Free will Argument against Divine Providence

[bennyboy]

That's where you are wrong - we are not making a definition in physical terms, we are making it in empirical terms. That is the point you consistently fail to get.

You say tomato, I say "begging the question." By "empirical," you mean observations which can be part of our mutual experience. Let me ask you this, would you accept mental self-reflection or self-observation as an act of empirical observation? If not, then put your thesaurus away, because you are using "physical terms" and "empirical terms" interchangeably.

We are identifying reality based on our ideas - which in turn are based on reality - not defining it. Which is why talking about idealistic monism makes to sense.

Your ideas are based on reality? As in, objective reality? Tell me, pray tell, how are you to confirm this confident assertion, but with your mental faculties? And should these faculties turn out to be too limited to comprehend the truth that the entire universe offers, what then?

Sure. What's the criteria for the falsifiability of your hypothesis that "sentience cannot be shown to be true".

What's this "true" stuff? Sentience, as in the ability to ACTUALLY experience rather than just to process information from the environment, cannot be shown to exist, except as a concept.

Wrong - that's the point I'm making. Without the actual capacity to feel experience it'd be impossible to completely mimic the results of experiential data processing.

So basically, there is some unique quality of mind which cannot be represented by any mechanical process, no matter how complex? I mean people are pretty varied-- I don't think passing the Turing test is going to be so hard.

Like I said, the current preponderance of evidence favors the physicalist interpretation of all mental functions, including sentience. Thus, the discovery of the elements I mentioned can be reasonably expected - though not guranteed - hence the use of the word "yet".

The preponderance of evidence shows that every mind which is able to communicate the fact of its awareness to human beings supervenes on the human brain. It says nothing about how any physical system CAN supervene the important quality of actual awareness, or about what other physical systems might have some level of awareness.

That's your problem: you don't say "we don't know yet, let's find out", your default position is "we can't know at all". Thankfully, the scientists don't share your view.

Strawman much? I've never said we shouldn't try to find out about the brain or the mind. I've said that the ASSUMPTIONS we make about mind are neither proven nor provable, due to limitations intrinsic to the subjective perspective.

But let me say this: all the science we do begins and ends with sentience. You think looking through a microscope is an objective process? Or gazing through a telescope? No. These things are all experiences, and so all of science happens at the level of concepts, not the level of any physical reality that might underly them.

Don't believe me? Then answer me this: is a tree, for example, more properly referred to as an object, or as an emergent property of particles completely lacking tree-ness?

Assuming that the worm or the bat is capable of that level of understanding - this is a question for you to ponder upon. I think about the issue quite frequently and have a few ideas about how to go about this - but any such discussion would be pointless if you keep arguing from the assumption that it can't be done.

lol this is an anthropomorphic example. The point is that we can see that all living things are intrinsically limited in their capacity to comprehend the truth. We can fully understand WHY a worm can never ever comprehend, for example, the doppler shift of stars moving at different speeds; the worm cannot see, and so it cannot be said to comprehend "reality." Now, what are the chances that humans are so perfect in our perceptions that we have no absolute system limitations of this kind? I say zero percent; what say you?