AB,
I have never claimed that human free will is free from cause. I have said it is free from physical cause.
I know you’ve said it, but now you’ve given yourself the huge problem of demonstrating that there even
is a non-physical. How would you define it, identify it, test it, explain its workings etc? You can assert “non-physical”, “spiritual” etc and then populate them with “it’s magic innit” to you heart’s content if you really want to, but it’s still white noise to anyone but you.
All our conscious choices are determined - consciously determined by the will invoked from our self awareness - not pre determined by the endless chains of physical cause and effect which go back to the beginning of time.
Well, that “self-awareness” is progress of sorts I guess. So where then does this “will” obtain its wants if not from the subconscious – which itself is “determined by the endless chains of physical cause and effect which go back to the beginning of time” as you put it?
And thus we get back to the question of what constitutes our self awareness and how it works. By limiting our self awareness to be an emergent property of nothing but deterministic electro chemical activity takes away all notion of freedom or personal control and shackles us all to the inevitable physically controlled reactions to previous events. This is not the reality I exist in.
What the hell is wrong with you? You’ve had the
argumentum ad consequentiam fallacy explained to you, what, 10 times, 20 maybe, 50 perhaps yet you repeat it over and over again, and moreover you completely misrepresent the outcome you don’t like in any case.
Very slowly now. Forget “free” will, “god”, “soul” and the rest of it and just focus on the problem in logic. The
argumentum ad consequentiam structure is, “If X then Y, therefore X cannot be” when “Y” is an outcome you happen not to like. Thus, say, “If gravity, then apples will fall on my head. I don’t like apples falling on my head, therefore gravity is false”.
Can you see why this is a bad argument? Can you though? Good, because it’s the same argument you keep trying when you tell us you don’t like the type of free will that determinism produces, therefore determinism is false.
Now then. Do you intend just to ignore the problem yet again, or will you finally have the honesty to say something like, “OK, I can grasp now what this fallacy entails and I see why my attempting it is a bad idea”?
As for what the outcome of determinism actually is, your “deterministic electro chemical activity takes away all notion of freedom or personal control and shackles us all to the inevitable physically controlled reactions to previous events” is palpable nonsense. It doesn’t take away “all notion” of it at all – it just takes away
your logically incoherent version of it, neither deterministic nor random but somehow, you know, magic or something instead.
This is not the reality I exist in.
Yes it is. It’s just not the reality you’d
like to live in, which is a very different thing and a good job too as that reality would be chaotic.
