… but what does more ‘complicated’ mean? no matter how he defines it, you’d not be willing to retract your belief in freewill because you don’t know what the concept of metaphysical freewill is… what it is asserting. Silhouette and peacegirl (to an extent… but she’s a ‘soft-determinist’) are the only ones in this thread who know what in sam hill is going on here.
now you tell me; what is the special property a human being has that makes it immune to influence of the natural forces? ‘consciousness’? but consciousness is an effect, not a cause… unless you believe that thoughts can move objects.
when comparing rocks to humans, of course we can say that there is a greater complexity of system processes, but processes aren’t things, aren’t physical, they are descriptions of behavior. we’re not questioning how things behave, but why they behave as they do, and process is not an explanation for this… at least not at the fundamental level we are examining here. now if you disregard the differences in processes for a moment and look for the property that all things have in common, you’ll see that they are all objects located in space/time. now if causation affects all things in space/time, what is that special property human beings have that makes them exempt to these causal forces? forget about your consciousness, your ‘thinking’… this is not a property in a physical sense… not even a thing… but a descriptive process for a kind of behavior; you don’t ‘have’ consciousness, you don’t ‘do’ consciousness. you ‘act’ consciously or not, and we say you are conscious not because we ‘see’ or have located in your brain some special feature which we can say of ‘wait… that’s not part of the brain… that’s something else’. rather we see corresponding behavior states to mental states, and while these are sometimes interchangeable (mental state x may be contiguous to behavior y, or vice versa), there is nothing showing that a mental state doesn’t, itself, follow causally sufficient antecedent conditions… conditions you didn’t spring into being by ‘thinking’.
all this talk about slave mentality and subconscious/unconscious instinct and psyche and power totems and yada yada yada is neither here nor there. until you can demonstrate a substance - such as an acausal ‘soul’ - that cannot be affected by the physical causation that affects everything else in the universe, you cannot assert that there is metaphysical freewill.
you guys really, really need to do some research on the philosophy of freewill and determinism so you can know exactly what you’re saying when you say freewill is real. i can tell by your arguments that you haven’t done this. i know this because you aren’t even defending freewill properly… much less refuting determinism. if i can come in here and present a better argument in defense of freewill (even though it would be sophistry), you guys ain’t hittin’ on shit.
i’ll even give you a push. read over hume’s problem of induction so you can get an understanding of the only solid empirical argument against causality. and then look at kant’s reply to hume on this problem. finally, look at how spinoza treats the problem, and you’ll find the strongest deductive proofs for the existence of causality that stand on a purely rational foundation. you’ll discover that you don’t need to ‘experience’ causality to know that it exists and that everything in existence is subject to it. no ‘wiggle’ room, no ‘yeah this is determined but not that… not all the way, not completely.’ and if you find the shit too dry, check out richard taylor, roderick chisholm, and peter van inwagen.
man i don’t what ya’lls deal is. it’s like you’re scared of the shit or something. like it’s not even a big deal, though. what are you gonna do if suddenly you realize there’s no freewill? stop getting out of bed in the morning? what, do you need to believe in freewill to make your life meaningful? you think if the world woke up tomorrow and stopped believing in freewill, there’d be any less responsibility and culpability? hell naw, man. it was never about freewill in the first place because there’s no such thing. the entire corpus of judicial law and morality is founded on power relations, and you can bet your ass there will always be consequences for what people do. that shit in a court room about ‘yeah but you knew it was wrong’ or ‘but you could have chosen not to do it’ is nothing but a sophisticated language game ministering to some kind of exchange/subordination of power. morality and freewill is just a cover-up for this dynamic. the shit isn’t real, bro!
ya’ll need to spend a whole week studying substance dualism, because that’s what you’re all doing… and ya’ll don’t even know it. don’t think anything you say in defense of freewill hasn’t already been said, said better than you, and thoroughly refuted. ya’ll niggas is better than this amateur shit you’re doing.
promethean75, out.