Author Topic: Searching for GOD...  (Read 3897149 times)

Nearly Sane

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 64349
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8600 on: January 22, 2016, 09:01:53 AM »
As I have said previously, our conscious self can invoke whatever it takes to implement a conscious choice in real time.  Otherwise there would be a lot more accidents involving drivers who make a conscious decision to overtake when the conditions are perceived to be safe.

No, now you are overlaying the assertion that there is conscious decision making on a model where it doesn't seem to work. There aren't 2 separate decision which are out of sync. And again you are begging the question assuming that there is free will when that happens what you are trying to evidence.


I really think you need to try and not just use arguments which seem to make sense to you because they are already informed by your assumptions. As noted frequently in the past few days you are using a top down approach rather than building your argument up. This leads you to go in a reprove circle because you aren't taking into account any challenge to your overall position. That in combination in continued use of the argument by incredulity and the shifting of burden of proof means that it is only your apparent genuineness that gives any worth to the discussion.


I would strongly suggest that you have a reread of the relevant bits of the thread, read through some of the writing on free will a viable on the net, and come back with a clearer more logical approach.
« Last Edit: January 22, 2016, 09:28:08 AM by Nearly Sane »

Alan Burns

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 10213
  • I lay it down of my own free will. John 10:18
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8601 on: January 22, 2016, 09:02:38 AM »

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

Thanks for the reference, but the fact that it contains 18 pages of text along with seventy references for further reading indicates that there is no definitive answer to the human attempts to find an explanation for our concept of free will.

I think back to our children at primary school age coming up with "I can do what I want" when confronted with parental advice.

I think the children were closer to the truth  ;)
The truth will set you free  - John 8:32
Truth is not an abstraction, but a person - Edith Stein
Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. - CS Lewis
Joy is the Gigantic Secret of Christians - GK Chesterton

Shaker

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 15639
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8602 on: January 22, 2016, 09:07:57 AM »
Thanks for the reference, but the fact that it contains 18 pages of text along with seventy references for further reading indicates that there is no definitive answer to the human attempts to find an explanation for our concept of free will.
I think it indicates that people who grapple with the subject think there's a hell of a lot more to it than "souls" and "Goddunnit."
Pain, or damage, don't end the world. Or despair, or fucking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man, and give some back. - Al Swearengen, Deadwood.

torridon

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 10209
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8603 on: January 22, 2016, 09:11:26 AM »
Thanks for the reference, but the fact that it contains 18 pages of text along with seventy references for further reading indicates that there is no definitive answer to the human attempts to find an explanation for our concept of free will.

I think back to our children at primary school age coming up with "I can do what I want" when confronted with parental advice.

I think the children were closer to the truth  ;)

Well you're an adult now; are you going to be forever content with the naivety of a child's understanding ?

Nearly Sane

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 64349
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8604 on: January 22, 2016, 09:22:44 AM »
Thanks for the reference, but the fact that it contains 18 pages of text along with seventy references for further reading indicates that there is no definitive answer to the human attempts to find an explanation for our concept of free will.

I think back to our children at primary school age coming up with "I can do what I want" when confronted with parental advice.

I think the children were closer to the truth  ;)

And no one is saying there is a definitive answer, so why the straw man.


If you want to make a case logically, I suggest holding children up as an example is ludicrous. Do you really want 'he started it!' to be how we should carry out philosophical discussion. This fetishisation of being child like as if it is wisdom, is to my mind, just an attempt to give up discussion. This stuff is hard, you have to do the hard yards, quoting the playground won't cut it.

bluehillside Retd.

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 19477
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8605 on: January 22, 2016, 09:31:53 AM »
AB,

Having skimmed through you last few posts it seems to me that you have given yourself a series of problems with your conjectures that you'll have to address if you expect others to take them seriously. Here are some of them:

1. You post often with great certainty about a "soul", but then you retract to claim it to be just a "possibility". This is disingenuous - anything is a possibility - but possibilities about souls, dragons or the man in the moon offer nothing with which others can engage.

2. You continue to fail tell tell us what you mean by "soul". Absent a definition more meaningful than "a little man at the controls, only he's non-material" you remain in the category "not even wrong".

3. You continue to rely heavily on the argument from personal incredulity - a basic logical fallacy. Just because you cannot imagine the answers to the questions that befuddle you does not mean that others cannot, and moreover that they haven't to varying degrees demonstrated their answers.

4. Populating the hole in your imagination and knowledge with a "soul" is your basic god of the gaps fallacy.

5. There's something like 100 million neurons in the human brain. We know that very complex phenomena can emerge from relatively few "stupid" components - when you have 100 million of those components there's no reason to think that consciousness is too complex a phenomenon to have emerged from them.

6. If you insist on your "little man at the controls" conjecture nonetheless, then if you excuse him from needing a decision-making mind of his own that's just special pleading. If your response is, "ah, but the soul is non-material" that's no more coherent a reply than, "it's magic".

7. You arbitrarily decide that other species do not have consciousness in order to fit your conjecture that a god deliberately made us to be different from them. Yet every piece of evidence suggests that they do - many of them are to a large extent made of the same stuff as us, their behaviours mimic ours very closely, experiments with chimps show remarkable levels of language learning, empathy, emotional responses like our own etc.

8. You tell us that you work in computers, yet don't seem to know that some software already mimics a sort of proto consciousness. Relatively simple programming steps can "learn" autonomously and then produce outcomes well beyond anything the programmer envisaged. Games like Sim City for example rely exactly on that phenomenon, and there's no reason to think that more sophisticated software won't arrive in the future that's much closer in its capabilities to the meat computers in our heads. 

9. You complain that others criticise you because you don't have "watertight" evidence for your conjectures. That's wrong - you have not one jot of evidence for sure, but the criticisms are much more centred on the various problems I've set out here.

10. Finally, as other have noted you still have a burden of proof problem. It's not enough just to dismiss the evidence against you (however incompetently). Even if you could undo all that neuroscience, zoology, computer science, evolutionary theory, emergence theory etc etc etc tell us, still all you'd be left with is a "don't know". Populating that don't know with a "therefore X" is another fundamental error in reasoning - don't know just means don't know; it does not open the door to any un-defined, un-reasoned and un-evidenced pet hypothesis that happens to appeal to you. For that door to open, you'd need finally to make an argument for this "soul" of yours. 

Apart from that though...
« Last Edit: January 22, 2016, 09:57:31 AM by bluehillside »
"Don't make me come down there."

God

Rhiannon

  • Guest
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8606 on: January 22, 2016, 09:34:59 AM »
I find this notion of childhood as being a time of true wisdom somewhat bemusing. There's something luxuriant about getting older and stepping ever onward into new understanding and insight. It's something to wallow in.

But I think what AB is saying here is that we are all naughty wilful children trying to disobey our daddy god.

ekim

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 5812
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8607 on: January 22, 2016, 09:44:10 AM »
Thanks for the reference, but the fact that it contains 18 pages of text along with seventy references for further reading indicates that there is no definitive answer to the human attempts to find an explanation for our concept of free will.

I think back to our children at primary school age coming up with "I can do what I want" when confronted with parental advice.

I think the children were closer to the truth  ;)
I think that the example you give is an expression of self will and self will is driven by 'self' considerations, not free from them.  As a Christian, isn't your path towards sacrificing self in favour of God's will (whatever you think that is) in which case you are bound to God's Will rather than free from it.

Alan Burns

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 10213
  • I lay it down of my own free will. John 10:18
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8608 on: January 22, 2016, 10:04:03 AM »
I think that the example you give is an expression of self will and self will is driven by 'self' considerations, not free from them.  As a Christian, isn't your path towards sacrificing self in favour of God's will (whatever you think that is) in which case you are bound to God's Will rather than free from it.
The truth is that I am free to choose between doing my will or doing what I perceive tobe God's will.
The truth will set you free  - John 8:32
Truth is not an abstraction, but a person - Edith Stein
Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. - CS Lewis
Joy is the Gigantic Secret of Christians - GK Chesterton

Nearly Sane

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 64349
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8609 on: January 22, 2016, 10:07:31 AM »
The truth is that I am free to choose between doing my will or doing what I perceive tobe God's will.
You do know just writing 'the truth' doesn't make it true?



floo

  • Guest
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8610 on: January 22, 2016, 10:10:27 AM »
I find this notion of childhood as being a time of true wisdom somewhat bemusing. There's something luxuriant about getting older and stepping ever onward into new understanding and insight. It's something to wallow in.

But I think what AB is saying here is that we are all naughty wilful children trying to disobey our daddy god.

Obeying Daddy god, if it exists, would be like obeying Hitler, only worse!

floo

  • Guest
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8611 on: January 22, 2016, 10:11:28 AM »
The truth is that I am free to choose between doing my will or doing what I perceive tobe God's will.

Your will is far better than the perceived will of the evil deity!

ekim

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 5812
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8612 on: January 22, 2016, 10:22:06 AM »
The truth is that I am free to choose between doing my will or doing what I perceive tobe God's will.
Just how free is that choice?  It is easy to see how you might be bound to self will but what drives you to surrender to your God's will?  Is it doctrine or rewards of Heaven or fears of eternal damnation??

bluehillside Retd.

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 19477
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8613 on: January 22, 2016, 10:36:43 AM »
AB,

Quote
The truth is that I am free to choose between doing my will or doing what I perceive to be God's will.

In which case either one would still be your "will".

Who is this "I" of whom you speak - the material Alan Burns, or the non-material little man at the controls you've conjectured into existence?
"Don't make me come down there."

God

Leonard James

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12443
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8614 on: January 22, 2016, 10:58:03 AM »
Robots of the future probably will though. As it is, we like to think of ourselves as being alive; but I am made entirely of dead stuff; a billion billion carbon atoms in me,not a single one of them is alive. If natural selection can create thinking breathing life out of completely dead stuff, we will probably work out how to replicate that using better materials in the future.  Thats what we do.

Yes, I accept that, but at the moment I want Alan to see that the natural process of evolution has produced the human brain and its capabilities, making the supposition of divine intervention totally superfluous.

Maeght

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 5680
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8615 on: January 22, 2016, 12:49:09 PM »
The truth is that I am free to choose between doing my will or doing what I perceive tobe God's will.

This is why I gave up discussing this because it is clear that you need to believe in all this due to your theology and so twist and turn trying to show that free will exists. It is nothing to do with logic, science or evidence but purely a need due to religious beliefs and nothing anyone says will change that.

Leonard James

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12443
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8616 on: January 22, 2016, 01:01:34 PM »
This is why I gave up discussing this because it is clear that you need to believe in all this due to your theology and so twist and turn trying to show that free will exists. It is nothing to do with logic, science or evidence but purely a need due to religious beliefs and nothing anyone says will change that.

I don't have any religious beliefs, but I believe we have free will.

bluehillside Retd.

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 19477
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8617 on: January 22, 2016, 01:03:40 PM »
Len,

Quote
I don't have any religious beliefs, but I believe we have free will.

Free of what?
"Don't make me come down there."

God

Leonard James

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12443
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8618 on: January 22, 2016, 01:04:42 PM »
Len,

Free of what?

Free of anything that forces me to act in a predetermined way.

Maeght

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 5680
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8619 on: January 22, 2016, 01:07:07 PM »
I don't have any religious beliefs, but I believe we have free will.

I know you do but that post was to Alan, not you.

Leonard James

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12443
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8620 on: January 22, 2016, 01:08:43 PM »
I know you do but that post was to Alan, not you.

Well, I feel sympathy for Alan, that is why I spoke out.  :)

bluehillside Retd.

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 19477
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8621 on: January 22, 2016, 01:22:28 PM »
Len,

Quote
Free of anything that forces me to act in a predetermined way.

Well "causes" rather than "forces" perhaps (you'd need a separate "you" to be forced) but if the stuff that causes you to behave as you do isn't your material brain, you'd need a "something" separate from that brain to do the deciding. AB just invents something he calls a "soul" to do the job (which is hugely problematic as an answer for the reasons I set out to him a few posts back) but I doubt you'd agree with him about that. What then is it that you think does the deciding for you, and where would it be?

See, intuitively we have strong sense of "I" - ie, the self - somehow living in but apart from our bodies but if the evidence from neuroscience is correct then we'd still have that sense even if there was no Cartesian mind/body separation. How then would you know whether there is a separate "I" rather than just the instinctive impression of it?

   
« Last Edit: January 22, 2016, 02:19:01 PM by bluehillside »
"Don't make me come down there."

God

Maeght

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 5680
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8622 on: January 22, 2016, 01:27:10 PM »
Well, I feel sympathy for Alan, that is why I spoke out.  :)

Sympathy! Why sympathy exactly?

Leonard James

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12443
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8623 on: January 22, 2016, 03:18:56 PM »
Sympathy! Why sympathy exactly?

Because he is a lone voice defending what he believes against the rest of us who don't! Plus I have known him for many years (online) and know that he is a nice guy with no malice in him.

Leonard James

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12443
Re: Searching for GOD...
« Reply #8624 on: January 22, 2016, 03:23:15 PM »
Len,

Well "causes" rather than "forces" perhaps (you'd need a separate "you" to be forced) but if the stuff that causes you to behave as you do isn't your material brain, you'd need a "something" separate from that brain to do the deciding. AB just invents something he calls a "soul" to do the job (which is hugely problematic as an answer for the reasons I set out to him a few posts back) but I doubt you'd agree with him about that. What then is it that you think does the deciding for you, and where would it be?

See, intuitively we have strong sense of "I" - ie, the self - somehow living in but apart from our bodies but if the evidence from neuroscience is correct then we'd still have that sense even if there was no Cartesian mind/body separation. How then would you know whether there is a separate "I" rather than just the instinctive impression of it?

 

As I see it, "I" am the sum total of my cerebral functions. "I" am the result of my brain gathering all the information from the senses and its memory bank and uniting it into one, thinking, decision-making entity.