Sound logic comes from the consciously driven ability to think, to asses, to reason, to draw inferences and to form conclusions.
The 'consciously driven' bit there is unevidenced, but the rest of it's a reasonable start point.
Yet many on this thread claim that such consciously driven ability must be an illusion because thoughts themselves must be entirely driven by previous events in a deterministic system.
Not because thoughts must be from some ideological perspective, but because that's the explanation that fits the available evidence.
You start off from a presumption that this ability to logically analyse can be derived from a deterministic system in which every event is entirely defined by a previous event.
No, we don't. We start from a position where we have a well-validated method for investigating observable phenomena - the scientific method - and an observable phenomenon - consciousness. We apply one to the other and derive from that some conclusions. Given the nature of the scientific method, those conclusions are always to some extent provisional, and consciousness is far from the robustly evidenced piece of science, currently, but nothing that you're putting forth at the moment is sufficient to undermine our best current understanding.
So for any form of logic to be enabled in our conscious awareness, you must presume that it is capable of being derived from unguidable reactions to previous events.
Not presume, conclude, but yes.
I put it to you that any form of logic could never come into our conscious awareness without the essential freedom needed to think, to asses, to reason, to draw inferences and to form conclusions.
You can put that, but you need to justify it, or I can just as easily put to you that, in fact, we can and the discussion has gone absolutely nowhere. Why do you believe that free will is required to make logical deductions? Of all the forms of the thought possible, I'd suggest that logical deductions are the easiest to justify in a deterministic brain, trying to justify artistic decisions would have been the more technical stretch.
The science of neurology is only scraping the surface of the workings of the human mind. After 100 years of investigation the concepts of thought and memory have yet to be discovered in neurological terms. The idea that it all emerges from physical reactions is just a presumption based on very limited scientific knowledge.
The detail of thought and memory, perhaps, but the underpinnings are there and broadly understood. As to the idea that it all emerges from physical reactions that's not speculation from an imperfect knowledge, that's a deduction from the absolute lack of any evidence of any other system at work. Even if our current understanding of how the brain works were to be proven wrong, you'd still need some sort of supporting evidence for some other mechanism of activity that could interfere with our activity in order to justify a claim of a non-physical element to consciousness.
Let's presume, for a moment, that everything science believes it has concluded about neurology, psychology and the function of the brain is fundamentally flawed. That leaves us knowing absolutely nothing - your claim of some spiritual component is completely unaffected by that revelation because it has no more nor less foundation than it had before, which is to say none. If you want to posit a non-materialist element to consciousness, if you want to try to make 'free will' work, you need to resolve the logical conflicts inherent in the concept and provide a framework in which such ideas could be justified. Choosing not to accept the current best understanding of science only justifies the claim 'I don't know', it doesn't justify the claims 'therefore souls' or 'hence free will'.
O.
