Do you believe in free will?

[The Grand Nudger]

Was I, I'm sorry, again I defer to those uninformed people at Stanford. Your determination that I (and by extension they) am wrong comes from what, a philosophical argument made 17 priors that no longer criticizes our concept of self (since we have learned, in that 17 year interim by means of demonstrable evidence, that this ciriticism was at least partially correct, that there is no self as a thing as far as we can tell, only as an effect of a machine? So, redefinition, but no elimination.)? Well damn my ego. Since I'm speaking to an eliminative materialist, I'm wondering why I even have to mention this, since it has been the strongest criticism of the position almost since the position was first expressed. Such a strong opposition, in fact, that Churchland herself has opined that she would not call it "eliminative" anything..if she were forming the position today. How your arguments surrounding the self and some incinerated planet are compatible with either eliminative materialism or the position of cognitive science still eludes me. But my ego is probably getting in the way. How something about the self is being handwaved away by those who do not even attempt to make the argument you presented them as making eludes me. Again, probably my ego. That a statement that plainly lays out both what we know and the limits of what we know is ignorance eludes me, ego again? Here I am arguing evidence, and you're responding with philosophy...hmn, what to choose, what to choose.... In this case, it would seem that even though your philosophy and my evidence lead us to roughly the same conclusion, I would probably defer to the evidence available as the strongest case for our shared conclusion. Especially since that evidence both validated and called into question a philosophical position all at once.

(To be clear, I'm no stranger to being wrong, I'm more often wrong than right (and those are just the times I realize it, god knows how often I'm wrong without realizing so, but I'd rather you provided me with a better reason than because I say so, or because this philosophy says so, when I'm refering to evidence and evidence alone, with no assumptions made about anything more than what that evidence suggests, when i keep providing references for precisely what I'm saying, while you keep ignoring them.)