Yes yes, if you logically argue something to be true whether anyone likes it or not, you’re arguing it because emotionally you want it to be true… - fallacy name: “Appeal to motive”. I’ve heard that before from a different poor thinker, despite the fact that I intentionally live my life exactly in line with how a “responsible” person would. Perhaps it is a pattern amongst Free Will advocates - to swipe back ad hominem out of petty vengeance when reason yet again fails them? More research is needed.
Look, you can hand-wave at the possibility that my expert identification of logical fallacies could one day fail, but until someone legitimately proves me to not be as smart as I know I am, I’ll chalk up that argument under “empty” alongside the others.
It may shock you to know that I fully accept my lack of mastery in some fields, and I prefer to take a backseat when someone shows superior knowledge on a topic out of a desire to learn. I actually want to be legitimately proven wrong by something I’ve not thought of before - THIS is why I argue. I want to advance my understanding of truth, and only argue more if I see even a shred of potential to better myself (or others) in this regard. So when I want out due to frustration, you can be sure that I’ve realised I’m not going to get anything from further discussion. You will notice by the different tone I am offering others when I am not yet absolutely sure if I am right - there is a reason you received that tone to begin with but no longer do. Believe it or not, I do actually prefer to be patient.
To clarify the first half of your closing sentence (the second half is more fallacious appealing to motive), self-identity is not better in terms of truth, but seems to have at least some value in terms of utility. In my stated interests of truth, this alone is why I argue against it. Even if we were arguing utility, self-identity would not be a clear winner if it was accepted that a discussion could be conducted without the layman use of subjects, grammatically. But I don’t know anyone philosophically advanced enough to try this with.
One thing people at least appear to often forget is that experience takes place, using the terms of Materialism, in the brain. The input that gets translated into experience (even experience of the “external”) is supposed to be “from/because” of some noumenal reality that is supposed to exist independently of subjective perception, despite being 100% directly inaccessible. The only conception you have of the “external” to “your identity”, or even “the nounmenal”, is all 100% taking place within your consciousness. This is what I’m assuming people are meaning when they speak of the “internal”… And this puts the argument squarely in favour of “100% internal” empirically speaking. However, as you can tell by the inverted commas, I am not accepting any of this language. My main reason is that 100% internal (or even 100% external for that matter) means there is no opposite against which to define “internal” (or “external”), invalidating the terms when they are 100%.
What happened to the blackboxing, Karpel?
Are you saying hard determinism is invalidated by consciousness? If you are, I would have to disagree. First of all, are you assuming a Dualist stance? If so, what is your solution to the mind-body problem to legitimise said Dualism? I am not sure the argument would work under Monism. Since you “don’t grant any lack of Free Will anywhere”, I don’t see how Free Will is possible without Dualism. It requires a mind separate from matter such that it is simultaneously immune from being determined by matter, yet can still be influenced by the causation of matter in order to inform decisions, and yet still able to interact with matter once a decision is made and realised. There is so much contradiction in such a claim even if you could satisfactorily solve the mind-body problem. And this is on top of the exhaustive syllogism that either one decides for a reason, which is will but not free from such a reason, or one decides for no reason, which is free from reason but no longer “will”. Therefore you can either have free, or will, but not both.
You need to get past all three of these barriers in order to even think about “Free Will” anywhere.