts are coming from my head, leads me to believe that my thoughts are coming from my brain and nowhere else. What seems to be the issue is this: well how is it possible for conscious experience to arise out of a lump of grey matter endowed with nothing but electro-magnetic chemical properties?

I claim this question is similar to the question “How is it possible that the geometric properties of being a cube can arises out of a lump of matter?” I also say that we satisfy our curiosity in the same way.

But wouldnt you agree that when we have profound transformative experiences. When we raise our level of awareness. When we change ourselves, we are changing ourselves we are actually changing the physiology of our brains right? A lot of scientist have stated this many times.

If that is the case then that would make sense given that different mental phenomena might require different physical enabling conditions. If I want to turn a cube into a pyramid, I’m going to need a chisel.

I do not mean to put the burden of proof on you but wouldn’t you say that all evidence suggest that all roads leads to the brain?

If you mean do I think that brains are necessary enabling conditions of thought, that’s not a bad theory.

Consequently, all of this has significance for the discussion of free will. Indeterministic quantum events make free choice possible. Yes, quantum physics is fairly deterministic at the macro level and quantum effects mostly cancel each other out (though there are things like Geiger counters that amplify indeterminism and are worth noting). But nevertheless, they are enabling conditions of our free choices. But indeterministic quantum events do not cause or explain our free choices. Free will software would only ever run on indeterministic hardware. But the hardware is only an enabling condition, not a constitutive condition, of the software.

But how do we make the quantum events happen? By exerting a mysterious soul-force on our component particles? Free will is not an additional enabling condition; it’s what gets enabled. Our free choices don’t interfere with physical law any more than “a cube is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex” interferes with the physical law of this cube-shaped lump of matter over here. Physical law determines only the probabilities of quantum events. Our free choices don’t alter those probabilities. We don’t make the enabling conditions more likely; we just make the enabling conditions happen.

But how? Spooky soul-force? Well, how do you move an atom without special equipment? Just move your hand. In other words, we cause quantum events, without interfering with physical law (which is only concerned with probabilities), simply by performing the actions which have those events as underlying enabling conditions.

Scene 1: Episode 7 @ 01:16:54

Scene 2: Episode 10 @ 02:01:20

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There is no need to wait for Mubarak to “step down.” If you have decided that your government is illegitimate (as all states invariably are) then, in the words of Charles Johnson, “you have already completed the revolution: no government on earth has any legitimate authority to bind you to any obligation that you did not already have on your own. It’s a mistake to think of the State as holding you under its authority while you struggle to escape; at the most, it has power, not authority over you. As far as your former government is concerned, you have the moral standing not of a subject, but of the head of a revolutionary state of one.” Don’t give any more legitimacy to Mubarak by acting like some declaration on his part means anything. What are you waiting for? Look around and start living free.

Furthermore, “declare [the uprising] as the new basis of social organization and…appeal to the oppressed of the world to join with it. The call for a transitional government, constitutional reform, new elections, etc., should be rejected. The January 25 uprising must avoid being defined as something of significance only to Egypt; it cannot win if it is confined to Egypt — it must strip off its national form. In response to the secret negotiations directed by Washington, the January 25 uprising will have to aggressively declare its intentions to go global.”