AB,
An experience of freedom would not be capable of yielding the same result as the freedom needed to guide your thought processes to a viable conclusion.
“The freedom needed to guide” is just a repetition of your previous mistake, and essentially yes it would. Deterministic consciousness would be (in fact IS) experientially indistinguishable from your invisible little logic-free man at the controls version – each would appear to be the process of independent agency over our thoughts, only the former explanation is consistent with reason and evidence and the latter is just “it’s magic innit?”.
In your example, fingers do touch the keys because it is their force fields which are touching. Force fields are just as much part of the finger as atoms. If the atoms actually touched there would be colliding electrons and ensuing chaos.
Way to miss the point. Ask almost anyone whether fingers actually touch the keys – ie, material touches material – and almost all will say yes. Why? Because it just feels that way, everyone agrees, it’s "obvious", it’s "blatant", it's "common sense" etc – you know, exactly the same things you say about your conjectures with no arguments or logic to support them. The difference though is that, when confronted with reason and evidence, most people will accept that their perception of touching was wrong. When you’re confronted with reason and evidence about your assertions though, you just double down with the way it feels, “obvious”, “blatant”, "flawed”, "common sense" etc. Why? Because you’re so emotionally invested in your beliefs that you cannot bear to be honest enough to confront the sound reasons that falsify them and the total absence of sound reasons to justify them.
But the truth you continue to avoid is the absolute improbability of being able to reach any viable conclusion by physical reactions alone without the freedom needed to guide your thought processes.
What makes you think that that’s so improbable at all, let alone that the way out of supposed unlikeliness is to rely on magic for your answer? Given sufficient complexity there’s no reason to assume that a brain could not produce consciousness as an emergent property. Your incredulity about that is all you have, but no logic at all.
The reality…
YOUR reality AB, not THE reality…
…implies that we have much more freedom than can be achieved through physically determined reactions of material elements.
I hear the assertion, but – yet again – where’s the logic to support it? Your incredulity just “implies” that you vastly underestimate the complexity of brains and that you’re ignorant of even the basic principles of emergence (despite having them explained to you several times). Does that mean the consciousness must therefore be an emergent property of brains? Not necessarily no, but it does mean that we have a perfectly good explanation in principle significantly but not wholly supported by evidence with no sensible reason at all for junking it in favour of “it’s magic innit?”.
The source of this freedom is beyond your understanding, but it must exist because you exist. You are the source.
That’s just incoherent. Must leprechauns exist because rainbows exist? Must unicorns exist because hoof prints exist? Must Jack Frost exist because it was icy this morning? That something exists isn’t on its own evidence for anything (other than that it exists at all). To be evidence for something you need logic that connects premise(s) with conclusion(s). “It must exist because you exist…” doesn’t even get its trousers off for this purpose – it’s just (yet another) mindless assertion.
You can of course keep repeating the same utter nonsense over and over again so as to refuse ever to engage with the arguments that falsify it, but this behaviour just makes you look foolish or dishonest (or both). Keep behaving that way if you want to, but it’s not a good look when you try it among thinking people. Really it isn’t.
