AB,
A few posts ago I set out plainly and simply where you consistently go wrong and invited you finally to show some honesty by addressing them (or at east trying to). Entirely predictably you just ignored them and carried on making the same errors in subsequent replies. Let's be charitable though and assume they just escaped your attention, so here they are again for you to address:
Here’s what you know (or have no excuse for not knowing because it’s been explained to you so often):
1. Your concept of “freedom” is incoherent, self-contradictory and so impossible. Neither science, nor reason nor anything else can find a “source” for it therefore because it cannot exist in the first place.
2. For everyday, common-or-garden functional purposes though your impossible version serves well enough nonetheless. Moreover, this “impossible but good enough for day-to-day purposes” freedom sits perfectly well in the materialist model.
3. The experience of things does not necessarily provide a good explanation for them. You know this already because there are plenty of examples of our perception telling us one thing when more considered thinking tells us another, more coherent thing – the difference between the perception and the deeper reality of touch is just one example. What that tells you is that you cannot necessarily rely on your perception of freedom to provide a good explanation for it – there’s no inexorable logical path from one to the other.
4. The moment you try to respond to an argument you don’t like with, “but that would mean…” you’ve exited the discussion. “But that would mean” arguments are not always wrong by the way – if I claimed the moon to be made of cream cheese and you replied with, “but that would mean that the Eagle lunar lander would have sunk into it so it cannot be made of cream cheese” that would be a good argument. What you actually do though (a lot) is to finish “but that would mean” just with a consequence you happen not to like.
And that’s a very bad argument indeed because for epistemic purposes your personal preferences are entirely irrelevant.
5. Your way to get out of the determinism you don’t like is to invent a little man at the controls you call a “soul”. That though would just transfer the determinist vs random problem to the little man, so you then try to get off that hook by placing him outside both evidence and logic. The moment you try “it’s magic” as an explanation however then again you immediately exit the discussion for reasons that should be obvious even to you. If you want claim magic for one speculation, then you have no choice but to allow it for any other speculation. To do otherwise is called “special pleading”, yet another of the fallacies of which you’re so fond.
6. When you cannot (or will not) address any of the falsifying arguments ranged against you, calling the people making them “the forces of evil” is something I’d be ashamed of if my six-year-old said it, let alone an adult. Indeed ascribing malevolent agency is what six-year-olds do say (“that tree hit me” etc). Once again, it also exits you immediately from any sort of sensible discussion.
7. If you think you have evidence for something (like a “spiritual”), then (finally) you should present it. A warning though: the word “evidence” actually means something – a good test is that if I could use the same type of “evidence” to argue for leprechauns (“I believe it really deeply” etc) than it cannot be evidence at all.
Now then. After all your thousands of posts of mindless assertions, here’s your chance finally to engage openly and honestly with the explanations you’ve just been given of where you keep going wrong.
I have to say that I have very low expectations that you will do so, but it’s your choice. Surprise me.
