Searching for GOD...

[Enki]

That might be a problem for biblical literalists, but for the majority of Christians, who take a more intelligent, nuanced view of the bible, it's "so what?" territory.

No doubt,  but my aside was completely apposite if you see it in the context of the preceding posts.

[Alan Burns]

This means that your choice was partly for none of the reasons that pertained at the time and was therefore random.

Reasons exist in your conscious awareness.  You do things for reasons determined within your conscious awareness.  Your conscious awareness has freedom to think up reasons - some good, some bad.  I must presume you are confusing reasons with causes.

[Stranger]

Reasons exist in your conscious awareness.  You do things for reasons determined within your conscious awareness.  Your conscious awareness has freedom to think up reasons - some good, some bad.

Back to the broken speak-your-weight machine act, I see.

Either your "conscious awareness" does all those things entirely because of reasons that trace back into the past, or it does it, in part, for no reason at all and therefore involves randomness.

Anything that just appears in the present, that is not caused by past events, is necessarily random exactly because it has no cause - and that goes just as much for any magic la-la land you want to dream up as it does for the physical world because it is a purely logical argument.

I must presume you are confusing reasons with causes.

reason - "A cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event." [my emphasis].

Repeating empty-headed nonsense that has been answered countless times before, is not logic.

Where is the logic you said you had?

[Alan Burns]

Back to the broken speak-your-weight machine act, I see.

Either your "conscious awareness" does all those things entirely because of reasons that trace back into the past, or it does it, in part, for no reason at all and therefore involves randomness.

Anything that just appears in the present, that is not caused by past events, is necessarily random exactly because it has no cause - and that goes just as much for any magic la-la land you want to dream up as it does for the physical world because it is a purely logical argument.

reason - "A cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event." [my emphasis].

Repeating empty-headed nonsense that has been answered countless times before, is not logic.

Where is the logic you said you had?

But in order to conceive of the short sighted logic you keep quoting, you need conscious freedom to think it through.  Without such conscious freedom the end result would be just a meaningless reaction with no means of consciously achieved verification.

As I said in my previous post - reasons, (as opposed to causes), exist in your conscious awareness, and we are all capable of thinking up good reasons or bad reasons at will because we have the conscious freedom to do so.

[Stranger]

But in order to conceive of the short sighted logic you keep quoting, you need conscious freedom to think it through.  Without such conscious freedom the end result would be just a meaningless reaction with no means of consciously achieved verification.

More mindless repetition. I must have answered this a dozen times before. Why won't you actually engage with the arguments?

Why would the reaction being meaningless? What is it about about the "freedom" needed to think things through and to "verify" them, needs the self-contradictory ability to have done differently without randomness? This isn't about how much consciousness is involved, so emphasising that is totally pointless.

Why are you apparently incapable of actually thinking things through, let alone verifying them?

Where is the logic you said you had?

[torridon]

As I said in my previous post - reasons, (as opposed to causes), exist in your conscious awareness, and we are all capable of thinking up good reasons or bad reasons at will because we have the conscious freedom to do so.

Still doesn't mean that you can want things you don't want, or believe things that you don't believe. Neither can we fully control which ideas come to mind.  if i could do that, I'd just have good ideas all the time. You can exert your willpower to try to think, but all your thinking is constrained by what you have already thought about, what you desire and don't desire, what you believe to be true, and what you believe to be false. We cannot escape this conditioning, it is out of this mental substrate and background that our thoughts emerge.  Could you think a thought that was free of all that you had learned to date ?

[Alan Burns]

More mindless repetition. I must have answered this a dozen times before. Why won't you actually engage with the arguments?

Why would the reaction being meaningless? What is it about about the "freedom" needed to think things through and to "verify" them, needs the self-contradictory ability to have done differently without randomness? This isn't about how much consciousness is involved, so emphasising that is totally pointless.

I make no apology for the repetition which is simply a witness to the God given freedom we all enjoy.  A freedom which nature alone could never give.  And I will continue to use this God given freedom to carry on witnessing to this basic truth which no amount of flawed human thinking can take away.

What would be totally pointless would be the outcome of any "thinking through" process without the facility for consciously controlled guidance.  How can a present state of conscious awareness have any influence over past events? If every event in a thinking process is entirely determined by past events, there is no real thinking - only unavoidable reactions to past events.  In your deterministic scenario, what precisely determines the reactions to the past events?  Are they nothing more than physical reactions?  Can you not see how pointless such a scenario would be if the outcome of any thought process is just an inevitable, unavoidable string of physically determined reactions?

[Stranger]

I make no apology for the repetition which is simply a witness to the God given freedom we all enjoy.  A freedom which nature alone could never give.  And I will continue to use this God given freedom to carry on witnessing to this basic truth which no amount of flawed human thinking can take away.

Look Alan, either you can back up your assertions with logic (as you claimed you could) or you can't and all you have is mindless repetition, baseless assertions, an extensive collection of fallacies, and childish foot-stamping like this.

If you're just here to mindlessly repeat yourself because you think you're earning brownie points in heaven, then you should at least have the basic honesty to withdraw your claim that you had "sound logic". Surely as a Christian you should at least apologise for lying?

What would be totally pointless would be the outcome of any "thinking through" process without the facility for consciously controlled guidance.

You still seem unable to grasp that the role of consciousness is not the issue. How much "conscious control" there is has NOTHING to do with the point of disagreement.

How can a present state of conscious awareness have any influence over past events?

The "present state of conscious awareness" is still empty word salad and this question is exactly equivalent to asking "how can anybody not be the person they are?" In both instances the answer is the same: they can't. You are the person you are and there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot just ditch your personality and become somebody different. That is exactly the same constraint as not being able to change the past because you are what the past has made you.

Anyway - are you just going to mindlessly repeat yourself without any attempt to produce the logic you claimed you had and apologise for the false claim, finally engage with the logic and attempt to properly justify yourself, or be a shameless liar?

[Alan Burns]

Look Alan, either you can back up your assertions with logic (as you claimed you could) or you can't and all you have is mindless repetition, baseless assertions, an extensive collection of fallacies, and childish foot-stamping like this.

If you're just here to mindlessly repeat yourself because you think you're earning brownie points in heaven, then you should at least have the basic honesty to withdraw your claim that you had "sound logic". Surely as a Christian you should at least apologise for lying?

You still seem unable to grasp that the role of consciousness is not the issue. How much "conscious control" there is has NOTHING to do with the point of disagreement.

The "present state of conscious awareness" is still empty word salad and this question is exactly equivalent to asking "how can anybody not be the person they are?" In both instances the answer is the same: they can't. You are the person you are and there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot just ditch your personality and become somebody different. That is exactly the same constraint as not being able to change the past because you are what the past has made you.

Anyway - are you just going to mindlessly repeat yourself without any attempt to produce the logic you claimed you had and apologise for the false claim, finally engage with the logic and attempt to properly justify yourself, or be a shameless liar?

How can I possibly apologise for using my God given freedom to witness to this truth? You are asking me to apologise for doing something which your convoluted logic claims was determined before I did it.

You claim the role of conscious awareness is irrelevant.
You could not be more wrong.
Your present state of conscious awareness is where everything happens - you are aware of the past, you are aware of the present, and you are aware of the choices which lay before you before you consciously invoke them.  As I have previously pointed out - awareness is not a physical reaction in itself - it is awareness of the physical reactions going on in your brain.  When you fully understand conscious awareness, you will comprehend the mystery of human free will.

[torridon]

You claim the role of conscious awareness is irrelevant.
You could not be more wrong.
Your present state of conscious awareness is where everything happens - you are aware of the past, you are aware of the present, and you are aware of the choices which lay before you before you consciously invoke them.  As I have previously pointed out - awareness is not a physical reaction in itself - it is awareness of the physical reactions going on in your brain.  When you fully understand conscious awareness, you will comprehend the mystery of human free will.

No, Stranger is right, it is you that is wrong.  The phenomenon of consciousness is ultimately irrelevant.  It provides a medium through which decisions can be made but it cannot violate the laws of logic enabling for instance choices that are simultaneously random yet not random which is what your claims amount to.  No one can draw a square circle simply by virtue of being conscious. Consciousness evolved to facilitate better decision making but your irrational claims for it would be a disastrous outcome and if consciousness enabled such, then it would not have evolved and it would not have persisted, being a death sentence to any creature that possessed it.  You simply seem not to be able to grasp these fundamentals, so entrenched are you in fixed simple minded ways of understanding.

[Stranger]

How can I possibly apologise for using my God given freedom to witness to this truth? You are asking me to apologise for doing something which your convoluted logic claims was determined before I did it.

Obvious evasion. You claimed you had logic to back up your views and have not posted any. You could have been mistaken, lying, or not posting it for some bizarre reason.

Why won't you just acknowledge the which one it is?

You claim the role of conscious awareness is irrelevant.
You could not be more wrong.

Once again demonstrating that you don't understand the logic of the situation. It is logically irrelevant because the impossibility of your version of freedom has nothing to do with consciousness. You can't argue that we could have done differently without randomness by simply insisting that it all goes no in the "conscious awareness" because it is irrelevant to the contradiction.

It's like trying to claim that you can draw a square circle by repeatedly insisting that you have a pen and a sheet of paper and refusing to address the impossibility of what you claim to be able to draw with them.

[Enki]

How can I possibly apologise for using my God given freedom to witness to this truth? You are asking me to apologise for doing something which your convoluted logic claims was determined before I did it.
.......

I don't find it convoluted at all. On the contrary I find it pretty straightforward. The fact that you seem to find it convoluted and have not come up with any logic in response suggests either:

1) You don't understand the logic.

or

2) You understand it but dismiss it by calling it convoluted rather than confront it.

Either way, you can't seem to deal with it, relying upon misrepresentation, word distortion(the latest being 'reason/cause') and assertion.   These aren't cogent arguments, Alan, they're empty of substance.

[Alan Burns]

Obvious evasion. You claimed you had logic to back up your views and have not posted any. You could have been mistaken, lying, or not posting it for some bizarre reason.

Why won't you just acknowledge the which one it is?

Once again demonstrating that you don't understand the logic of the situation. It is logically irrelevant because the impossibility of your version of freedom has nothing to do with consciousness. You can't argue that we could have done differently without randomness by simply insisting that it all goes no in the "conscious awareness" because it is irrelevant to the contradiction.

It's like trying to claim that you can draw a square circle by repeatedly insisting that you have a pen and a sheet of paper and refusing to address the impossibility of what you claim to be able to draw with them.

You claim my freedom to consciously choose is impossible because I could not have done it differently without randomness - yet from an earlier post you say :

Anyway - are you just going to mindlessly repeat yourself without any attempt to produce the logic you claimed you had and apologise for the false claim, finally engage with the logic and attempt to properly justify yourself, or be a shameless liar?

How could I apologise for doing something which you claim I could not have done differently?
Surely in order to make an apology, I would have to be admitting to the fact that I should have done it differently.
By calling for an apology, you are presuming that "I" am being held to account rather than past events over which I have no control.

[Alan Burns]

No, Stranger is right, it is you that is wrong.  The phenomenon of consciousness is ultimately irrelevant.  It provides a medium through which decisions can be made but it cannot violate the laws of logic enabling for instance choices that are simultaneously random yet not random which is what your claims amount to.  No one can draw a square circle simply by virtue of being conscious. Consciousness evolved to facilitate better decision making but your irrational claims for it would be a disastrous outcome and if consciousness enabled such, then it would not have evolved and it would not have persisted, being a death sentence to any creature that possessed it.  You simply seem not to be able to grasp these fundamentals, so entrenched are you in fixed simple minded ways of understanding.

I fail to see how you could possibly have come up with such a convoluted attempt to dismiss the relevance of consciousness without any input from your own consciousness!

[Stranger]

You claim my freedom to consciously choose is impossible because I could not have done it differently without randomness...

No, I'm not. Jeez, who took your MENSA test for you? I'm saying that consciousness is irrelevant to whether you could have done differently or not. For fuck's sake, what's so hard to grasp?

How could I apologise for doing something which you claim I could not have done differently?
Surely in order to make an apology, I would have to be admitting to the fact that I should have done it differently.
By calling for an apology, you are presuming that "I" am being held to account rather than past events over which I have no control.

More obvious evasion - guilty conscience?

Why can't you either produce the logic you claimed to have or admit you have none?

[Alan Burns]

No, I'm not. Jeez, who took your MENSA test for you? I'm saying that consciousness is irrelevant to whether you could have done differently or not. For fuck's sake, what's so hard to grasp?

More obvious evasion - guilty conscience?

Why can't you either produce the logic you claimed to have or admit you have none?

I think you need to explain why my post is an "obvious evasion" instead of just asserting it.
here it is again:
How could I apologise for doing something which you claim I could not have done differently?
Surely in order to make an apology, I would have to be admitting to the fact that I should have done it differently.
By calling for an apology, you are presuming that "I" am being held to account rather than past events over which I have no control.

[Stranger]

I fail to see how you could possibly have come up with such a convoluted attempt to dismiss the relevance of consciousness without any input from your own consciousness!

What's the matter with you? Can't you follow a simple line of reasoning? Consciousness isn't irrelevant to making choices and composing posts, it's irrelevant to the contradiction inherant in your version of "freedom".

You seem utterly fixated that if it's conscious that somehow magically overcomes the contradiction and that people who are arguing against your contradictory version of "freedom" are somehow dismissing consciousness. Neither are true.

[Stranger]

I think you need to explain why my post is an "obvious evesion" instead of just asserting it.
here it is again:
How could I apologise for doing something which you claim I could not have done differently?
Surely in order to make an apology, I would have to be admitting to the fact that I should have done it differently.
By calling for an apology, you are presuming that "I" am being held to account rather than past events over which I have no control.

How about you address the fact that you have repeatedly just asserted (amongst many, many other things) that you have logic and that the logic presented by others is "flawed"?

It's obvious evasion because you are trying to avoid facing up to your own empty assertions - and it's not like I (and others) haven't answered this "point" multiple times before, only to have you totally ignore the answers.

Matthew 7:5

[torridon]

I fail to see how you could possibly have come up with such a convoluted attempt to dismiss the relevance of consciousness without any input from your own consciousness!

Silly Alan, I never claimed to have written the previous post whilst unconscious. I wrote it whilst conscious as do you, but I don't make the absurd inference that consciousness is some sort of magic that allows people to do inconceivable things like wanting things you don't want or choosing which preference to prefer.  Consciousness facilitates real things, not nonsense things.

[torridon]

I think you need to explain why my post is an "obvious evasion" instead of just asserting it.
here it is again:
How could I apologise for doing something which you claim I could not have done differently?
Surely in order to make an apology, I would have to be admitting to the fact that I should have done it differently.
By calling for an apology, you are presuming that "I" am being held to account rather than past events over which I have no control.

Don't be so naive, playing the innocent card.  Yes you cannot change the past, but you could recognise, going forward, that there is more value in engaging honestly with ideas and with other people and start to ditch your customary flippancy and evasion.  Actually read what is written. Actually engage ideas.  It shouldn't be falling to random posters on a messageboard to introduce you to these basic rules of human decency.

[Alan Burns]

What's the matter with you? Can't you follow a simple line of reasoning? Consciousness isn't irrelevant to making choices and composing posts, it's irrelevant to the contradiction inherant in your version of "freedom".

You seem utterly fixated that if it's conscious that somehow magically overcomes the contradiction and that people who are arguing against your contradictory version of "freedom" are somehow dismissing consciousness. Neither are true.

The contradiction lies with your take on determinism.

You claim that all our choices are determined by past events, but our conscious awareness has no control over past events because it exists in the present.  It defines our present. For conscious awareness to have any input on choices, it must be free from the past in order to do so, otherwise it is just a spectator over what has already been determined.

[torridon]

The contradiction lies with your take on determinism.

You claim that all our choices are determined by past events, but our conscious awareness has no control over past events because it exists in the present.  It defines our present. For conscious awareness to have any input on choices, it must be free from the past in order to do so, otherwise it is just a spectator over what has already been determined.

All things in the present moment derive from previous moments, this is the arrow of time and this clearly applies to consciousness as much as it applies to the speed and position of a boulder rolling down a hill.  Were consciousness to be somehow free of the arrow of time then it would be a random phenomenon, having no provenance.  There is nothing random about consciousness, or if there is, then the extent that there is would undermine the exercise of our will, it would be an impediment, a deleterious misfortune which nature would tend to eliminate over time. What the evidence shows is the opposite of this, since it first evolved in primitive forms it has spread widely throughout nature such that it is ubiquitous in some or other form.  This means we can safely infer it to be a net benefit to organisms, something that would not obtain under the absurd claim that it is somehow free of the arrow of time.

Being temporally aligned with the wider universe does not mean that we cannot remember the past or imagine the future, this is what minds do and how they facilitate better decision making. But all such thought processes must also be deterministic - to claim otherwise is to claim that we have random thoughts and randomness would augur against the exercise of our will.  The thoughts we have are meaningful, ie they are not random, they originate out of deeper workings of mind.  To claim they are free, is ultimately to claim they are random and that would debilitate us.

[Stranger]

The contradiction lies with your take on determinism.

Yet you can't point out any such contradiction...

You claim that all our choices are determined by past events, but our conscious awareness has no control over past events because it exists in the present.  It defines our present. For conscious awareness to have any input on choices, it must be free from the past in order to do so, otherwise it is just a spectator over what has already been determined.

Firstly this is just an appeal to consequences fallacy. You do get that you not liking a conclusions doesn't mean that it's wrong, yes?

It is also nonsense. The program in a chess computer isn't a spectator, it is what is actually making the choices. The mind of a non-human animal isn't a spectator, it is what is determining its behaviour. In both cases (for very different reasons) the behaviour is being determined in real time - no part of the systems can sensibly be described as spectators.

No matter how many times you repeat it, talk of "the present" in this context is meaningless twaddle. Our consciousness is exists in time. Thoughts enter it, get mulled over, choices get made, and we move on to something else.

Here, yet again, is the real contradiction: if every thought that enters your consciousness and every conscious choice you make is not entirely determined by its antecedents (all the possible things that could influence it), then part of the reason for it must be unrelated to its antecedents and must therefore be random.

It is not convoluted, it is simple and straightforward. Neither is it based on material or physical assumptions. I emphasised consciousness because that's what you seem obsessed with but the logic is completely unrelated to consciousness because it applies to any system at all the develops its state over time - as human minds in particular, and any choice making system at all more generally, quite obviously do.

And I'm still waiting for any hint of the logic you said you had, or the honesty to admit you have none.

[Outrider]

The contradiction lies with your take on determinism.

You claim that all our choices are determined by past events, but our conscious awareness has no control over past events because it exists in the present.

Firstly, if our conscious awareness had control over past events it wouldn't be determined by them, but secondly it's not merely a claim it's the logical deduction of how the process works.  If you somehow want to divorce consciousness from prior events then you need to explain how the break happens.

It defines our present. For conscious awareness to have any input on choices, it must be free from the past in order to do so, otherwise it is just a spectator over what has already been determined.

Right.  It's the fact that you don't like that conclusion that seems to spur your argument, not actually anything logically or evidentially wrong with the individual steps.  That's the logical fallacy of arguing from consequence - if you don't like the conclusion, you need to investigate why you don't like the conclusion, but to maintain that the logic is wrong solely because you don't like it makes no sense.

O.

[ippy]

Firstly, if our conscious awareness had control over past events it wouldn't be determined by them, but secondly it's not merely a claim it's the logical deduction of how the process works.  If you somehow want to divorce consciousness from prior events then you need to explain how the break happens.

Right.  It's the fact that you don't like that conclusion that seems to spur your argument, not actually anything logically or evidentially wrong with the individual steps.  That's the logical fallacy of arguing from consequence - if you don't like the conclusion, you need to investigate why you don't like the conclusion, but to maintain that the logic is wrong solely because you don't like it makes no sense.

O.

Rationalising with a heavily indoctrinated Catholic?

The poor bloke is trapped and is totally unable to open certain doors that must feel forbidden to him. This power of indoctrination never ceases to amaze me, the catholic version seems to be the most advanced and thorough form of this kind of mind bending that's revealingly demonstrated almost daily on this thread.

ippy.