Is Moral Responsibility Compatible With Determinism?

[Alan V]

Reductionism assumes everything can be reduced to material causes and the laws of physics. Emergentism assumes that the whole can be, and often is, greater than the sum of the parts. Emergentism therefore implies that satisfactory explanations for observed phenomena can only be achieved at the appropriate levels of complexity. So for instance, if you want to understand how a bird flies, taking it apart and examining the pieces will tell you only so much. Only with the pieces put together and the bird alive and conscious can it fly. Life and consciousness are both emergent. Not everything observed reduces. Instead, such properties simply disappear at a point.

So just to reiterate, again and again, that you guys are reductionists proves nothing. Material emergentism is an intellectually respectable alternative to material reductionism.

So be reductionists if you want, but just remember that you do have a choice.

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My statement is this: scientists have not observed matter making a motion that cannot be explained by a prior cause. If every motion of matter is determined by a prior cause, then determinism is true.

If you do mathematics on an abacus, do the beads "cause" you to get the right answers, or do your symbolic attributions do the trick, above and beyond the material attributes of the beads? What if the human brain works the same way, and its material attributes remain the same, just like the beads, no matter what kinds of calculations you do with it?

The symbolic processing of information -- reasoning -- is an emergent property. Reasoning makes things happen in the real world too, not just simple material causes. The two are distinctly different, even if reasoning uses material objects in its calculations.

The reason we have different words and concepts in our languages is to make important discriminations between things which are different. "Free will" is one such concept.