Occasional Tales

With the lovely Cassandra. Cassandra is forecasting great losses for the Greeks if the sea battle ( ναυμαχία , as they say in Greek) goes ahead. But since the enemy had already sent the Greeks an invitation to which they’d RSVPed, the admiral thought it would be rather rude of them not to attend. [ Paraphrasing scenarios is one thing, but you're just making this up . –ed.] Unfortunately for the Greeks, Cassandra’s forecast was accurate, and when the accuracy of subsequent prophecies became known, the Greeks took to consulting her before any military engagements. But the admiral wasn’t so pleased and got a couple of sophists and a couple of philosophers to undermine Cassandra’s credibility. As Euthydemus proved, sophists were idiots, but the philosophers had an idea. They suggested that because the future hasn’t happened, Cassandra’s forecasts must be false. Also, if the admiral had conducted the battle a little differently, the outcome would’ve been different, thus invalidating the...

But does that abrogate free will? John Locke suddenly wakes up at 4am one morning with a brilliant idea. He’d like to get up and go to his study, but he knows that his landlady (who is probably inclined to application rather than theory) is a light sleeper and always complaining about his nocturnal activities. But he realises that in order to mollify his landlady, he can deal with it in the morning and being, in fact, rather comfortable, he goes back to sleep. By the next morning, though, he’s forgotten what his idea was and is rather annoyed. But he did choose to go back to sleep and simply has to accept the outcome of his decision. But here’s the twist. His landlady actually locked the door to prevent him from roaming around at night so that even if he had got up, he couldn’t have reached the study. Locke thinks he made a free decision, but did he? Whether Locke knew the door was locked or not, I’d say that he did make a free decision because he could’ve chosen to get out of bed and ...

“I’m not myself today.” It seems that the florist shares the same opinion about Steve as me, that he’s still the same old Steve underlyingly. But Martin disagrees with him because Steve has chosen to be unfriendly. Martin then learns that Steve has been taking some hormones which make him more aggressively. This news makes Martin think that Steve probably is the same person as before, but he’s been chemically altered.[ 1 ] Martin goes back to Steve to try and remonstrate and gets a basket of rotten fruit tipped over him, making a mess of his suit. Steve apologises and says that because of the pressures of business, he just hasn’t been himself. Should Martin forgive him or is this now a matter for the police? §1. It is not Steve who should be on trial today, men of Athens, but those who were the cause of the change to his personality. Nonetheless, it was Steve who tipped a basket of rotten fruit over me, which resulted in a £25 dry cleaning bill. §2. Formerly, Steve was noted for the am...

What are we? We continue with the slightly deranged ramblings of Dr Descartes. This time, it's that little matter of free will. If we didn't have free will, then what would be the difference between humans and animals? What's to say that we have free will at all? I'm not saying that some god is the puppet master and we're the marionettes, but what I am saying is that we don't have as much free will as we like to believe. What we do have is choices. If I had an infinite number of choices open to me every time I made a decision, then I'd have free will. But I don't have such choices because my actions often lead me in very specific directions. If I do A, then B is going to result. The only choice I might have is not to proceed to B, although I might, and probably want to do that anyway. Or perhaps we always have infinite choices, but we can instantly exclude 99.99999…% of them. For example, I might need more breakfast cereal. My obvious course of action is...