Defending Pantheism

[Alan V]

But emergent and reducible are not mutually exclusive concepts.

Emergent properties are not reducible if they disappear when the complexity is taken apart. Think of disassembling a bird. It loses both the ability to fly and the property of life.

That is not to say that understanding the components isn't important to understanding how the system works, but that's a different issue.

But even so, chemical properties are reducible to the behavior of subatomic particles (physics). Biological processes are reducible to the interactions of molecules (chemistry). And psychology is reducible to the neurobiological processes in the brain (biology).

Some are, some aren't.

Because physics can (in principle) explain each and every process that occurs in the brain, "willing" (a function of the brain) is reducible to the laws of nature. Since none of us can control the laws of nature, none of us is able to to control what our brain "wills."

You are begging the question. That is exactly the point under dispute. If new properties are possible, they might not be restricted to the same rules as the properties of less complex arrangements of matter.

This doesn't mean their aren't good arguments for the existence of free will... it simply means that the complexity of the brain isn't one of them (or perhaps needs revision to explain how brains control physical processes and not vice versa).

I disagree. As I have said, the human brain can reason and can act by reasons. That is not the same thing as acting by material causes at all.

There are theories of mind that propose that all feedback mechanisms in the universe are sentient. By this reasoning, the back of your toilet enjoys some crude form of consciousness. I reject this kind of reasoning as superfluous and unfounded. And I also reject a similar sort of reasoning that says: once a feedback mechanism is so complex it become autonomous. How exactly does that work? It may appear autonomous to those who can't see exactly how it works, but my default position is that a brain is subject to the laws of cause and effect just like a rock or any other piece of inanimate matter.

To attribute consciousness to the smallest possible particles of matter is reductionistic, and in fact I consider it a reductio ad absurdum.

The brain is subject to the laws of physics, certainly. Which does free will violate? Determinism is not a law, it's a property.

What about a cell in a person's body? Does it too have free will? If not, how does a collection of cells gain it?

Through the emergence of new properties with complexity. In other words, very gradually through evolution.

If you think emergence is reducible, you don't understand emergence. Emergence builds up through chance evolutionary events, not through strictly determined events. There is therefore no follow through of determinism to higher levels of complexity. Instead, it's whatever worked evolutionarily. Free will worked as one evolutionary strategy.