RE: Consciousness Trilemma
May 28, 2017 at 5:34 pm
(This post was last modified: May 28, 2017 at 5:39 pm by bennyboy.)
(May 28, 2017 at 8:02 am)Khemikal Wrote: OFC you can describe it as such, eliminative materialists take issue with those descriptions, not that you have a feeling.How can a label for a feeling be an error? If I felt a sunset was beautiful, and also a statue, but they lit up different neural systems, would you then claim that beauty is an illusion, since there's no definite "beauty state, neuron, bundle or region?"
In any case, that subtle sort of compatibilist free will isn't really the sort of free will I was touching on. I'm simply presenting the feeling we have of a classical free will as something that, under specific circumstances (in that case a hard determinist universe), would not only be in error, but be non-existent. It would be something else that we were experiencing, and then attributing whatever that was to our free will. As such, we'd never find the "free will" mental state, or the free will neuron, or the free will bundle, or the free will region, because it didn't (and couldn't) exist. It didn't map to a specific, discrete process or structure.
You mention "classical free will," but could you explain what that means to you? I've found a lot of contradictory ideas but the dominant Christian view (which I guess you're taking as classical) is that God chooses not to directly control the behaviors of man in guiding him toward a fateful end: instead, man is able to control the outcome of his life by making decisions. Is it your view that I don't make decisions, or that they can affect the outcome of my life? Or do you equate determinism with a kind of fatalism-- my end is already writ in stone, because each moment in time can unfold in one and only one way?
