Anti-Climacus

WELL: A couple of notes on Kevin Yaroch's philosophy blogging:

"The mind is one of the most complex things there is..."

I'm not sure if this is a confusion of the mind/brain distinction (it probably isn't, but it might be), but it always seemed to be like the idea of the mind being simple wasn't prima facie ridiculous (unless by 'simple' we mean 'indivisible,' but that's a further set of linguistic arguments)--the argument being that the mechanism by which the mind works is relatively simple (especially since the brain does yeoman's work on limiting the things that get considered), and it's rather the case that the particular contents of mental states vary widely.

"Many, probably most, people who have written about free will, and a number of other topics, have made that mistake, and their writings have been nonsensical for that reason. That is almost always the case with advocates of indeterminism..."

Well, in the first place, advocates of indeterminism will often sound nonsensical because indeterminism is nonsensical (though you can square Sartre with hard determinism or compatibilism).

Secondly, I think the charge is largely untrue: you can make a perfectly good defense of compatibilism that's entirely deflationary about the mind (in a certain sense, every compatibilist argument has to be at least a little deflationary--you can't accept the truth of determinism without in some sense limiting what the mind can do), but you can also have an inflated conception of the mind that's perfectly compatible with the truth of determinism (this is the two-aspect theory, which I support), depending on how you want to read that thesis.

I also suspect, though I've never taken a stab at cashing out, that one can hold that the mind is the brain, full stop, physical determinism is true in a relevant sense, and have there be a soul that can be efficacious in action.