You covered this topic very well and I will be reading this again because I think there is a lot in it that will serve me well as I tackle skeptical issues myself.

Thank you for posting such a beautifully written article on this very important subject.

With you on the sockpuppet theory. I wonder if he’s given it button eyes…?

Not all people develop abstract thinking strengths and some people who have previously been strong in this area may lose the facility. People with certain learning disabilities and some types of mental retardation can have great difficulty conceptualizing beyond a certain point or they have trouble with words that represent ideas rather than things. They see such abstraction as incomprehensible gibberish.

In some instances brain injury, particularly in the frontal lobe, affects a person’s ability to think abstractly, and this may cause difficulties when people need to make conceptual decisions, make moral judgments or problem solve in complex ways.

It should be reiterated that there is a normal range of abstract thinking ability, and some people are more concrete than they are abstract. This does not predict less success in life, though high deficits in abstract thinking might indicate some learning disabilities.”
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-abstract-thinking.htm

The problem with the others is that they expect you to state your view so that they can ask probing questions whose only purpose is to denigrate that view and, at the same time, they refuse to state their own view so you can get some sense of what their questions actually mean in the context of their own views. Context is everything sometimes. When pressed to give their view they slide into incomprehensible gibberish. It is impossible to argue against a position that cannot be clearly stated. And I’m pretty sure that is their intention.

After all this time in this thread, and several other threads that you may not be aware of, I still have no idea what AD thinks on this issue. Does he go with the scientific assumption that everything has a natural explanation? Does he think there has to be something more than just natural explanations? Who knows? At this point I am beyond caring because I’m never going to get an answer anyway. I wouldn’t even care if he just had sensible arguments against my position but he couches those arguments in terms of something that he just refuses to identify and which I suspect is a belief in supernatural ideas whether he recognises them as such or not.

regards,
BillyJoe

beyond that, the qualifiers i used were intended for emphasis and accuracy of my thoughts rather than just redundancy, and as for the robot thing, i meant to imply, of course, that such beings would be specifically, even arbitrarily defined in such a way that they met the criteria of both having exactly replicated human brain function and being unconscious.

i tend to agree that such a thing is likely not possible, even if it is artificially generated. in fact, i even hold a few very specific hypotheses about the actual physical nature of consciousness that necessarily imply they would be exactly as conscious as we are.

Can you say “sockpuppet” too?

First of all, thanks again for your input.
And apologies for misunderstanding your intent initially.

‘the reason i used the word “technically” when i did is to assert that i was sticking to a very particular and strict definition of the word “choice,” which i don’t necessarily see as appropriate. and i used the word “theoretically” because that’s the word you always put in front of an assertion that has not been experimentally verified.”

Both of your statements were already conditional “if” statements. My only point here – and remember I agreed with them both of those statements – was that those two words were redundant.

“to be SURE in that way of what we are discussing here would mean needing overwhelming evidence that the human mind is a fully deterministic system. there is SOME evidence for that, and none in conflict with it, but in order to call it the way you are….”

No, I have always referred to this as the *assumption* of science, never a certitude. I don’t know what else I can do to draw attention to the fact that I am saying it is the *assumption* of science that everything has a physical explanation – except to repeat it again now for about the tenth time.

“we would need first to understand the WHOLE SYSTEM to a drastically more complex level than we do now, and THEN we would need to run certain currently-unimaginable experiments 1000s of times and always get consistent results.”

Yes, and we would continue to work on the *assumption* that the the mind has a physical explanation.

“hypothetically, the only way at this stage of understand we could be actually sure in the scientific sense would be to monitor the results of a parallel universe that had robot replicas of all the current humans instead of all the current humans.”

Oh shit, not the discredited p-zombie argument. What makes you think that such “robots” would not be every bit as conscious as the humans they replicate. The scientific *assumption* would certainly be that they are, even if we could never prove it.

“people utter the phrase “i had no choice” all the time already. we are effectively already aware that we don’t have control, at least in most cases. finding out that we aren’t REALLY in control at all will just change the precise definition of the word “choice;” it’s not like it will change the actual experience, or the validity of it we feel personally. people will continue to make choices and use the word regardless of scientific findings.”

Where you can point to in all I have said on this thread that does not agree with all you have said above.
And how are you saying any more or less than I have: that “choice” is an illusion but that it is the “illusion of choice” that is real and that we won’t go around changing our everyday language to reflect that reality.

“perhaps, BJ, what these people are saying is, it doesn’t make sense to apply new information about the mind and determinism within it to a definition of the word choice that is immediately rendered archaic by said information and its subsequent implications.”

But you don’t really know what they are saying do you? They seem to be at pains not to say anything explicit on this topic at all, lest it be shown to be nothing more than a belief in version of mind over matter. Otherwise I cannot understand the timidity displayed here.

‘if your real argument here is just a staggeringly pedantic one against the supernatural concept of free will, then just say so and quit screwing with people. “

There are those who outright claim the existence of supernatural freewill and there are those who have a version that they believe is not supernatural but which, on closer examination can be shown to be nevertheless supernatural or dualistic. The Cartesian theatre has not been totally eliminated from the minds of some of those who think they have moved beyond supernatural beliefs about the mind. Do the posters here hold this view? Well, who knows? They persistently refuse to lay their cards on the table.