Do you believe in free will?

[theVOID]

I am what is called a Compatibilist - I believe that there is no "free will" in a literal sense, such as our minds truly overcoming causality, like an uncaused cause in themselves, even if everything is determined by the unfolding of a cosmic algorithm - unless I am forced to act against my will, every choice i made was still my choice, it was part of my very nature and the accumulation of events in the history of the cosmos lead to my nature being what it was in the first place, so there is no violation dealt to what humans are and what it means to be one.

It only seems natural to act in recognition of the effects of past events, be they natural/physical processes of nature or the events ingrained into my psyche through experience - they ARE what we call our "will", be it truly free or not the implications are identical in every practical sense.

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According to your world view rocks and computers are quite analogous to the human mind because they are all the product of unintelligent physical laws governing matter actually. It is atheist scientists like Steven Pinker who are the ones that compare the human person to a computer not me.

That's because the underline concept of abstract data and how it is represented physically is quite similar to the mechanisms of the brain in handling data - To show that an abstraction can be created quite simply from some conditional logic and a simple input output system with memory is suggestive that the brain needs only a more efficient version of the same concept to achieve the abstract mind that we all experience in being.

To compare it to rocks however is just naive, they don't have any comparable computational system.

You say above that free will is our own and not given to us by God. I'd like to know how you can prove that and demonstrate how in a purely naturalistic universe unintelligent forces can combine unconscious matter to somehow create consciousness and a free will that stands apart from such matter.

I would like to see that too The free will part anyway - What we know of the mechanisms of the brain creates no doubt concerning it's ability to handle the given functions that we experience (and the millions of brain functions that are not part of the "mind" ).

Boy you sound just like another prepositional naturalist who argues from the belief that only the natural world exists and your not willing to consider the possibility of anything more even though there has yet to be a naturalistic explanation for the big bang, fine tuning, the origins of life, consciousness, the moral law, rationality, or free will.

One thing to point out here... we have evidence of nature.

Oh And the whole "we have no naturalistic explanation for..." yadayada is one big argument from incredulity, a logical fallacy.

BTW, we do in fact have naturalist explanations for The origins of life (Abiogenesis), Fine tuning (Multi-verse, Mathematical Necessity) consciousness (monist theory, Metzinger, Spinoza etc.) Morality (Desirism, Moral naturalism, Moral theory of evolution etc) Rationality (Reliablism etc.) and i reject "true free will" as it has not been demonstrated or made logically necessary. Even if none of these presented philosophical and scientific theories come to nothing, i'll be resting fucking easy knowing that unlike you I have enough balls to reject the invocation of Magic Man (Aka God) in the face of ambiguity or inability to reach a complete conclusion.

That's the thing I find most bizarre about theists, you always seems so completely reliant on certainty, to the point where you reject naturalistic explanations that are consistent with reality and entirely sufficient to explain these myriad observations in favor of this invocation of Magic Man or which you have no valid argument in favor of nor evidence indicative of, all in the name of being conclusive - Your illusion that you are able to rationally obtain such certainty makes you foolish, and rather stupid.