Searching for GOD...

[jeremyp]

What does it mean?

Dean Koontz is an author. TV evangelists write lots of books.

[Nearly Sane]

Relentless by Koontz is the worst book I have ever read

[Robbie]

Shooting Stars was actually a piece of genius. Dicky just had his sense of humour gland removed

Agree with you about 'Shooting Stars', loved it and the songs were so good, especially, "Locked in my flat".

Back to Coontz or Dean Koontz.

[Walter]

Relentless by Koontz is the worst book I have ever read

was someone forcing you . ? you could have stopped at any time . That's the thing with books , if you don't turn the page , it ends there.
TOP TIP,
I always read the last sentence first . If it says 'and they all lived happily ever after' , I start at the beginning knowing I'm not going to waste my time   

[Walter]

Hi Gordon

nice to see you on duty tonight 

[Nearly Sane]

was someone forcing you . ? you could have stopped at any time . That's the thing with books , if you don't turn the page , it ends there.
TOP TIP,
I always read the last sentence first . If it says 'and they all lived happily ever after' , I start at the beginning knowing I'm not going to waste my time

  I read in awe of its awefullness

[SteveH]

Steve H,

Think of it this way: nature has no remit to correlate your experience of things with the way they actually are. Rather nature's remit is optimise the survival of genes. If experiencing your "will" as if it were "free" serves that purpose, then well and good.

AB's mistake is to be so emotionally wedded to the idea that his will is actually "free" (and then to conjure up a menagerie of "souls" and the like to make sense of that) that he cannot bear to accept the logically coherent alternative. It's a basic error in reasoning called the argumentum ad consequentiam that's been explained to him many times, but he clings to it as a man clings to concrete lifebelt nonetheless.       

Well, as I've asked numerous times, and not had a reply, if we have no free will, we were eternally predestined to believe what we believe, so how can we know our beliefs are true?

[BeRational]

Well, as I've asked numerous times, and not had a reply, if we have no free will, we were eternally predestined to believe what we believe, so how can we know our beliefs are true?

Our beliefs are likely to ge true if they correlate with the reality we perceive around us.
Like not stepping off a high building being a good idea

[Aruntraveller]

Relentless by Koontz is the worst book I have ever read

Koontz is bad, but you obviously have never read any Kathy Reichs.

[SteveH]

AB,

This is incoherent. If a "source" does not function deterministically then it's random; if it doesn't function randomly, then it's deterministic. Your way out of that is essentially "it's magic", which is epistemically worthless.

Just re-read the Wikipedia article on free will. Still don't understand most of it, but at any rate there is a position called compatiblism, which says that determinism and free-will can co-exist, and some compatiblists even say that determinism  is neceessary for free-will to exist (presumably because without it, everything would be random). I have read of a distinction between "strong" and "weak" free-will, the weak version being that all decisions are determined, but some of the determinants are the subject's conscious choices. It was determined from all eternity that I would light some 'Prince Albert' in my Blakemar Rhodesian pipe about ten minutes ago, but it was nevertheless my choice. Strong free-will maintains that I could have decided not to bother with a pipe, or chosen a different one, but that is probably incoherent. Or something. Probably just as well that I used my weak free-will to decide not to be a philosopher.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Steve H,

Well, as I've asked numerous times, and not had a reply, if we have no free will, we were eternally predestined to believe what we believe, so how can we know our beliefs are true?

Ultimately, we can’t. Knowledge is probabilistic – we know what we know only insofar as the tools and methods we have can separate true from false, and that paradigm sits within the experience of the free will we appear to have. That’s why we fall in love, send people to jail, pick the winner of Britain’s Got Talent etc quite happily as if there was some antecedent-free internal process going on when that cannot be the case. Whether at root there’s “true” randomness in play at the quantum field level is unknowable just now, but randomness in conscious decision-making would be chaotic.       

[Sriram]

I'd agree the next tory leader probably won't be a random event.  That doesn't equate to unpredictable in principal, it just means unpredictable in practice.  Too difficult to call, in other words. It's a bit like forecasting the weather, we have some limited success in it, but we can never have 100% accuracy because we don't have access to all the data.

Yes..but who is predicting? Isn't that part of the predetermined cycle? It is like time travel and going to the past. It creates a paradox. 

[Walter]

Yes..but who is predicting? Isn't that part of the predetermined cycle? It is like time travel and going to the past. It creates a paradox.

what? eh?

[bluehillside Retd.]

Sriram,

Yes..but who is predicting? Isn't that part of the predetermined cycle? It is like time travel and going to the past. It creates a paradox.

Wrong again. Think of it as a thought experiment: in a deterministic universe if you had every possible piece of information that there is and limitless processing ability you could in theory predict every future event there would ever be. Who “you” would be is irrelevant.   

[Walter]

and even then you could only narrow it down to a probability .

[Alan Burns]

Whether at root there’s “true” randomness in play at the quantum field level is unknowable just now, but randomness in conscious decision-making would be chaotic.     

Not randomness, obviously.  Just unpredictable events driven by an undetectable source.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

Not randomness, obviously.  Just unpredictable events driven by an undetectable source.

If it's "undetectable" how do you know it exists?

[Roses]

Not randomness, obviously.  Just unpredictable events driven by an undetectable source.

If something is undetectable it is only a matter of conjecture that it might exist, not a matter of fact.

[Alan Burns]

AB,

If it's "undetectable" how do you know it exists?

Because it is what drives my conscious choices 

[Walter]

Because it is what drives my conscious choices 

so it is detectable then . (but only by you )

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

Because it is what drives my conscious choices 

Still makes no sense. If it's undetectable, how do you know it's there at all to do this supposed "driving"?

[Roses]

Because it is what drives my conscious choices 

But you said it was undetectable, therefore you only want to believe it to be true, as you have no factual evidence that it is so.

[Alan Burns]

AB,

Still makes no sense. If it's undetectable, how do you know it's there at all to do this supposed "driving"?

If the source of my conscious choices was detectable by human scientific investigation, it would not be a conscious choice - just an unavoidable reaction driven by the laws of science (not by me).

[Roses]

If the source of my conscious choices was detectable by human scientific investigation, it would not be a conscious choice - just an unavoidable reaction driven by the laws of science (not by me).

So in other words you make a conscious choice to believe in your take on faith, even though you have no viable evidence to substantiate it.

[torridon]

If the source of my conscious choices was detectable by human scientific investigation, it would not be a conscious choice - just an unavoidable reaction driven by the laws of science (not by me).

If there were any evidence for free will, presumably you would have shared that already.  Instead all we get is such as the above, you tieing yourself in knots, trying to wordify a fundamentally incoherent claim.