AB,
Nature is driven by physically pre determined reactions to events. We can't change or control the laws of physics - therefore freedom can't be naturalistic in nature.
Groan… How many effing times does this have to be explained to you? “Freedom” as you experience it and freedom as an underlying substrate of reality are
not same thing. Could you at least please indicate that you finally grasp this point, even if you continue to reject it because it contradicts your faith beliefs?
You think and feel and experience freedom at a relatively superficial level, just as many other deeply held beliefs once were held at a superficial level (for example that your fingers touch the keyboard whereas in fact there’s a tiny gap caused by repellent forces between them). What we know now though that is that superficiality leads to
mistakes – in your case to an understanding of freedom that’s incoherent and contradictory (ie, your determined vs random problem).
My freedom to invoke conscious choices is evident in my most fundamental perception of reality.
Which is epistemically worthless in this case, just as is your deepest perception of reality that you touch your keyboard. What possible relevance do you think your deepest perception has to the facts and evidence that undermines it?
I think of something, and I consciously choose whether to do it or not. Then surely onus is on you and other non believers to demonstrate how this notion of freedom could possibly be an illusion, but in doing so you would in fact be demonstrating your actual freedom to contradict the notion of freedom!
There’s no excuse for this stupidity now given that it’s been unravelled for you countless times already. What you perceive as “your conscious choice” cannot be “free” in the sense that you imagine because it runs up immediately against the determined vs random barrier. Just inventing a little man at the controls and telling us he’s magic so fundamental logic no longer applies is pathetic.
To choose such a trivial example of conscious choice does not fully demonstrate the power of your freedom to choose. A much more profound example of your freedom to choose lies in every word you consciously choose to type in reply to my posts. What ultimately underpins your choice of words?
Oh for – trivial or not the basic premise remains: what you experience as “free” is superficially sensible but collapses immediately you try to apply some reason to it. It
must be so until and unless you finally find a way out of the determined vs random problem.
The findings of neuroscience are not wrong, but they do not constitute the full picture of consciously driven thought processes. All they show is some correlation between thought experiences and neurological brain activity. For example, the observation of mechanical activity in a machine does not define the root cause of this activity - which emanates from the operator of the machine.
Ultimately everything is correlative – if I hit a nail with a hammer the hammer blow looks causal to me, but I cannot be epistemically certain that there wasn’t another cause that was invisible to me. That’s the game you’re attempting here – neuroscience (and other fields of study) overwhelmingly point to consciousness as an emergent property of the brain, with as much probability as chemistry points to the causes of exothermic reactions or geography points to the causes of oxbow lakes.
Probabilistically the cards are all stacked against you; and your response of effectively “yes but I might have the lucky one in a million answer instead” does you no credit. Yes you might, jus as I might with my faith belief the Kevin the leprechaun is actually banging in the nail. So what though?
But you need to recognise the limitations of what you base your logical conclusions on. If your logical conclusions are based upon nothing more than the observation of physically determined material behaviour, you will inevitably come up with an entirely materialistic answer.
Yes, but that’s all we know of that’s
investigable. If you want to posit a non-material, then it’s up to you (finally) to find a means to distinguish your claims about it from just guessing. No-one ever has managed that, but I wish you luck in the effort if you fancy trying it
By refusing to accept the existence of anything outside the limited boundaries of what can be physically perceived through our human senses and equipment you are effectively assuming a short sighted view of reality.
No, I’m “assuming” for practical purposes a view of reality that’s distinguishable from white noise, from guessing etc. That’s not to say that there necessarily aren’t any number of different realities “out there”, but it is to say that your or a Muslim’s or a leprechaunist’s expressions of what they’d like these realities to be aren't worth taking seriously.
I have never claimed that we have ultimate freedom. Our freedom to choose is limited to what is physically possible or feasible within practical constraints. But restricted choice is still a choice - not a reaction. An entirely material world which is completely under the control of scientific laws allows no form of freedom - just inevitable reactions to events.
And again you collapse straight back into an
argumentum ad consequentiam. What you
do claim is that a magic little man at the controls (for which there’s neither supporting logic nor any evidence) has (apparently) ultimate freedom despite the logical incoherence this nonsense presents. That ultimately our sense of apparent freedom can't be as you would like it to be does not though change the facts of the matter, however unpalatable you may find them.
The fact that we can't understand how our freedom to choose actually works does not imply that it does not exist. And the reality of our freedom to choose constitutes substantial evidence that we comprise more than mere physically controlled material elements.
Wronger than Professor Wrong of Wrong University. First, substantially we do understand how consciousness work albeit that the picture is incomplete.
Second, having half the pieces of a jig-saw is by magnitudes more likely to give us a better picture of reality than having none of them.
Third, as ever you fail grasp that “mere physically controlled material elements” can give rise to
emergent properties, and that all the evidence we do have points to consciousness being one of them.
Why is this so difficult for you? Seriously though?
