Free Will: Yea or Nay?

[Davian]

Are you able to judge another's subjective experience? Shall I judge yours?

No.

And then you proceed to do some judging...

I agree that appeal to consensus does not make a belief true only that the two proposed beliefs have a radically dissimilar quality. Appeal to consensus shows here that the positive assertion or proposition that "believing God is like believing in Santa Clause" is of the same salient quality as all delusions known to humankind. It is like the proposition of any man who goes into a town and claims that fairies exist or argues that belief in other minds is like believing in fairies on the sole grounds that he cannot have a sense experience of other minds or because he alone can see the butterfly people.

I used the belief in Santa as an analogy, as representative that belief is not a choice, in line with the theme of this thread.

No one can see your butterfly people - the correlation you are making with regards to God. If nobody can see the analogy between Santa Clause and God it says more about the person making the claim then it does about the theist.

A veiled insult. Do you feel that insulting those that disagree with you adds weight to your assertions?

When, in philosophy of religion there are roughly two dozed arguments for the truth of theism,

If you feel that you have one that works, open a thread with it and lets kick the tires and take it for a spin around the block.

(none presently well-known for naturalism) and there is are no adult person's arguing for the existence of Santa Clause, when people come to this belief when they start thinking rather than before they start thinking, the man making the claim appears strikingly similar, in fact indistinguishable to that young child of the age of four, but for the fact that he is an adult and thus like more like the lunatic - like the man who writes in on the walls of his cell, "the world is but a dream and I do not care if 99.9999 percent of the world cannot see it."

 

[Davian]

No, it's cheap and irritating.

That it makes you feel that way just shows that it is working.

You remember they killed him, right?

 

[Chesterton]

 

[Star Adept]

What would we experience if reality was an illusion?

You can deny any thing by claiming it is an illusion. Its how the fools get to atheism. I think we should explain reality rather than explain it away.

You would experience another reality. I'm a schizophrenic. Please explain reality to me so I might finally be cured. Conversely, you can accept an illusion as reality and the less testable the illusion is, the more real you can claim or believe it to be.

 

[striger]

Wheres my free will to fly like a bird ????????

 

[Davian]

Wheres my free will to fly like a bird ????????

 

[Chany]

I get it!

 

[Davian]

Wheres my free will to fly like a bird ????????

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy states: "There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. Its knack lies in learning to throw yourself at the ground and miss. ... Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that presents the difficulties."

This is the part that involves 'free will':

"One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It's no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won't. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else then you're halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it's going to hurt if you fail to miss it."

Flying - HHGTTG

 

[Star Adept]

I understand your point, Dev, but it does not remove free will.

Rather, it is to say that we are free as an individual to make our own choices. We cannot choose to do that which we are unable to do, thus it is not an option in so far as choice.

 

[Davian]

I understand your point, Dev, but it does not remove free will.

I will take this as directed at me.

Rather, it is to say that we are free as an individual to make our own choices.

Agreed; as Dennett states in his book, Elbow Room, we have "the power to be active agents, biological devices that respond to our environment with rational, desirable courses of action."

Elbow Room (book) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

We cannot choose to do that which we are unable to do, thus it is not an option in so far as choice.

From a neuroscientific standpoint, the question is, which choices, if any, are made by the phenomenal self ("I"?), or is it more accurate to say that the phenomenal self is created by the brain and only remembers having made those decisions (it just feels like free will).