(February 15, 2017 at 3:24 pm)Aroura Wrote:(February 15, 2017 at 1:46 pm)SteveII Wrote: 1. I think if your worldview was Naturalism it would. For there to be real free will, the mind, something immaterial, would have causal effect on the world and the notion of determinism undermined. I have not heard of an argument that preserves both Free Will and Naturalism. Feel free...1. You make a lot of presupposed assumptions about me. I fought very hard against the idea of determinism, for years. I hated the idea, and had many debates about it. I do not have a world view based around it, I just accepted it. I already accept there are immaterial concepts and ideas. I do think naturalism is correct, however, if it were proven incorrect, I would accept it and move on, just as I have done before. I have no deep beliefs or philosophies based on it that would unravel. I have no God or Soul or Afterlife to lose.
2. My third reason addresses the brain damage objection: Lastly, while there is a causal dependency of the mind events on the brain events, you cannot confuse correlation with identity. It does not follow that if two events are correlated, that they are identical.
3. I presented 3 reason that you have not addressed specifically. Why is this not evidence that for mind/body duality?
4. A worldview is measured on how well it assimilates reality into a coherent framework. I think mine does that better than yours for a lot of reasons. This one happens to be the topic of this thread. If you are okay with a worldview that fails to address everything, that is your business.
(p.s. I've studied this in multiple college courses. I know the arguments for and against. I personally find the arguments for duality, free will, and a personal God all to be weak, and based on emotional attachment to the ideas, and little else).
How do you think you would react if it were proven that free-will did not exist? Would it negatively impact your belief in God, or how you view yourself as a self made person, and how you view others as choosing to be sinful or good? [1A]
2. No, it doesn't. It also doesn't follow that they are not identical. There is no actual evidence that mind is not just an emergent property of the brain. Illogical arguments are not evidence.
3. Fine, I'll address your 3 points.
a Not everything that goes on in our mind is causally determined by our bodies. Sometime what goes on in our bodies is a result of what goes on in our mind. I am choosing to reply to you and do the necessary chores of getting sentences down on the screen. We have mental-to-physical causation. The explanation of both the choice I made and the physical events going on in my body is for the purpose of defending my position. A purposeful explanation is a teleological explanation and a teleological explanation is not a deterministic one.
I already addressed this one. I never said everything that goes on in the mind is determined by our bodies. But it is determined by something. Just because you do not know the causation does not mean you get to insert magic. This IS essentially God of the Gaps. [2A] Also, if you are going to define free-will to mean purpose or desire, then just admit that and we can discuss compatibilism. [b][3A][/b]
b. Secondly, electrodes can be used to stimulate the brain to do different things (make a noise, raise a hand, etc.). However the patient always says something like "I didn't do that, you did that". There is no place that can be stimulated to cause a patient to decide to do something.
Exactly! Because there is no decision making, so there is nothing there to stimulate. The feeling that you "chose" something is illusory, this example exposes that illusion. This is actually evidence of the illusion, not something magically exists outside the brain in some "real" way. [4A]
At any rate, your final sentence isn't true. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) appears to profoundly affect cognitive control, and feelings of "choice". Damage to this region of the brain can make people feel as if they are not making choices, but simply responding to impulses. They describe themselves as feeling "robotic" or as if they are simply a passenger in a vehicle, watching it all happen. People can actually lose the feeling of free will, because it is caused by the brain! [b][5A] [/b]
In any case, you are still inserting magic where there is a gap in knowledge. Back to God of the Gaps, but with free will.
c Lastly, while there is a causal dependency of the mind events on the brain events, you cannot confuse correlation with identity. It does not follow that if two events are correlated, that they are identical.
Right, but that also does not mean you get to entirely dismiss that they might be. Correlation does not imply causation, true, but it in no way dismisses causation entirely. [6A]
If the mind existed outside the brain, then we would have the ability for the mind to exist when the brain is fully asleep (not REM), or dead. But that isn't the case. When the brain sleeps, so does the mind. When the brain is dead, so is the mind. (waits to hear about NDE's next) [7A]
(p.s. In case I was unclear, I am not attached to the idea of determinism. I actually still find it difficult to accept, and rather detestable to think we are either basically robots or perhaps slightly random robots. I struggle quite a lot with the notion, and it causes me more than a little anxiety. I would probably feel relief, if anything, to find evidence that it is not correct. That being said, I don't deny things simply because they make me uncomfortable. I face what seems to me to be truths, even hard or difficult truths. So please stop asserting I only believe this thing because I want to, that's so patently absurd in my case, it's not even worth a laugh.) [8A]
1A. If Free Will was proved false, it would be catastrophic to my worldview. While you seem to be agnostic about the body/mind duality issue, you have made statements that say my belief is false, un-reasoned, and inserting God-of-the-gaps/magic. The fact that my worldview depends on Free Will being true says absolutely nothing about whether it is true or not--and therefore carries zero weight.
2A. No no no. If one comes to the conclusion (as I do) that there is an immaterial mind that can think/reason/decide and then have causal effect on the brain, then that is all we can conclude from that evidence. I never said, "therefore God." That is poor argumentation and would be God-of-the-Gaps. If I were to move on to a Natural Theology argument that God is the best explanation for an immaterial mind, then that would have it's own arguments and conclusions--but that is a separate issue than what we have been discussing. But, back to the points I made in A. You didn't undermine them with some other explanation--so I am going with the conclusion--the mind is immaterial.
3A. Compatiblism is just redefining Free Will until it fits with determinism.
4A. You have simply described compatiblism--which seems to be the result of Naturalism running smack into what all of our reason and senses tell us is genuine Free Will. The resulting conflict must be reconciled--so we will redefine our way out of it!
5A. Just because neuroscientisthave identified the area of the brain that processes a decision does not make a point against an immaterial mind. No one disagrees that the immaterial mind must act on the physical brain. Since the brain both feeds the mind all physical stimuli and is the recipient of direction from the mind, it only makes sense that damage to the brain will produce psychological effects.
6A. I was not making a point about causation. I was making a point about identity.
7A. Again, the immaterial mind is 100% dependent on the physical brain.
8A. I only meant to point out usually that atheism results in naturalism which entails determinism. If there is anything the proves any of these steps wrong, it will cast doubt on the others.
