AB,
I have to admit that I am struggling to see the point you are trying to make.
The point(s) were simple enough:
1. There’s no necessity for something other than the material, mortal “us” for consciousness to exist and, even if there was, introducing another agency to do the job (“soul”) just relocates your mistaken objection
to that agency. Your way out of that (“it’s magic innit”) isn’t an explanation, it’s the abnegation of an explanation.
2. You don’t understand how analogies work. An analogy isn’t the comparison of different objects, it’s the comparison of the same argument
applied to those different objects. Hence “a good man is as hard to find as a needle in a haystack” isn’t a comparison of good men and needles – it’s a comparison of the difficulty of finding both of them.
I’ve explained this to you before but you just ran away so it’s s disappointing to have to explain to you again.
3. Your grounds for not accepting my claim “leprechauns leave pots of gold at the ends or rainbows” are the same grounds that I rely on to reject your claims “soul”, “god” etc – they’re logically impossible and there’s no evidence for them in any case. This is why the soul/leprechaun analogy is as valid as the good men/needles analogy.
4. Your solution to the logical problems this gives you is to take recourse in magical thinking - you assert into existence various entities to which, in magic land, the rules of logic and evidence no longer apply – or at least you select (apparently arbitrarily)
which rules of logic and evidence don’t apply in magic land.
This isn’t a solution at all though, for reasons that should be obvious to you – if you want to claim a magic realm in which (some) rules of logic and evidence no longer apply there’s nothing to consider. It’s just white noise. When you asset cause and effect no longer to apply in magic land, then there’s qualitatively no difference between that and also asserting that 2 +2 =5 in magic land too. Anything goes.
Are you clear now?
Is it based around your assumption that conscious control of our thoughts is a logical impossibility - therefore my attempts to verify the reality of our conscious control are doomed to failure?
Logical deduction isn’t “an assumption”. It would help if you stopped lying about that too.
If so this is the point of contention. The fact that you do have conscious control of your thoughts is blindingly obvious to me. The more you try to explain away this reality the more you compound the evidence that it is a reality.
This idiocy has long-since been refuted, and many times too. Just because something is obvious to you doesn’t make it objectively true, at least not at the explanatory level of truth rather than at the everyday lived experience level of truth.
You act as if you are an outside agency investigating the workings of a material brain - which in my mind reflects the truth. But in your scenario you are the material brain which is under investigation and as such will be subject to the constraints found in the investigation - which would mean that if your conclusion that you have no conscious control of your thoughts is correct, the investigation could never have taken place.
What you’re groping towards here called the hard problem of consciousness (once described as “you can’t cut butter with a knife made of butter”). In other word, we can’t step outside “ourselves” to observe objectively from the outside how consciousness works. This much is true, but that doesn’t give us licence to assert myths and fairy tales instead to bridge the gap from subjective to objective. We have extraordinarily well tried and tested methods to distinguish subjective opinions (“It’s obvious to me…” etc) from objective truths and, whether or not these methods will ever crack the hard problem on consciousness, as they're the only investigable and verifiable show in town for this purpose there’s no good reason to abandon them for white noise superstitions.
I have little hope that you’ll understand much of this, or for that matter that you’ll have the basic decency not just to run away from it again but there it is nonetheless. Either embrace and rely on reason and logic for your understanding of the world or don’t, but don’t abandon it for blind faith and then claim the blind faith is also underpinned by reason and logic after all but that you can never produce.
Oh, and especially if all you have is “the fact that you can make these arguments that falsify me must mean that I’m right” utter bullshit Catch-22 please don’t bother. That’d just be you running away again.
