AB,
But the materialistic model can never provide a definitive explanation for conscious choice.
The problem here is that you don’t understand the terms you attempt, so the answer to that involves me unpacking the confusion before I can begin. What do you mean by “definitive” for example? If you mean something like, “as definitive as the definition we have of, say, gravity” then that’s not a statement you can make because it’s not something you can know to be true. If however you mean something more like, “correct beyond any possibility of being falsified” that’s technically true (for reasons I won’t trouble you with) but it’s also true for every other definition we have so it doesn’t help you at all. As presumably by "definition" what you actually mean is "explanation" in any case though ("consciousness" as a term is reasonably well defined, it's the
explanation for it that's incomplete) why not use that term in any case?
Because any materialistic explanation will by definition provide no freedom to choose and assert that everything will be derived from physically defined reactions of material elements.
First that’s the fallacy called the
argumentum ad consequentiam again, and second the only “freedom” it would deny
is your personal definition of it which is itself fundamentally irrational (for the reasons that keep being explained to you and you keep ignoring).
This is not fallacious thinking, it is a logical conclusion based upon known material behaviour. So in the materialistic scenario, any concept of choice will have to be assumed to be illusionary.
It’s “illusory” and yes it is fallacious thinking for the reasons I’ve just explained.
You can't provide a physical definition for spiritual entities. All we can provide is evidence for what they do.
Well that’s embarrassing for you. Your complaint (wrongly as it happens) about the material model for consciousness is that it’s not “fully defined”, but you then exempt your conjecture about a “soul” from a much bigger definitional problem by throwing in the conditional “physical”. If you can’t provide a “physical” definition, then what kind of definition do you propose instead? If your answer remains “none at all” yet you persist with the claim then you’re doing something called special pleading, which is yet another fallacy.
The "I" is the single entity of awareness which perceives our brain activity and consciously interacts with it. Let us call call this single entity of awareness the human soul
No, let’s not for some very good reasons. First, if you think there’s something that “perceives our brain activity” then that something is presumably somehow outside and separate from our brains. Leaving aside for now the total absence of evidence for such a thing, and indeed the total absence of an explanation for how it would do that “interacting”, your invisible little man at the controls would itself
still have to deal with the determined vs binary problem simply as matter of logic. Not "physical" logic. Not "material" logic. Just logic. “It’s magic innit?” has effectively been your only response to that so far, but I suspect that at some dim level even you know that to be hopeless. Why not then finally show some honesty and have a go at tackling it?
Second, “soul” implies a supernatural entity of some kind. If you want to claim a supernatural though, then you’ll have to explain
first what you mean by it, how you’d identify it, how it could be investigated etc. Until and unless you can finally do that, you may as well say “wibble” for all the rhetorical use it has.
Look, I’ll even make it easy for you again. Do you remember a while ago that I used our two Norse friends to explain where you go wrong? You remember, Sven says to Eric, “I’m seeing patterns in the weather that enable me to tell whether it’ll rain tomorrow, and sometimes that evidence tells me too that thunder is coming” and Eric replies, “ah, but you don’t have a complete definition of thunder yet do you, therefore…it can never be defined in material terms, therefore….Thor!” As ever you just ignored it, but its construction is precisely the one you attempt for “soul”. You ignore the direction in which science currently points, you complain that it has yet fully to “define” consciousness, you make the entirely unqualified claim that it can never “define” consciousness, and then you drop in your superstitious belief “soul”
about which you have no information of any kind as if that was an answer.
If you want anyone to take seriously your claim that you think about things, why not think about
that and respond to it – preferably not by stringing together another series of fallacious arguments? Seriously though, why not now bring some honesty to the table and give it a go? In what way do you think your and Eric’s positions are different?
