AB,
The examples of apparently deceptive feelings you gave can easily be verified by evidence you quote.
First, as I called you out on completely misrepresenting me and explained again what I actually said does it not occur to you that the decent thing to do here would be to apologise and to commit not to do it again?
Second, You have consistently elided the depth of your feeling
about an experience into the validity of your explanation
for it (“I really feel at my deepest level that…therefore...” etc). The point about these examples was to show you that there’s no relationship between the
depth of your feeling about something and the
quality of your explanation for it. No-one care how "deeply", "profoundly", "really" or anything else you feel as though you have “free” will because for explanatory purposes the strength of your feeling about that is evidentially worthless. It simply has no relevance, any more than the strength of your feeling that you touch the keyboard had any evidential value.
Why not now then say something like, “ah yes, I see that now and I commit never again to adduce as evidence for my explanation for something how strongly I happen to feel the experience of it to be”?
Third, yes the more robust explanations can be validated by reasoning and evidence that go beyond our mere feelings
about something. Why then just dismiss out of hand any reasoning and evidence that points to consciousness as a naturalistic phenomenon because your experience of it happens to feel differently?
But my freedom to consciously choose is verified by the evidence that I have done what I chose to do. So for the presumption that my freedom to choose is "just the way it seems", you would need some method to verify that my intended choice was entirely predetermined by past events. The problem here is in defining the cause of the conscious intention. The logic you appear to rely on here is that there is nothing else visibly involved other than the predetermined electrochemical activity of the brain cells. But the problem you have is in showing that a conscious intention is entirely defined by nothing but physically predetermined, uncontrollable brain activity.
No, that isn’t “the problem” at all. There
isn’t a problem other than that the models for consciousness we have so far still leave open questions and so are not complete. The same is true though for the theory of gravity, but as that doesn’t “effectively remove” (as you put it) a religious belief you happen to hold about pixies holding stuff down with very thin strings (the epistemic equivalent of “soul” by the way) you don’t just “deny”
that theory regardless of its content.
This is the fundamental dishonesty at the heart of your position yet you’ll never, ever it seems even recognise it let alone attempt to engage with it.
