Free will Argument against Divine Providence

[bennyboy]

With this, I categorically disagree. First of all, you've just said that none of these abilities necessarily constitute awareness. You'll have to explain how it both CAN and also CANNOT.

What I said was none of these abilities on their own can be considered to necessarily constitute awareness. As of now, we simply do not know which combination of the given abilities are required for awareness and which are the optional extras.

You are defining awareness in functional terms, rather than experiential terms. I think you'll be unsurprised to find that I do not accept your definition, or the process at which you are arriving at it.

Second, I define experience as my ability to really feel feelings, really see colors, not just for my brain to process them. I know this special ability exists, because I happen to have it. I assume people have it, because they behave much as I behave, and so I believe they are like me in other ways, as well.

You should also be aware of the difference between "experience" and "awareness". Experience is a specialized form of internal awareness, i.e. you being aware of the working of your own mind. When an apple is put in front of you, your eyes receive the visual data and transfer it to the brain where it is processed. All the while, you are aware of this process occurring and you refer to it as the experience of seeing the color red. When your stomach is empty, it leads to a biological reaction resulting in the desire for food and your awareness of this process is regarded as feeling hungry.

The issue is not how the brain translates light into a composite symbol "apple." The issue is how a physical system has arrived at the actual experience of redness. You are clearly confident in this narrative, but you are lacking even a beginning theory about how this might happen. Given ANY kind of processing, or ANY physical structure, how is it that the actual experience we have supervenes on it?

For a machine to pass the Turing test, I believe it'd need to have a certain level self-awareness, if it is to talk intelligibly about its internal state. Thus, I believe it to be capable of experience as well.

That's a philosophical position, which will undoubtedly be "proven" by similar question-begging: well, we've shown that certain kinds of self-referential processing represent sentience, and we've shown that the Cyberboy 2000 processes in this way. Therefore it's experiencing.

And THAT is exactly why I don't allow the non-dualistic use of dualistic words. The reality is that when the Cyberboy fires up, it may just be processing data, and not experiencing it as colors, or as beautiful patterns, or as delightful scents; I, on the other hand, know for sure that I am engaged in a rich experience of my envrionment. Your semantic convenience (read: "sensible adaptation of the words to new contexts") could one day have real consequences: like people choosing to put their "consciousness" into mechanical brains, and thereby erasing their actual consciousness from the universe, and dying maybe 50 years early.

This is a problem, because if you want to prove that awareness is a particular kind of data processing, you'll have to show that there is no fundamental awareness in rocks, or in the sun, or in every particle in the universe. Having evidence for a theory for which contrary evidence cannot, even hypothetically, be produced is not to have a workable theory-- it's a very good signal that question-begging is accompanying philosophical assumptions.

This is not a problem for me because the very nature of a data-processing system rules out the possibility of fundamental awareness in the rocks or sun or particles of the universe. Secondly, identifying the definitive features of awareness would require justification - which means that any such theory would have to be falsifiable.

The existence of experience is neither provable nor falsifiable. Therefore, the most sensible hypothesis is that you do not actually experience, but just seem to.

Any collection. A drop of water might land on my head; a gust of wind blows it off course; the drop therefore has no free will. My dog might go to his food bowl; he can see that my wife has not put food in the bowl; my dog therefore has no free will.

If we use the phrase to refer to just any collection, then there is no point in defining the term at all. The whole point of starting with a generalization is to determine, form that point onwards, which particular specifics would be sensible - not to exclude specifics altogether.

EVERY collection is "just any collection," unless you have a real-life, sentient human mind capable of experience to dub one system significant, and others not.

You're mixing modes: you insist on a physical monism, but keep using words in which mind, will, etc. exist in some meaningful way. But they don't. What separates the chemical/energetic/gravitational interactions of the brain from any other system from one in which "mind" exists? Nothing except an idea.

And again, we're down to operational definitions. Don't believe me? Define beauty, and say how it can be "verified independently."

Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure or satisfaction.

Such a perceptual experience would take a specific form within your brain and - should the means of observation be developed - it'd be verifiable.

So beauty is NOT a property of things, but a reaction of the brain to things. And in fact, thing-ness is not a property of things either; even this exists only at the conceptual level (i.e. of a sentient, thinking being).