Dear Professor Honderich,

I do hope that medical science has your heart back under control.  I think how close we came to losing Professor Dennett a short while ago.

I have been reading your Philosopher:A Kind of Life.

From p. 387  "Does it need to be added that accidents and chances are one thing and acting on them another? That I in fact chose? Well, some chances are hard to resist."

I would love to talk to you about reconciling real chance in the universe with the adequate determinism that the world provides us.

We do not have the metaphysical strict rational logical determinism philosophers (and many scientists) have dreamed off dogmatically, merely the adequate physical determinism that let us send men to the moon and back.

As far as I can see, quantum uncertainty does nothing to the adequate determinism of our willed actions.

It certainly has no affect on the laws of nature - except the unusual case of microscopic quantum events.

Amplifications of quantum randomness to use as a method of making decisions (by Eddington, Compton, and others) has been sadly ludicrous.

But randomness can add alternative possibilities for us to choose from, as you note above. And our choice can be a determination, consistent with our character and values, a de-liberation of those free possiblilities in an ambiguous future.

As John Locke wrote, it is not the will that is free. It is the man that is free.

I have also been working over your Theory of Determinism, to find summaries for your page on my Information Philosophy website here:
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/honderich/

Whenever you find the time for criticisms, they will be most appreciated.

I dream that I might convince you, and then perhaps with your strong position in the philosophical community you could convince your colleagues, that the determinism we have in the real world, what I call "adequate determinism" is no cause for the attitude of "dismay."
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/adequate_determinism.html

Cheers,

Bob

My Dear Professor Honderich,

If I am becoming a pest, just file this email with the others for when your heart slows down.

But I do wish you would think of me as one of those "one or two open-minded postgraduates of the age" you mention in How Free Are You?

Or perhaps those in A Kind of Life that you "encouraged to come with some philosophy got down on paper, since it seems to me that one learns most by the discipline of writing. Sections of thesis are better than thoughts on the wing."

Rather than send you more "thoughts on the wing" or worse, hoping to talk with you before you can assess my significance to your "limited immortality," I thought I would share a dream in this email, and then write a hidden web page with an imagined conversation between us two called "Ted and Bob."

As the "major spokesman for hard determinism" (my history now so describes you)  and as the inspiration for a group of younger philosophers (Double, Magill, Pereboom, Smilansky, G. Strawson?), none of whom shares your passion and sense of loss involved with the "black thing," I blissfully imagine that you might change the direction of the determinism and freedom debate in the next couple of years.

If you change a bit, it would be an Epicurean "swerve" in the history of philosophy.

If you accepted a modest role for indeterminism in your "near determinism" - not threatening the determinism required for an adequately determined will in the least - but allowing for an intelligible kind of "origination," I believe you could help drive a consensus among philosophers - an "intersubjective agreement" in Charles Peirce's sense - that would convince lesser thinkers like Robert Kane, Peter van Inwagen, and perhaps even the curmudgeon Dan Dennett to redefine what is taught in future to philosophy students about free will.

I have studied their works as much as I have yours. Kane admits he can make no sense of his quantum indeterminism suggestions. Van Inwagen does little more than repeat the standard objection to determinism with his Consequence Argument. To the extent that he admits indeterminism into his decisions, he agrees with Kane that the agent loses control and thus free will remains a mystery.

My Dream

A three-day conference at Harvard, perhaps as early as 2009, with you, Kane (he is not very well at the moment), van Inwagen, and Dennett leading panels at the Philosophy Department, the Law School, the Divinity School, and the new Cog Sci/Psychology/Neurosciences initiative, to explain the significance of the new free will consensus among philosophers.

It would create a giant buzz.

Philosophy might even get out in front of vibrant neuroscience with some implications for Consciousness.

Our Dialogue

I have put our imaginary conversation, based on extensive quotes from your Theory of Determinism and How Free Are You? on an unadvertised web page (known only to you and me).

http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/honderich/ted_and_bob.html

Please consider it as a "section of  a thesis" by a hard-working postgraduate student.

But if you accept this thesis as your own, you would have to change your positions of dismay and intransigence to ones with significantly higher life hopes, and it could be a bright line rather than a black thing at the end of the "decent length of life" and "limited immortality" you have in fact already achieved.

Cheers,

Bob