Determinism Is Self Defeating

[bennyboy]

You look yourself in the mirror and say, "You don't exist except as a symbolic representation of the activities of quantum particles AND NOTHING MORE" And if you can do that and believe it, then I'll start thinking you have a point about free will and the mind.

ChadWooters, a Swedenborgian who hasn't been seen round here of late, consistently would challenge me to deny the brute fact of subjective experience. I don't deny the so-called "brute fact" itself, I deny his and your interpretation of that brute fact. Your interpretation of it, and the fact itself, are not one and the same. That would be like asking me to deny that the earth around me is flat as far as I can see, and then when I tell you that, in spite of this, the earth is a globe, you telling me that I can't deny the "brute fact" of my experience of the earth as being flat. You're substituting a debatable interpretation filled with hollow inferences for a fact of the matter, and it doesn't wash. It's said that the explanation of any matter is obvious once you understand the explanation, and before you do, the thing is completely mysterious. Like a magic trick, the illusion is wondrous until someone shows how it is accomplished without resort to actual magic. You, and most people, lack such an explanation which would de-mystify the phenomena, and mistake your wonder at its mystery for something of evidential significance.

Before I get all excited about answering the many individual ideas in your post, could you give me a nice clear statement of your thesis? I smell an ad hom in there, but I'm not sure what point you're trying to undermine with it.

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That has always been my criticism of "knowledge" derived from subjective experience; someone can know that they had an experience but to be certain that you know it had a special meaning, and what that meaning is, speaks of a faith in one's own ability to interpret the produce of one's own mind which is simply not deserved when you consider how many ways in which the brain can glitch or otherwise produce unreliable information.

Hmmm. Is there any kind of knowledge that isn't derived from subjective experience? My daughter and I spent part of the morning experiencing looking through a microscope and experiencing reading a science text; does that count?