Question 1:
Could you enlightening us as to the reason why you chose Psychodelirium as a nick? And, what do you attribute your interest in philosophy? Does it have to do with family history, personal fascination, or something else?
I'm afraid I don't have a very good answer to either of these questions. I chose "Psychodelirium" as a handle in some online game, and it seems to have followed me since then. It sprung to mind rather randomly at first, but I suppose it might entail a reference to altered states of consciousness, and consciousness, amongst related things, has always been a philosophical interest of mine. And speaking of my philosophical interests, I can't really trace those down to any specific roots, either. I've been fascinated with minds, broadly speaking, as long as I can remember, and the first philosophical texts that I read were all in the philosophy of mind. Naturally, the issues in that sub-discipline have led me to related ones in the philosophy of language, science, and so on - to a rather wide interest, in short.
Question 2:
What is your reaction to the free will question? For instance, when someone say to you, 'I'm not responsible for my actions in that they were determined by the laws of physics'? Do you think Hitler was responsible, or he just subject to these deterministic laws as well?
Well, to begin with, I come to this question from the compatibilist tradition of claiming that we can have real, valuable "free will" without any metaphysical embarassments. I think most of the skepticism about free will that we're seeing nowadays comes from the realization that a certain bad framework for thinking about the mind - a framework that goes back to Descartes - isn't fitting with anything that we know about our brains. This framework has been used to try and ground some ordinary everyday notions, like the notion of having a choice, or the notion of being responsible, in some rather dubious metaphysical notions that we now want to discard. For example one of these metaphysical underpinnings has been the idea of dualism, the idea that there is this immaterial soul or spirit - the real "you" - that controls your body. As long as that idea has seemed plausible, it has also seemed reasonable to explain the notions of choice and responsibility by saying that the decisions made by this immaterial soul weren't contingent on the states of the brain, or of the physical environment, but rather were guided by something like abstract moral principles.
So now that we don't believe in immaterial souls, a lot of people want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They want to say that since we can't ground choice and responsibility in Cartesian dualism, we should get rid of choice and responsibility altogether. Or at least, we should say that these notions are "pragmatically useful", and we should keep them in some distilled form, but they don't actually "refer" to anything real in the world.
There are two things that we can say to this. The first is that we could ground choice and responsibility in something more scientifically tenable than dualism. For example, the philosopher Dan Dennett has recently written a book that tries to ground them in memetics and evolution. I think much of the confusion surrounding the idea of free will comes from trying to look at minds through the remnants of the Cartesian categories. People see neurons in the brain doing their thing, and they start asking, well if all the intelligent work that the brain does is all parallel and distributed, where is the "self", where am "I"? Doesn't this mean that "I" don't do anything meaningful at all? Well, no, because the "I" in this question is the very same Cartesian soul that we want to say doesn't exist. If you think that "you" are a metaphysical ghost in the machine, then of course you're going to think your autonomy is being curbed by discoveries in cognitive science. The idea that Hitler is either responsible or determined, but couldn't possibly be both, turns on a presupposition of this sort. But you shouldn't think that. What "you" are, is part brain and part world. "You" are part of the drama played out by the universe, not a passive onlooker.
The second thing we can say, and if we are pragmatists, we will say it, is that there is no need to "ground" choice and responsibility at all. There is no need, because the putative distinction between "pragmatically useful to talk about" and "really really real" is not a distinction worth bothering with. In fact, this distinction has its own dubious metaphysical underpinnings: the idea that there is One True description of the world to which all other descriptions must reduce.
So what the question of free will comes down to in the end is this. If what we mean by "free will" is metaphysical Cartesian free will - "ultimate" free will, as Strawson calls it - then we don't have "free will". If what we mean by "free will" is something like the capacity for reflexive deliberation in pursuit of a growing ensemble of goals, then we do have "free will". The distinction becomes terminological - we have to choose which way of speaking we like more. And since even the incompatibilists agree that the idea of free will is "pragmatically useful to talk about", the choice should be obvious.
Question 3:
What's your view on the question of physical immortality? Do you think it's possible? Do you think it's a worthy as a goal?
Well, I think physical immortality isn't really a stand alone "goal", per se, but rather a logical outcome of other goals that we have. Human beings constantly want to do something, plan something, achieve something, make a mark on the world. As long as we have active interests to pursue, we will ever want to live, not die. We can sum up this attitude in the conveniently general slogan: life is fun, and death is boring. Perhaps if life were no longer any fun - never, at all - we might no longer feel so attached to it. But we live in interesting times, so I don't see that happening any time soon.
Physical immortality in the sense of living forever is very probably impossible. But the attitude of immortalism, at least as far as I agree with it, consists in fighting death to the last, even if the battle can never be conclusively over. We are engaged in a constant struggle to live longer, to do more, not so much in the pursuit of a nebulous goal of infinite existence.
