Free will Argument against Divine Providence

[bennyboy]

That's the coherence theory of truth. Try out the correspondence theory of truth for size.

Truth is a philosophical construct that indicates how well a statement corresponds to objective reality. So, when we say that for worms, substance X tastes bad, the truth of the statement is determined by the fact of whether or not there is actually a "bad taste" sensation produced in the worms. According to this theory, your worldview itself is subject to true/false evaluation. So, here it doesn't matter if your beliefs are "true" within the context of your worldview - if your worldview is false, i.e. it does not accurately represent reality, then the truth-value of your statement is invalid.

Reality is one thing, and proving that your idea represents it is quite another. You are fond of the word "evidence," and avoid the word "proof" like the plague, for obvious reasons: philosophical positions cannot be proven in the way that you would normally require positions to be proven: through empirical observations which can be shared with others.

Don't believe me? What observations can you use to prove that your observations represent reality?

So, you accept that subjective awareness exists and yet you are not willing to accept any proof of that it exists? You sound curiously like a theist: "God exists and I have experienced this truth on my own, but it is not possible to prove that he exists."

I absolutely agree. From the perspective of an objective system like science, you can as well prove that God exists as you can prove that a system is actually experiencing anything.

I've told you already - try remembering it this time. Self-referential data-processing.

A system (mind) receives data from external sources (sense data) and processes it leading to specific results.

If the same system receives the above event, i.e. the reception and processing, as data and processes that as well, then that phenomena is called "experience". A collection of such multiple experiences give result in "sentience".

And back to the question-begging substitution of operational definitions for real ones. The fact is, that when I wake up and open my eyes, I do more than process light: I experience red as redness. If you want experience to mean other than that, it matters little: the fact of that subjective perception defies semantic attempts to squeeze it into your model.

Ever heard of the locked-in syndrome? Anesthesia awareness? These are examples that show that communication is not the only way to detect awareness.

Not the only way? There isn't even ONE way. All we can do is talk to an organism, and if it reports that it is subjectively experiencing its environment, we can choose whether we are willing to believe it.

Except for the fact that the validity of those philosophical assumptions is subject to judgment as well. Which is why, assumptions based on objective reality do not beg the question. You should be able to justify your philosophical assumptions as well.

They rely on the assumption that there IS an objective reality.

Wrong again. The existence of a readout display indicates that observation has already been made without there being any experience involved. In fact, I can write a program to automatically calibrate the tool according to the raw data received, I can create another program to receive the result from the display and yet another program to analyze those results according to specific concepts and report the conclusions and the whole scientific process after formulating the hypothesis has taken place without any experiential involvement. In fact, once I can write programs capable of formulating concepts instead of simply working by them, we can get rid of human experience in science altogether.

Remember we're talking about using empirical observations to act as evidence for theories, not about making robots that do cool stuff automatically. Well, if you want to use your wonderfully programmed machine to confirm your theory, you (or some other sentient being) are going to have to be able to experience its resultant state in some way.

Solidity more than green-ness. However, constituent particles don't need a particular property for that property to be present in whole. But that is not the same concept as "emergentism".

Call it "boobeldyboo" if you want. Without a sentient mind to see the green-ness, or to draw the idea of "solidity" from a particular density or arrangment of wave function in space, entity words like "tree" are meaningless.

No, we're not. We have shown, definitively, that we can use technology to refine and expand our ability to perceive. But in order to do this, we have to have some idea about what ability we want to refine. If there is some important property in the universe which we can neither comprehend nor even imagine, we will not be able to do this.

You say that you are not confusing comprehension with perception, but your arguments suggest otherwise. There are many important properties of universe that are beyond our perception, but we comprehend them. Even properties which seem counter-intuitive or incomprehensible - we comprehend them as well. So, there is simply no evidence to suggest there being some incomprehensible/unimaginab;e property of the universe.

You say "evidence" too much, as a substitute for "not provable, but I believe it anyway." It sounds like you are saying there is no information in the universe, of any type, which humans cannot observe. What's your evidence for that? That we can perceive some things?