(May 30, 2009 at 10:10 am)Darwinian Wrote: My reason for accepting the notion of free will is simply that I 'appear' to experience it. So therefore I accept it and would require evidence of some kind to think otherwise.
And that's the circular argument once again.
If you do have free will then to you - you appear to experience it...
But if you don't have free will then to you - you still appear to experience it.
There's no reason to believe the appearance would be any different with or without it. How can we possibly tell?
So to say the appearance of it is evidence when you can't possibly tell the difference either way is fallacious.
And to say that the fact you believe in free will or people commonly believe in it is evidence of (or reason to believe in...) the truth of it - is a circular argument.
To say that the fact you believe in free will is rational because it 'appears that it exists' to you pretty much equates to saying:
"The fact that people commonly believe in free will is all the evidence they need to be rationally commonly believing in the truth of it".
That's circular because you are saying belief in free will is a rational reason to believe that free will
is true.
Quote:This is quite different from God. With this the default position is not to accept it as there is no reason to think otherwise. Unlike free will, we don't have sense of God within us do we?
I don't have a sense of 'free will' within me anymore. Free will I think is simply even more common a belief than God. And free will is instilled in us more from evolution while religion is more culture.
But the fact 'free will' is more commonly believed and instilled in us through evolution is irrelevant. The fact we believe it or even that we have evolved to believe it is not remotely evidence of the truth of it...because the belief itself cannot support the truth of the belief - that's circular reasoning.
What evidence or reason have you got that we couldn't just as easily believe in free will without free will?
Belief in free will is not evidence that we couldn't just as easily believe in it without it. We could believe in free will without having it! How couldn't we?
So all that is irrelevant. It still comes down to the fact that there's no evidence of (or reason to believe in...) free will that I know of.
and as I said:
1. Belief in free will is obviously not evidence of free will itself, because a belief is not evidence of the truth of a belief - that's circular.
2. Belief in free will is not evidence that without free will we couldn't believe in it. I have know of no reason to believe that we couldn't just as easily believe in free will without actually having it.
3. So what reason is there to believe in it then?
Quote:Of course, it may be that you are different in that you don't sense anything akin to free will, but I do and so do all the people I have spoken to about it, whether they actually think it real or not.
Sensing free will is irrelevant to the truth of it because you could just as easily be sensing it without actually having it. You can't back up the existence of free will with the experience of it because what you are experiencing as 'free will' you could just as easily be experiencing without it as an illusion (as I believe you indeed do).
EvF
