Do you believe in free will?

[Angrboda]

@ Apo-Except that in this case, when I say "it's under the hood", it's because it is, and we've opened the hood to check. Now, if we were to open the hood, and there was no distributer (yet it still ran), I'd be left with two possible scenarios (and this is assuming that I am not merely mistaken about there being no distributor). One, this car doesn't require a distributor, two, it is located somewhere else. Well, show me the somewhere else and I'll give 2 more consideration than 1. Or, as I've been mentioning all along, someone could just point to the fucking distributor. Why ask me to provide more information than we have? I wish I could explain how our minds work in every particular, but I can't. That doesn't mean that anything you have to offer has value. You must make that case yourself.

I have to demonstrate that you don't know where the distributor is? You've pointed to a pile of things and said, "that's the distributor," and I'm supposed to demonstrate that you don't know which part is the distributor? Despite your already having admitted that you don't know ("I wish I could explain how our minds work in every particular, but I can't."). You've made a claim that the self not simply is inside the brain, but that it is the brain. If you can't demonstrate that the entire brain is the self, then you're equivocating. And I can tell you for certain that a neurosurgeon can cut away many parts of the brain without affecting your self. So the brain isn't idempotent with the self. So again, you're pointing to a set of things, and telling me they are the one thing, and now I have to demonstrate that you know what that one thing is? That's fucked up. You made the claim that the brain is the self, you have the burden of proof, not I. And so far you've shown me nothing that even looks remotely like a self.

And you completely ignored the mereological point in the rush to reverse your burden of proof. Let me explain it to you this way. I ask you what you use to type your posts with, and you say your hands. I point out that if the brain is you then they aren't your hands because they aren't a part of the brain. At which point you'll likely say that you control them. Yet the gravity exerted by earth controls them every bit as much as you do, so are they the planet's hands too? You see, you haven't identified what exactly a self is, and until you do, your claims to know where it is are either equivocation or handwaving. Unless you really do know where the self is, in which case I'd like you to define the boundaries between self and not-self, such as which lobes of the brain are involved, is anything outside the brain involved, and so on; until then, your claim that the self "is" the brain is an assertion without any evidence. Telling me that I have to prove that you're ignorant about what exactly the self is, well that is just messed up.

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If the planet I'm on becomes a nuclear fireball, the self will cease to exist. Yet if I claimed that the planet "is" the self, you'd rightly consider me a nutter. Let me ask one final time. I let you know that a fluxnarb is a part of the engine. I ask you to point to the fluxnarb, but you can't do it, not because the engine doesn't have a fluxnarb, but because you don't know what it is, and thus you can't comply. In the same way, when I point to the brain and ask you to point out the parts that are the self, you can't comply — not because the brain doesn't have a self, but because you don't actually know what a self is. Given that level of ignorance, it's ludicrous for you to claim that you know that the "brain is the self" because the latter term in your world is undefined. Knowledge statements with undefined terms are meaningless (from logic, not speaking colloquially; any term anded with a term that has no truth value renders the entire expression without truth value, meaningless or null — according to classical logic [there are logics in which this is not the case; I'm assuming you're okay with classical logic]). Therefore, unless you can define the self so that I can match up the parts of the self with the parts (or whole) of the brain, your statement that "the self is the brain" is meaningless. And I am not in any way responsible for supplying you with the right definition or proving anything about your claim. You are. Or, you can continue to utter meaningless statements.
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