Free will and determinism

Trust me, this line of reasoning won't get you anywhere.

You are right, of course, Sci. 

materialist faithful have managed to mangle philosophy

 
Yes, and it's so effective it removed 99% of "germs" (religious or spiritual) even the good "germs" (the kind humans thrive on) And for what good ? 

the usual excuse is there's some kind of dichotomy where every causal act is deterministic or random but there's no definitive logical argument I've seen provided 

The only way to overcome their sophisticated "shenanigans" is too finally "prove" once and for all, that "thoughts" can form/occur without a brain.  

but their starting position is we can't trust our experiences

Or our senses, unless we conclude that we are mistaken, and that couldn't have happened. Then of course we can trust our senses. Simple.

Consciousness exists as an epiphenomenon.

Interestingly the idea of consciousness being purely epiphenomenal is not very popular even in academic circles nowdays. It doesn't make evolutionary sense.

The only way to overcome their sophisticated "shenanigans" is too finally "prove" once and for all, that "thoughts" can form/occur without a brain. 

Even if all we have is the brain/body, it isn't at all clear that would mean there's no free will given our physical reality is also something that is neither deterministic nor random. I suspect we live among machines, and so the idea our bodies are mere machines has a certain ring to it. The "medium is the message", and we are soaked in the medium of mechanisms and thus end taking on mechanistic ways of thinking without realizing the bias.

But there are challenges to all this even in standard academic circles, as @quirkybrainmeat  notes above...What's interesting is as you have neuroscientists like Tononi and Koch saying only what truly exists can truly cause, and what they think "truly exists" is at the mental level...

They seem to be getting dangerously close to validating PK. I sort of get what @stephenw is talking about, how Information Science is going to eventually be a bridge toward a scientific acceptance of the paranormal...Or at least that's what I think he's saying.

But there are challenges to all this even in standard academic circles, as @quirkybrainmeat  notes above...What's interesting is as you have neuroscientists like Tononi and Koch saying only what truly exists can truly cause, and what they think "truly exists" is at the mental level...

Even they thread a dangerous road, just look at how many criticize it for "panpsychism" and "not understanding correlation"

We do have experience of making decisions though?

There's that pesky word "how" again..though I think the reason your question is interminable is this post:


This was the response to when I asked what the criteria of satisfactory explanation is. No one can meet this criteria in a debate, those non-stated goal posts can always recede?

"The man who wants to beat a dog always finds his stick."
  -Serbian Proverb

We have some experience, but not the entire experience. I suppose if I really cogitate on a simple decision, I might see all the steps. But even then, do I really experience what happens between the moment I still have two choices and the next moment when I pick one? I don't think so.

We have plenty of discussions where there is a more-or-less satisfactory explanation. Here we have no explanation at all.

~~ Paul

We have plenty of discussions where there is a more-or-less satisfactory explanation

Nice!  Had no idea you felt this way.  Man did we all invest some time and thought in the linked thread on this topic.  Glad to see it at least put a dent in it.

Oh I keep linking back to the old thread for that reason.

At this point it's obviously an erroneous if not trick question, and the best possible responses have likely been given.

Sweet Mother of Pearl, it's not a trick question.

So if you are willing to link back to the old thread, could you post a link to one of the good responses?

~~ Paul

In one sense I think you are right - a human being seems to be a strange and intimate blend of physical matter and spirit (for want of a better word). I am sure that animals are the same.

In all sorts of ways, you can't explain how living things behave without addressing both components of that blend - so you are right if you ignore the spirit part of the blend. When people such as you try to ignore the spirit part of the blend, the result is a string of absurd ideas:

We have no free will.

Consciousness exists as an epiphenomenon.

Consciousness is a hallucination.

NDE's are best not talked about!

etc.

You are right in that if you ignore the spirit part of the blend, any and all of these conclusions seem to follow.

I think spirits are real, basically because people like you have to endorse such implausible ideas to deny their existence. A spirit clearly has free will (presumably within some constraints), and asking for the mechanism by which spirits operate is either meaningless in principle, or is akin to stone age man asking what makes certain plants poisonous. I.e. it is a question that would require a lengthy scientific exploration of the properties of spirits.

Honestly, I used to think much as you do, but I found there was a growing list of evidence that I had to ignore or explain away.

A spirit does not clearly have free will. Again, the idea of a spirit is a proposed source of free decisions. But there is nothing about the idea that explains how free decisions work. You can simply define spirits to have free will, but that is not particularly satisfying.

I do not hold that consciousness is an epiphenomenon nor that NDEs are best not talked about. I'm not sure what it means for consciousness to be an hallucination.

~~ Paul

Trust me, this line of reasoning won't get you anywhere. It doesn't make any sense how you can choose to take responsibility if you don't make decisions, but materialist faithful have managed to mangle philosophy to the point they have a pile of pseudo-profound statements.

What materialism evangelism has to believe is that there can be no possibility of genuine free will because it's obvious their belief system can't have it. Just look at the difference in how free will is treated versus how consciousness is treated.

We have an a priori reason to believe that materialism is false, there is no "how" that explains how we get consciousness from that which is non-conscious. Even New Atheist Horseman & neuroscience PhD Sam Harris agrees materialism seems nonsensical because it demands Something from Nothing.

Yet materialists don't stop this from claiming that someday such an explanation will be found.

OTOH there's no a priori reason to deny free will - the usual excuse is there's some kind of dichotomy where every causal act is deterministic or random but there's no definitive logical argument I've seen provided (usually the statement is given as something faith-based AFAICTell). Physics, which as per atheist Why I am Not A Christian author Bertrand Russell, just measures causation and doesn't give us an account of what is actually the intrinsic nature of causation:

"All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent."

Even then what it shows us are quantum phenomena that are neither deterministic (not 100% predictable) nor random (can be measured/modeled stochastically). So even before we bring in consciousness there's phenomena that parallel what we think of as humans that possess a certain character but whose every decision cannot be perfectly predicted.

AFAICTell it's all really just religious indoctrination into the materialist evangelical faith of the pseudoskeptics. They'll claim they are acting rationally, but their starting position is we can't trust our experiences nor our decision making so they should be more open to examining their faith-based beliefs...

Don't you think it's the job of the people claiming we have free will to provide the evidence (or proof, if it can be proven logically)? I mean, you can believe it as your default philosophy, but that is not evidence.

The argument about future explanations pertains just as much to idealism as to materialism. Consciousness is not explained.

~~ Paul

Interestingly the idea of consciousness being purely epiphenomenal is not very popular even in academic circles nowdays. It doesn't make evolutionary sense.

I agree. There are a lot of machinations necessary to explain how we are talking about consciousness even though it is epiphenomenal. I think it's doable, but it's tricky.

~~ Paul