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This is not a discussion on consciousness. We're discussing free will and I don't want you changing the discussion. Please limit your posts to free will and/or determinism. There's a thread already current on consciousness - please take any comments on that subject there: What Creates Consciousness?
Yes I agree appropriate recompense is the ideal. But it seems to me in reality, how we naturally react is we want the perpetrator to also suffer something. Experience some sort of penalty, suffering to denote the wrong done.
That's pretty obvious.
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Why can't God know? To say that God can't see all possibilities and know which one is going to happen is limiting an unlimited God. Your mind is limited and that's why it can not make sense to you. Are you all powerful? Can you create something out of nothing? Can you create the earth? Those are not rhetorical questions. I would like you to answer them.
No, I cannot do any of those things.
The only way any being can always know which one is going to happen is only if that one (that possibility/choice) was always 100%. Which would make the other one 0% now wouldn't it. So how can that be a choice in that case if it is/always was always known 100%?
Sometimes the obvious needs to be said as the answer is that simply. Some things in life cannot be explained by reductive material science. Yet are just as real as the objective world.
No we do have some idea, its one of those things, like conscious experience of red. Try explaining that to someone. You canot in material terms. But you know within yourself that its real, its a real phenomena, a red experience just as much as the chair we are sitting on.
Like consciousness, its obvious to us but we cannot put it in the terms you want. Of course I know all the material reasons why we have no free will. But that comes under the reductionism and physical processes. Ones we can see, hear and test mechanistically.
Yes as I said I understand the mechanisms. Man we could go back to the atom. Its all about the neurons, chemicals, genetics. The physical causes that cause and cause and cause again in a chain of events within the causal closure of the physical.
What about a subconscious? Do you believe it is possible to lie to oneself?
Of course. It doesn't have to be the subconscious. We can knowingly lie to ourselves. But a lie has a certain quality about it. It doesn't intergrate very well with us. Theres a disconnection with reality.
Just to make sure that we're clear, I'm talking about subconsciously deceiving oneself while NOT being consciously aware that we are deceiving ourselves. I'm asking if you believe that we can subconsciously deceive ourselves, even because if we were consciously aware that we were lying to ourselves, then we would be aware it's a lie and subsequently that would mean we know it's not the truth, which in turn doesn't qualify as actually being deceived.
From what I read, informed opinion in the field is that only the 'Hard Problem' of consciousness (Chalmers) is not, in principle, open to scientific explanation. Many aspects of conscious experience already have at least partial explanation (e.g. belief can be characterised as a persistent 'truthy' informational pattern); but the fact of subjective experience itself, i.e. that there is something it is like to be conscious, is inevitably beyond all but correlative explanation.
That doesn't follow. Knowledge is associative information resulting from the way a brain stores, retrieves, and processes sensory information. Intentions are goals derived from feelings (sometimes via reason). Agency is (generally) the capacity to act on intentions. All are compatible with physical causality & explanation.
That sounds more like a description of philosophical intentionality, which is not related to intent but to representation, 'aboutness', or content in mental states. On second thoughts, you described attention rather than intention...
So our belief in free will is concrete evidence of our free will? We certainly participate in creating reality, we have influence in and on the world, but so does the weather...
Are you seriously suggesting that people are behaving in the way you describe because society doesn't recognise that people are responsible for their actions, or is this some odd rhetorical spin? How many people do you know who don't think people are responsible for their actions?
That's poor logic - if a lack of belief in free will led to chaos, that would not be evidence for free will. It might be evidence that a belief in free will avoids chaos, but the premise is unsupported.
Ah, so the experience and belief of alien abductions is evidence for alien abductions?
Then I you think you're done. I've explained why we don't have it. But you have absolutely no idea how it would work if we do. This isn't a debate on whether it exists or not. It's just you saying 'you're wrong, because I'm somehow right'.
It's remarkable how long this thread has stayed alive. The deck was always stacked in favor of determinism because the op qualifies the adjective "free" as free from determinism, which is why I mentioned earlier that determinism and free will are not a true dichotomy.
Free will can be true if determinism holds, so it's not a loaded question. You need to check out Compatibilism. Compatibilism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
But that requires that the meaning of "free" would have to morph in a moral/immoral paradigm, so that they're not mutually exclusive. I also said earlier that the meaning of free will is going to morph and that most people are going to end up saying it's philosophically compatible even because it's not a true dichotomy.
The op was quite clear: '...if free will is defined as the ability to make decisions that are not determined by prior events...'
