I think I understand Blake’s position now. But I think it a fairly controversial (to say the least) ontology.

If I understand Clark’s paradigm of choice correctly. all the events which make up the moment in which I choose have different unrelated causes, for the most part. So that while the events themselves have causes, the fact of their presence at that moment does not. It is by chance that these events meet at this time. We make our choice based on the influences of the unrelated events occurring at the moment of choice. At another moment there may be, by chance, a different configuration of events which could influence me to make a different choice. This seems to be choice in a social paradigm. Where I personally interact with the events and they have personal significance

Let me give you a simple example: there is an inlet and smack in the middle of the inlet is an island. The island constricts the flow of water, on either side, as the water goes back and forth, in the inlet, with the rising and lowering of the tide. As the water rushes through the passage waves are created from the smallness of the passage. Waves rebound on the shores, the bottom of the passage and on themselves. With rebounds on rebounds on rebounds a chaotic system of waves is created. Normally this is not a problem because the chaotic waves are not large enough to create much of a paddling problem.

One day I’m north of the island paddling south with the tide. I know when I get to the passage on the east side of the island the speed of the rushing water will increase as I shoot through the passage. Before I get there a strong south wind picks up and really begins to blow north. It has a profound effect on the passage I had chosen to take. As the water rushing south through the passage meets the strong winds blowing north and creates a phenomenon called standing waves. Instead of waves rolling along, these waves are standing straight up and down like flames on a bonfire. The don’t move north or south. The remain in one place dancing straight up and down. Not only that but the power of the chaotic wave system is magnified several times over. If you decide to go through, you know you will get hit with waves from almost all sides almost simultaneously. It’s like you’re sitting in a saddle strapped to a barrel. The barrel is kept up by four springs, two in front and two in back. To make matters worse, there are four people each pulling on a different spring randomly.

As I sit in my kayak I have to make the decision whether or not to paddle through the standing waves. Like the engineering paradigm, I have to assess the data points: the speed of the tidal current, the strength of the wind, the power of the chaotic standing waves. But that leaves one data set that does not come to the fore in the engineering paradigm. That data set is myself How much fear or lack of fear do I have facing this situation. This will be based on how comfortable I am with my paddling skills given the standing waves before me. This is not something the engineer paradigm need take into account. But it will be the most defining data set determining my decision. I may decide not to go through [hardly, real men live for the danger]. However, change the independent variable such as current speed, current direction or wind velocity I may make a different decision; not because of the independent variable directly but on how these independent variables are emotionally interpreted. This last part I don’t think Clark would include. However, it is the process when we go through when we are engaged with what can be called the social paradigm.

Thus the process by which we make choices are different based on whether the problem has personal significance for ourselves. In the engineer paradigm there is no personal significance. In the social paradigm there is. The way we come to a decision is different based on the paradigm we face. Thus the discussion of choice, it seems to me, must be understood within the paradigm that that coice is placed. There is an agent with both paradigms. It is only with the social paradigm that the agent is working with data elements that have personal significance.

Rich

The specific point at issue is not a matter of physics, but rather of “logic”- (scare quotes, because I don’t mean formal logic and a calculus of truth-functions, but something like concrete or “material” logic). Clark has already just responded that obviously he doesn’t think the universe reduces to the sheerly immanent and mindless causal interactions of material particles. I’d doubt he’s a Quinean.

The issue concerns something like what the early Husserl termed, IIRC, “categorical intuition”. The beauty of each woman might be unique, but I can only respond to that beauty through applying the category “woman”, (which renders us menfolk liable to all sorts of troubles). Precisely in the sort of account of synthesis that you appeal to, there is mediation by categorial and/or conceptual elements that generalize across instances or contexts, (which is part of their being categorial or conceptual), without which no intuition or identification of a discrete particular can occur. Whitehead spoke of those conceptual elements, (and this, of course, is the Platonic element in his thinking), as “eternal objects”, by which I take it he is referring to the formal or structural properties of “things”, which are a kind of permanent potentials in the universe, which are actualized by being “conceptually prehended” and “ingressed” into the process of concretion of actual occasions, (which goes to his doctrine of “causal immanence”, that the effect of a cause is partly dependent on what it effects, allowing him a certain limited rehabilitation of “final causes”). Such “eternal objects” strike me as similar to what Clark speaks of from Peirce, as universals that are real, at least in the sense of independent of any particular mind, but don’t “exist”. Such conceptual elements must be repeated across instances, though they may be ingredient in different ways in such instances. You might argue that God could know and intuit a numerically unique instance though its unique conceptual configuration, but to do so, he would have to repeat that configuration by bringing it into the composite set of relations comprising his own actual occasion. God could only know the free act of another as different, hence as “free” of his knowledge. Otherwise put, God’s direct, immediate intuition of an other’s act must, in fact, already itself be mediated, to be an intuition at all. Even if God would have complete through-sight into the basis in causal organization of the act, since a “free” act can not be reduced to its causal conditions, God would know of the act through its external “signs” and not through its “inner” freedom, and if the act would have a “unique causal signature” then the reading of that signature would itself have another “unique causal signature”. The inability to make out the immediate identity between the act and God’s knowledge of it in your account of its direct intuition is the precise point that, I think, both Clark and I have been responding to in your elaborated account, which point you have been apparently unable to grasp, repeating the elaboration of other elements of your account, as if we had not attentively read your accounts, and had simply missed your point. Well, I can only try again to specify the weakness or difficulty to be espied in the account, though that does not necessarily refute or obviate the whole account, nor its motivations.

This issue of the “repetition and difference”, as Clark put it above, saying he’s been thinking about it for 10 years, at the basis of the possibility of any identification of a particular, might seem minute, but it is actually quite difficult to make out, and it does have ramifications. (For one issue, it is involved in the issue of memory at the basis of any mental experience, Whitehead’s “traditions” of “societies” of actual occasions. Various forms of neural memory function as “system-properties”, which means that the interrelations between stored or retained memories change as new memories are added on). If particulars are numerically unique, nonetheless, they can only have any effect by entering into relation to other such particulars, and the overall effects of aggregations of particulars depend for their identification and explanation upon a “universal” element that at once organizes and is organized by them, and which, seemingly paradoxically, must itself be changeable.

The point of the “luck” objection, as far as I can make it out, is that both a unique particular act under LFW and an entirely contingent event of “luck” would be outside the usual parameters of causal organization and couldn’t readily be related to them. (I actually don’t think it entirely depends on an external/third person standpoint as opposed to an internal/first person experience, though Clark doesn’t like my differentiation of standpoints here, since who of us has not done a good deed and been embarrassed by fulsome praise for it, because we realize that much of its success was due to “luck” in the sustaining circumstances, or conversely, has failed in the accomplishment of a good deed, inspite of all due diligence, because the overwhelming force of circumstances has thwarted our “will” and resulted in consequences quite different from those intended.) The point of asking for a distinct detectable criterion for differentiating between and identifying the two cases is that indeterminism alone is not a sufficient condition for establishing an act of free agency, let alone a full-fledged account of LFW. It may well be that indeterminism in causality in the universe is a necessary condition for any sort of meaningful agency, let alone LFW. (However, I labored above at such tedious and absurd length to make the point that to even raise the issue of causality vis-a-vis agency the right emergent level in the “topography” of the causal universe needs to be brought into view. QM might indicate an indeterminism at the most basic causal level of the universe, but it’s simply not relevant to the neuro-physiological causal processes at the basis of mental experience, except insofar as, fairly trivially, electricity and chemical reactions are involved, although the electro-chemical mechanism of neural pulses are actually quite inefficient, as the mark of a biologically evolved organism, than what advanced technological wizardry could engineer nowadays). But I take it Clark, Blake, and John all concede some significant degree of indeterminism in the causal processes of the universe, which may be sufficient to allow of agency, so determinism itself has not been the issue. In fact, it is only with indeterminism in causal organization, I think, that the “luck” objection can take hold and have any “force”: there simply wouldn’t be any “luck” under complete determinism. However, it is, obviously, a wrong order of argument to go from LFW to indeterminism. Even if God were to be so completely free and have such total self-disposal, he would still be working or operating through the causal organization of the universe of his devising, into which we are “interpellated” and to which we are subjected.

Now, I fully recognize that you are engaged with a project of theological explication, and are concerned with interrelating and reconciling various Mormon tenets in your account. I can only dimly intuit the stakes, as involving interrelations between LFW, moral responsibility, personal salvation and God’s creation and fore-knowledge. But since I lack any familiarity with the finer points of Mormon belief commitments and interpretations,- (I was brought up RC, though 3/4 of my ancestry is actually Calvinist, and I grew up in Chicago, where there were no Mormons, so I’m familiar rather with more “standard” Augustinian accounts of theological issues),- I am not qualified to comment, except to note that there is some frustration and polemical heat involved in the impasse here, which result in some misattributions or sense of misreading in the specific points at issue. But I can only comment on the specifically philosophical issues involved in your construction. Of course, I come at the question in a much different way, whereby the question of agency,- (since I dislike the term “free will”, because the notion of “will” has been heavily laden with traditional substantialist metaphysical associations),- is primarily a matter of practical reason, and not scientific theory or metaphysical description, and an account of agency and its freedom should be specifically practicable, in the sense of addressing the experiences, orientations and concerns that agents are addressing in their practical lives, and operable, in the sense that it allows for the sorts of distinctions needed for claims and attributions of agency to be sustained, in sorting out and working through specific cases at issue. Also, I come at the non-causal component of decision involved in agency from the standpoint of language/meaning, since I think language/meaning can not be held to correspond to patterns of causal organization that would underlie and determine meaning, for all that there is a neuro-physiology underpinning speech production/reception, that language must rely on being encoded in a material sign-substrate, and language, across innumerable contexts of its usage, refers to material objects or material contents, (such as, e.g. sense perceptions). But language/meaning can not be reduced and “cashed out” in any of those terms, but is a communicatively generated, non-causal medium. Hence, the moment of decision in agency can be understood, partly by overlap, partly by analogy, in the same way that we can account for deciding upon the interpretive understanding of meanings. But the other problem I have with your metaphysical description of LFW, as I’ve said above, concerns it’s “punctual” account of agency, since I think agency needs to be understood in temporally distended terms, (as with Heidegger’s “thrownness” and “projection”), and in terms of its follow-through in “the stream of life”, and that agents must develop some sort of quasi-stable structuring, with a degree of self-consistency and coherence by which they exist as agents, since a highly erratically behaving agent is a dysfunctional one, if not completely broken-down. But trying to identify a singular point of agency is likely self-defeating, (and probably residually Cartesian”). I’ll refer to the famous Benjamin Libet experiments, and other more recent and refined results, that journalistic reports always play up as refuting “free will”. But whatever the limits and faults of the particular experiments and their reported results, I don’t think that’s what they show. Rather I think what they show is that there is much more to the organization of mental experience, let alone the non-conscious and pre-conscious neural processes that bring it about, than just focal consciousness and our facticious experience of intentionality within it. Rather focal consciousness is itself a selective “mechanism”, interacting with a wide array of other selection mechanisms and their neural “decisions”, in the overall generation of our states-of-mind and our behavioral dispositions. And it is only through the extended sequence of such momentary selections that consciousness can hold sway over our behavior, as a matter of a planning “agency”. Agency would involve a highly composite and complex set of interrelations, involving numerous “decisions” at various levels, interacting and conditioning each other, with an overall processual result, but which can’t quite be identified with or in a single central moment of decision.

I don’t know what might be stipulated theologically concerning God’s knowledge, or what would regulate such a stipulation. One could just stipulate his omniscience, but such a doxological attribute has always be something of a religious mystery. Even the most extreme doctrine of double pre-destination, by which one’s savific destiny has already been fully fore-ordained by God, but one can not know with any certainty what that destiny might be, nor who belongs to the “saving remnant”, effectively just re-states that mystery, which is part of its ethical point. But if rational philosophical means are deployed in a theological construction, then not only does such a construction open itself to philosophical criticism of its means, but also to the limits of philosophical means.

Again, just to try to be maximally clear, a very specific point in your account was being pressed, concerning your assertion of a direct, immediate identity between God’s knowledge and the free act of an agent, and there is a question of whether such an identity can be made out by means of “reason alone”. How that small point might affect your overall account or its other stipulations and concerns, I don’t know. But if there are limitations on our knowledge, in terms of which we understand what it means “to know”, then making out such an asserted identity would mean that there would be a different “ontology” or “grammar” being attributed to the notion/expression “to know” than we would ordinarily or regularly use in human cases. I don’t know that I could make the point at issue any clearer.

I’ll put up an other post on just this issue this weekend to address this in more depth. I suspect I’ll get you wrong, but at least I’ll give it an other valiant effort.

BTW – your claim about what I believe is completely wrong. I’m a Peircean. I think that ultimately everything is semiotics – information flows and interactions. Particles are ultimately a fiction even at the atomic level let alone deeper.

See, this is what is frustrating to me. I have spoken repeatedly of the relation between data as it exists in relation to an agent. The agent has a basic power to organize the data, to synthesize it into a novel creation that has never before existed and will never exist again. There is a relation between the data, the basic power to order the data, and the resulting ordered data. So it is the relationship of these factors that is known to God and that is the clear basis for knowledge of a free act. There is self-ordered data that results from an act of synthesizing the data into a new whole. The very act of consciousness for Kant, Whitehead and Hartshorne consists of the basic power to synthesize and order the manifold of disparate data. The act of choice, or of ordering the data into a synthetic whole, is a basic power that is known to God immediately.

The basic problem as I see it is that Clark doesn’t believe that there is anything but physics — bare particles that randomly interact. Whether the indeterministic data result from randomness or from some basic act of a mind that cannot be known to physics and therefore epistemologically randomness is indistinguishable from data that are ordered by a self that is free to order the data by exercising basic powers. Clark seems to argue that LFW cannot be known because a physicist cannot know it — indeterministic data are just indeterministic data and that is all that can known.

However, in the process view God has immediate access to the data, to the basic powers and properties of the self and the resulting mind that organize the data, the nature of the data that results from the self as it organizes the data in a basic act of organizing data based upon the basic agent causal powers of the emergent self. God also knows the results of the exercise of basic powers by the self so that an ordered synthesis of data results that would not result without a free choice being made in the act of synthesizing the manifold. So God knows a lot more than the physicist because he has access to the mental powers and the mental acts and how they organized the data.

Yeah, what I described was precisely how God may learn such a fact from the properties of the world before, during and after the free act.

Further, the claim isn’t that you can tell the difference; but that God can. You have to give an argument that even an all-knowing, as a matter of logical necessity, cannot tell the difference. Or perhaps an argument that a being that creates by organizing cannot tell the difference. I haven’t seen any such argument that negates the kind of relation between an act of organizing data as an act of creative freedom and the prior data and the subsequent outcome as a result as I have given. So your comments are beside the point it seems to me.