It seems to me you're using a very narrow definition of evidence, especially as our discussion is an issue of what underlying evidence is relevant to the conclusion. A conclusion that writes off the most secure evidence we have and if followed rigidly leads to a denial of the one basically indisputable truth there is must be built on irrational premises.
So our senses are trustworthy...except in our sense of self? The issue here is you seem to think the outside world is more real than the world of consciousness in some way, because you use a premise that the only senses we have are those related to the outside world.
Self and consciousness are real, so is the world they exist in. I didn't say any different than that.
I can understand why, but I'm not proposing that it doesn't but using it analogously to the current discussion. It is just as silly to me to deny that free will exists, and for much the same reasons.
I'm not denying that free will exists. It certainly *feels* like it does. What I don't understand is how it could arise. That has not been answered by anything in this thread including assertions that it *must* exist, nor analogies that are silly.
Oh? And how do you know physics is trustworthy?
Centuries of evidence and experimental verification. A systematic approach to evidence. You know, normal science stuff. I know far more about physics and its anomalies than where free will could come from.
On a very narrow definition of evidence, built on metaphysical commitments that you refuse to admit you have made. Because you can't question your own worldview assumptions.
the assumption that the world is mechanical is a metaphysical belief.
Mechanical is not a word I would use, but what we have are physical phenomena nested one around the other in a consistent fashion. At the bottom of the chain are well understood properties of the natural world.
You seem to misunderstand, because it is not truth that is dependent on free will but our ability to make claims about it. Since you're unwilling to explore the assumptions you've onboarded by simply refusing to acknowledge that you have metaphysical beliefs there's not a whole lot of discussion that can be had on this portion. It takes a willingness to critically examine what we believe to be true about the world to engage with.
I'm not interested in discussing the theory of knowledge or what "reality" is, etc.
You're imposing metaphysical commitments onto the issue, because we cannot assume that the world operates mechanically so a lack of a mechanism isn't really a problem. That's metaphysics, not physics.
Physics doesn't need a meta.
So your refusal to acknowledge that your conclusions involve metaphysical commitments simply means you haven't critically examined why you truly believe what you believe, and since we don't share metaphysical commitments gives us little room for discussion on the evidentiary basis for or against free will. You've written off the most direct evidence we have, in order to prefer an extremely limited class of evidence as substantial.
What you seemed to have been doing is invoking some sort of non-physical interaction with physical matter as an agent (?) of free will. I have seen the same claims regarding "souls" and consciousness. What you are talking about is some immaterial thing (I think) interacting with the material of the nervous system that receives inputs and transmits motor signals along nerves by electro/chemical means. Those transmissions are operating under the laws of nature and are physical. If this immaterial thing is interacting with those signals there is some sort of interaction of this immaterial thing with matter. How does this occur? That is what I want to understand. (I don't expect you to have the answer.) The only plausible interactions on the right scales are electromagnetic and any other seems to be excluded by experiment. That's how we find out how things work, we examine them rigorously and the collection of tools known as "the scientific method" are the best ones we have derived to examine the physical world and the stuff it interacts with.
Nope, physicalism. The belief that existence is exclusively physical. Which your worldview assumptions clearly fall into some class of. Simply because you refuse to admit you have metaphysical beliefs doesn't mean you don't, it just shows you've never critical examined them.
"Physicalism" is a dumb term. I prefer "philosophical naturalism". When I see something unnatural, I'll let you know. (And you have no idea what I have and have not examined critically.) It is the conclusion I came to after decades of interacting with the Universe. I'm not sure I even had a choice to come to that conclusion.
It's a confounder to kick the problem up a level. When it all boils down to it, it comes down to the reality being either the physical operations in the brain or some combination of the semantic content of our thoughts and the physical operations in our brain. It seems clear to me that our thoughts have demonstrable effects on our brains so there must be some reality to them, and if we can't explain that reality in terms of material/physical processes then the implication isn't that the reality of our conscious experiences is illusory but that a metaphysical commitment to materialism/physicalism is unwarranted.
No it is not "kicking the problem up a level". Emergent phenomena are all over the natural world. Unfortunately, they are not well understood outside the scientific community. Another is unification. Just two centuries ago, we thought electricity and magnetism were separate phenomena. Then men like Faraday and Maxwell unified both into a single electromagnetism. Since then physicists have learned that what seemed like separate areas of physics are tied together by the same underlying laws and principles into a unified whole.
Chemists learn that chemistry works because there are atoms and those atoms gain their properties by nuclear physics and the quantized interactions of electron with nuclei. They learn that molecules are driven by bonds and bonds are quantum mechanical interactions between pairs of nuclei and one or more electrons. Effectively "chemical properties" are just emergent from the underlying quantum mechanics and properties of nuclei.
Biologists learn that the cells are complex and messy chemical systems and numerous parts of their operation has been tied directly to chemical processes. (including DNA transcription and replication). Larger organisms are built from the operations of millions of cells.
Economies, politics, and sociology are the behaviors of large groups of humans that emerge from the psychology of individuals when interacting in groups. Ecology emerges from the interaction of many types of creatures of different types (plants, animals, etc.).
Dismissing or avoiding emergent phenomena doesn't make them go away.
Weather being an emergent property doesn't remove its properties from being fully explicable in terms of the properties of flowing air. It just means that the interactions of those properties produces surprising effects that aren't always immediately predictable. Consciousness isn't simply unpredictable, but requires an entirely new fundamental understanding. And since, as we both agree, there is no physical explanation for that fundamental experience its existence raises serious problems for our intuitions about how the laws of nature operate.
Do you base this on the neurobiology of consciousness? I don't have any familiarity with neurobiology personally, but I am aware that they are the ones studying this thing. You note surprising new effects in emergent phenomena like weather and it was in weather forecasting that the chaotic nature of fluid dynamics was discovered. (And here I am using the technical definition of chaos.) People who study fluids and applied mathematicians are *still* working to understand the nature of chaotic flows in fluids like the atmosphere, but we do know what aspect of the equations of motion for fluids are the source of chaos. Consciousness is clearly not as well understood as chaos in fluid dynamics. (I should add a bit of professional advice: "intuition" is a really, really lousy way to understand how the laws of nature operate. The whole of the "scientific method" is basically designed to overcome the limitations placed on understanding by "intuition" and "common sense".)
Neither am I, I'm using the example analogously. Because as far as I can tell, the suggestion that free will doesn't exist is just as ridiculous and yet it is taken seriously within academia for some reason.
I have no idea what they do in that part of academia. When they work out how free will works, I'll take a look at it. I would be curious to know, but I have learned that it is not worth one's intellectual and emotional capital to invest in knowing every unknown thing. It only eats away at you and makes you "disturbed" by thing you can't fix. I have my own obsessions with unknowns to work on.
You're simply making an unvetted metaphysical statement. Simply being unwilling to examine your metaphysical beliefs by denying they exist doesn't remove them from existence, it just demonstrates an unwillingness to engage in critical examination of the things you believe about the world.
Things are only worth believing in when they are demonstrated. Until the supernatural is demonstrated, it is not worth believing, nor paying attention to.
