Free will Argument against Divine Providence

[genkaus]

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.

Given experience itself is a form of awareness, defining it in experiential terms would give rise to circular reasoning. Besides, when talking about what constitutes awareness we are automatically required to give a functional definition.

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?

Read it again. I'm specifically addressing the issue of "how a physical system arrives at the actual experience of redness". The theory here is that the aspect of self-awareness by which we become aware of the internal workings of the brain is what we call experience. Simply put:
1. A physical system becomes 'aware of', i.e. processes external information as a result of which certain changes take place within it.
2. A physical system further processes this act of processing itself, due to which further changes take place within it.

If 1. occurs, we can regard the system as 'aware'. If both 1 and 2 occur we can regard it as experiencing something.

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.

Once again, you are the only one begging the question here. You start with the assumption that experience is not and cannot be a form of data-processing and therefore, any data-processing physical system cannot be - by definition - capable of experience no matter how apparent its capacity for experience maybe. So, even if the Cyberboy 2000 says "This apple is red, round, smooth to touch and tastes sweet", you'd regard it simply as a machine processing visual, tactile and chemical data - not as an entity experiencing something.

My position, on the other hand, is falsifiable. I do assume that experience is a form of self-referential data-processing which means I would expect a physical system with human level of complexity and capacity for self-awareness to be capable of experience. Notice the use of the term "expect" - which means, I won't simply assume that it is capable of experience. But, if my assumption is correct then such an entity entity would be capable of experience - though specific to its physiological make-up and needs. I would expect it to find certain patterns as beautiful, certain scents as delightful and the taste of motor oil preferable to that of an apple. But, if it gives no such indications, then I'd have to accept that there is something more to experience than data-processing.

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.

I long for the day. I do not accept the assumption that a person's 'real' consciousness is something inexorably tied to their biological brain. And I do not attempt to study consciousness in functional terms simply as a matter semantic convenience. This is the very real consequence that I not only expect, but wish for. All I can hope for is that it would become a possibility within my lifetime. Transhumanism FTW.

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.

And why would you assume that it is neither provable nor falsifiable?

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.

I was under the impression that both of us qualified for that. Just me then?

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.

I though I had settled this point with my ingenious software-hardware analogy. We know that all software is reducible to particular forms as functions of the hardware. All your applications and programs can be explained by and described as a series of electronic pulses represented as 1's and 0's. And yet, we do not argue if software exists or if the terms can be used in any meaningful way. We can talk about all the different aspects of software without any regard or reference to the underlying hardware. Clearly, we accept the fact that an entity being explicable by or reducible to its underlying cause does not detract from its existence or meaningfulness. And for precisely the same reason, we can regard mind and will to have meaningful existence within physical monism.

So beauty is NOT a property of things, but a reaction of the brain to things.

No, the reaction would be the experience of pleasure or satisfaction. Pursuant to this reaction, the property referred to as 'beauty' gets assigned to the thing. However, since this property depends on the person perceiving the thing and not the thing itself, it is a subjective property.

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).

Yes. Though sentience is unnecessary for establishment of identity and this particular conceptual imposition is neither arbitrary nor subjective.