AB,
You have chosen a very trivial example to illustrate your point of view. Not many people take notice of such detail in Christmas trees, and it is very simple to verify once the problem is considered.
As so often, you have fundamentally missed the point. You were attempting yet another logical fallacy (the
argumentum ad populum) by implying that lots of people finding something to be obviously true must tell you that it is true ("…which is abundantly evident to all but a tiny minority who seem to think that…"). I was merely explaining that “all but a tiny minority” thinking something does not mean that they must be correct – whether or not the example that illustrates that principle is trivial is entirely irrelevant to the point being made. And it’s also very simple to verify the deterministic model of consciousness once you bother actually to think about the logical impossibility of your alternative.
A great many minds have thought very deeply about the causes and nature of human freewill, and not all have come to the same conclusion as you. You seem to treat it as a foregone conclusion that if anyone thinks deeply about this subject that they should come to the inevitable conclusion that everything they choose to do, think or say will have been entirely predetermined before they choose.
No, it’s not the process of thinking but rather the conclusions that thinking must reach if you follow where the most robust logic currently available to us inexorably leads. That’s why you abandon the good ship logic when you see where it does lead, and assert instead magical thinking (“soul”, “spiritual” etc). Curiously though, having declared “man-made” logic to be inadequate for the purpose of validating your various claims and assertions, you nonetheless keep trying to make arguments using that same method to do that verifying, albeit that you always get it disastrously wrong when you try it.
And this would certainly be the case in any man made machine or robotic simulation. Yet the very act of consciously choosing to think about it would appear difficult to explain in such a scenario.
Not if you bother thinking about it it wouldn’t. Your problem here though is that thinking beyond the most superficial of levels is something you refuse to do, presumably because you’re terrified of the consequence if ever you tried it.
But you continue to ignore the possibility of human agency having a cause determined by the conscious human mind which is not entirely predetermined by past events.
That’s because it’s not a possibility – it’s an
impossibility, for the reason that keeps being explained to you and that you keep resolutely ignoring. Your position is essentially, “this consciousness stuff looks really, really complicated to me – therefore I’ll assert it to be non-physical”. And that’s all you have – personal incredulity from beginning to end regardless of the evidence and reasoning that undoes you.
And our perception of reality may well be closer to the truth than anything you can postulate from your own limited thinking capability.
All thinking is “limited” by the abilities of our minds to do it – yours included (or especially some might think). Yes our intuitions “may” as a matter of dumb luck light upon truths that our reasoning cannot reach – gods, leprechauns and unicorns included – but when the logic and evidence we do have consistently tells a different story why would anyone decide that the unqualified and self-contradictory guesses of intuition should be preferred?
