It's a strange experience reading these posts. I still love A Short Story about Parasites and still feel hurt that no one else seems to like it anything like as much as I do. Some of the other stuff is enjoyable too. There are two that really intrigue me though. The final two posts about freewill. I recall them both very well. For some reason (I was probably about to do a lecture on it) freewill was very much on my mind. Since I read Daniel Dennett's works on it (Elbow Room, Consciousness Explained and -- most recently -- Freedom Evolves) it was something that, as I now say, exercised me.
I was staying over at my ex-wife's house, she was away and I was looking after the kids, sleeping on the sofa downstairs (I might even have said settee at the time). The night was incredibly windy and leaves and all kinds of other matter were striking the patio doors, and the trees were waving as if they were the source of the wind. I couldn't sleep to I went to my laptop and wrote the first one. Sometime later (I can't remember how long, maybe the next day -- check out the timestamp) I wrote the second, which tried to embody the ideas in a work of fiction reminiscent of It's a Wonderful Life. The whole experience of writing these two posts is entirely encapsulated by the phrase 'my reach exceeded my grasp' which is to say (and it is a lovely expression that haunts me) that there was something that I felt, but couldn't quite express. Somewhere on here there is an unreleased follow-up to "The Greatest Gift" which remains unpublished because it made no sense. I woke up on that windy night with the burning passion of somehow who had seen God, sat down wrote and it vanished as the mist.
In the first post I refer to Laplace's Demon and the paradox of freewill and determinism. This was lifted straight from a common philosophical trope that neither determinism or indeterminism produces freewill. And there is literally no third option, by definition (although our understandings of both are probably quite primitive). Reading it back now I think I know where I was going.
The point is that maybe Laplace's demon could have predicted that you saved the drowning child, but that you should not think that diminishes your actions as a moral agent because, although the demon could have predicted it (sorry for all the italics here) it couldn't have caused you to do this. The demon, by definition, has to be outside the system otherwise it is subject to the same constraints that you are. So you really had to be there and really had to do what you did otherwise the child would have drowned. To skirt around an Orwellian quotation, just because you can predict the future, doesn't mean that you can control the future. The very opposite, in fact, in a deterministic universe.
