RE: Free will Argument against Divine Providence
August 11, 2013 at 6:23 am
(This post was last modified: August 11, 2013 at 6:37 am by Edwardo Piet.)
(August 10, 2013 at 1:47 am)genkaus Wrote: Physicalist dualism? What's that? Emergentism?
Yes.
(August 10, 2013 at 1:47 am)genkaus Wrote: It may have been your opinion, but you did not present it as such.
Since my statement is not a lie, when I state it I also think it which means that it is my opinion.
It's my opinion since I think it.
Quote:That's interesting. Because your personal definition of free-will - the one requiring ultimate self-determination - can only make sense within the context of substance dualism.
Ultimate self-determination is impossible. Ultimately we are not determined by ourselves.
We are ultimately not self-determined.
Quote:According to emergentism, certain entities (or properties or aspects) can arise within the physical system that are not reducible to its parts. The whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. For example, while your brain is formed of neurons firing, the way it functions gives rise to the existence of "mind" or "self" which cannot be described or explained completely by the cellular neural events. Adding indeterminism to the mix, i.e. assuming that the individual states of the parts do not fully determine the whole - you have a bit of "elbow room" at the mental level within which the mind is allowed to determine itself to certain extent. This gap in determination is referred to as "free-will" which would be meaningful in the way you specified.
A gap in determination is just randomness or probabilisticality, neither of which are ourselves doing the determinining and thereby having free will, since for ourselves to do the determining that would require NO gap in determination AND our determination to be ultimately determined by ourselves and not all entirely determined, ultimately, by everything that is not our conscious self.
A gap in determination is a gap in self-determination.
Quote:Not unless you can prove indeterminism to be false.
An absence of determinism is an absence of self-determinism.
Quote:Except you didn't prove it as unsound, nor did you give any arguments to that effect, thus making your argument by redefinition - as indicated earlier - invalid.
It's a contradiction, no determination means no self determination.
With or without determinism there is no free will.
Quote:This is where substance dualism gives you a third option - your will is ultimately determined by your consciousness and is therefore ultimately self-determined.
Our consciousness doesn't determine itself ultimately, therefore our will isn't ultimately determined either.
