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In my section last week, we started by getting some of Dennett's key terms on the table ("universal acid," "greedy vs. proper" reductionism, "cranes vs. skyhooks," "emergent meaning"). Then we settled into the questions about morality (can we design it ourselves, if it doesn't come with the package? is it then "real"? is it valid?) And we talked about free will--what the conditions are for having it, whether we do or not, whether we feel that we do or not, whether we act as if we do or not...

Yesterday afternoon, I attended a session of the Working Group on Mental Health, where the topic was "meaning-making." The reading, which was about Viktor Frankl's "logotherapy," offered, I thought, a pretty good answer to some of our questions:

"this form of existential philosophy...says that man is--in spite of whatever mechanical limitations of heredity and environment he may face--always free to chose among alternatives the action he will take in response to those determined factors. It charges each individual always to be aware of this freedom, and therefore of the contingency of his destiny upon his own choices. Man is never a finished product, but an eternally and dynamically changing and developing organism; he never is, but always is becoming. Therefore he faces the responsibility for choices that will take him in the direction of what he wishes to become."

The first thing I'm going to do with my freedom is change the pronoun usage above.