Free will Argument against Divine Providence

[genkaus]

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?

You seem to be very, very confused about a lot of philosophical concepts. Try understanding them before blindly using them in whatever way seems okay.

I use the words proof and evidence in two different contexts - philosophical and scientific. Within philosophy, you use logic and deductive reasoning - here, the proof is possible. Within science, you use empirical observation and inductive reasoning - here only evidence is possible. Even in simultaneous application of these two fields of study, you have to be careful to keep the lines of reasoning separate. Therefore, a statement like "prove" your position through "empirical observation" is simply idiotic.

So, either your question should be "What logical reasoning can you use to prove that your observations represent reality?" or "What observations can you use as evidence to support your position that your observations represent reality?" - keep that difference in mind - don't make me keep correcting you.

Now, would you like to restate the question in a sensible form or do you insist in keeping it nonsensical and ask me to answer that?

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.

Once again, the objective system of science does not prove anything.

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.

And back to countering logical arguments with baseless accusations of question begging - given that the operational definitions used here are the real ones. The fact is, when you wake up in the morning, you do more than process light; you process the event of processing light and that is what you call experiencing redness. It is subjective perception because you are perceiving something internal to yourself and it fits quite neatly in my model without any semantic gymnastics. If you want to keep insisting that experience means something other than than without explaining what, then that's your problem.

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.

So, I assume you can talk to fishes and bugs and other assorted members of the animal kingdom - I mean, how else are you to even start justifying that these creatures are subjectively experiencing their environment?

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

Not an assumption - an axiom established by being self-evident and its negation being self-refuting.

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.

No, we don't. That's the beauty of CyberScientist 3000. I just have to feed in a hypothesis - the CyberScientist will observe and examine any prior studies on the subject, devise experimental criteria for the hypothesis, conduct the experiment, analyze the results, categorize them as evidence for or against the hypothesis and record the results for other applications to observe. The reason why this would work is because observation does not require experience and awareness does not require sentience.

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.

Wrong again - what is required is a mind capable of conceptualization, not sentience. You are, once again getting confused between different aspects of consciousness.

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?

I say "evidence" because, as I clarified earlier, we are talking about conclusions that we can draw from empirical observation. If I wanted to establish "proof", I'd talk about logic. Within the context of observation, I make the statement "lot of evidence for it, therefore I believe it". Within context of logic, I say "Proved as logically sound, therefore, I believe it". Nowhere do I say anything remotely similar to "not provable, but I believe it anyway".

And I am saying that there is no information of any kind that humans cannot observe. The evidence for this is that we've been able to observe many different kinds of information - even the ones beyond our perceptual limitations.