AB,
There is one aspect of your posts which I just can't get my head round.
That’s not true – it’s
all of my posts you “can’t get your head around”. I know this because you ignore or misrepresent every argument that undoes you.
You continue to be in denial of my (and your) ability to invoke conscious acts of will which are not entirely driven by the pre determined physical brain activity over which we can have no control…
You can’t be “in denial” of something you’ve been given no justification for thinking to be true in the first place, especially when that something is evidence-denying and logically incoherent.
…by saying "that's just the way it seems", and mentioning the unfathomable complexity of the physical workings of the human brain. But no matter how much complexity is involved, every event in our brains will be entirely determined by previous physical events in a purely materialistic scenario.
Yes. And?
Yet you seem to refuse to contemplate the alternative view of "that's the way it is" because this would not be compatible with your materialistic viewpoint.
No, I “refuse” to “see” a conjecture that’s incompatible with the available reason and evidence. Materialism satisfies both, so provisionally at least I accept it as true; your supernaturalism satisfies neither, so provisionally at least I treat it as not true. It’s simple enough.
But by implying that I am personally responsible for all the alleged flawed logic in my posts, you are verifying the option of "that's the way it is" in order to facilitate passing on these personal accusations to me.
Why do you struggle so much with this? The “you” that makes decisions is for most practical purposes a self-determinative entity – that’s why people go to jail for committing crimes. Even a moment’s reflection though would tell you that, at a deeper level than “you”, “me” etc must lie a subconscious that gives rise to your wants. If that want is “tea”, then your conscious self says “tea please”; if your subconscious self then says “coffee”, your conscious self says, “actually I’ve changed my mind – I’ll have coffee instead”. This is neither new nor controversial by the way – try Daniel Kahnemann’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” for a very readable introduction to the subject.
Oh, and while I’m here I’ve set out for you some very simple explanations of where you go wrong in logic. Why do you think you’ve chosen just to misrepresent or ignore them rather than engage with them? Why not for example say either, “actually the absence of an explanation for something does validate my alternative and here’s why…”, or better yet, “OK, I see now why an absent (let alone an incomplete) explanation for something tells me nothing whatever about what it might be so I’ll stop attempting the argument from personal incredulity from now on”?
Really though. What are you so afraid of?
