AB,
Can you please explain again, in simple steps, how such a statement can have credence if every thought ever experienced will have been determined (i.e. predetermined) by past events beyond conscious control?
Certainly:
1. To date every observation we’ve made of the universe shows it to be determinative – essentially every effect has a cause, generally multiple causes interacting (I’m excluding for now discussion of “true” randomness at the quantum field level which may or may not reveal different insights).
2. This means that, absent a good reason to do so, when seeking to understand observed phenomena there’s no justification for departing from the determinative model.
3. When the determinative paradigm does not provide a cogent explanation moreover, that does not justify it’s abandonment. Why? Because we cannot just suppose that at some future time we won’t have better reasoning, instruments etc the will enable a determinative explanation to be found. That’s why, for example, huge amounts of energy and money were invested at CERN that found the Higgs-Boson, rather than just throwing up our hands and saying, “that’ll be Zeus (or whoever) then”. This is a basic error in thinking you make a lot.
4. Evolution has no brief to arrive at “true” understandings of the world. Rather genetic mutations persist when they convey survival advantages on the host, but no more. What that mean is that the way things feel does not necessarily map accurately to the “out there” world. Specifically, having the feeling that we have truly “free” will is functionally important and useful, but there’s no reason to assume that the experience necessarily also maps to an underlying explanation for what’s actually happening.
5. We observe pretty much everywhere we look a phenomenon called “emergence” – that is, complex and sophisticated outcomes emerge spontaneously from simpler, interacting components that individually do not have the properties of the emergent property. Emergence happens “bottom up”, not “top down” – that is, there’s no need for a plan, a controller, an intellect to decide on what the outcome should be.
6. Relatively simple collections of constituent parts can produce much more complex emergent properties. There’s no good reason in principle therefore to think that the vastly populated and interacting components of brains could not produce the hugely complicated emergent property of consciousness.
7. Various fields of academic and medical research – neuroscience in particular – are gradually and painstakingly developing, testing and validating our understanding of consciousness. There are still significant gaps (which is why the work goes on) but as you should know by now gaps in explanations do not justify their abandonment for alternatives that have no investigable properties of any kind.
8. So, to your question: it has “credence” because “free” will a you assert it to be works well enough at the functional, workaday, “that’ll do for practical purposes” level of abstraction at which you and a I are talking right now. That does not though for one moment mean that the logic- and evidence-based explanation of “free” will being a determinative process does not sit alongside that perfectly readily, just as the workaday experience of touching the keys in front of you does not invalidate the deeper understanding we have that no two objects ever actually touch because for the repellent forces involved.
Now I know that you don’t want any of that to be true. Why? Because decades ago you came to some conclusions on which you then built the edifice of your various faith beliefs. Your problem though is that the falsify the determinative model you don’t want to be true you have to come up with reasoning of your own that’s more coherent, more robust, more resilient to critique. But you can’t do that because you have no such reasoning – instead you rely on assertions with no supporting reasoning (“it’s blindingly obvious that…” etc), or you do attempt reasoning of your own but when you do you always collapse into one or several of various fallacies. The reason you’re accused of trolling then is that rather than engage honestly with the explanations of why your arguments are fallacious, instead you just ignore the problem and then repeat exactly the same fallacies a bit later on.
So why not prove me wrong here and instead of pretending that nothing has been said that undoes you actually, finally, address openly and honestly those problems when they arise?
