For one, the opposite of freewill is not determinism, certainly not the determinism you are arguing against. You tend to be building up my position as a strawman then critique positions which I don't adhere to.chewybrian wrote: ↑August 18th, 2018, 5:21 am Am I misguided or are the facts in dispute? There is evidence pointing both ways about the nature of consciousness. However, the evidence pointing to determinism is only the belief that laws which can be shown to hold for other things must hold for consciousness, or that consciousness must be material simply because other things are. If it was, though, we should be able to define it as a physcical thing, and describe its' properties of mass, size, location and such; can you? And guess what? The laws of physics don't always hold, anyway!
Secondly, it's not that science attempts to argue that consciousness is a physical thing in order to present its case by comparing it to the causal process described by physics, but more so, that the mind has a process, both inductive and reductive which enevidably leads to a will driven by reason.
Your religious driven criticism of science is completely irrelevant to the science itself and doesn't offer any value to a meaningful or insightful conversation of the subject. Dark matter is simply a place holder for the current gap in knowledge of our model of the Universe. I am fine with that, this is our science works, there will always be a new frontier awaiting to be better understood, once upon this same sort of criticism was directed at the Higgs particle, its was essentially a place holder to help explain how particles gained mass.What's your comfort level with an 85% fudge factor? 'They' (physicists, that is) guess that something like 85% of all matter is 'dark matter', which has never been seen or defined, because this is necessary for calculations to be consistent with the universe holding together in the way it does. Hmmmmm...this galaxy should be spinning apart but it's not. Well, we'll just add a little bit of dark matter here, and here...
It's not that I pretend nor do I need to, it's that I just simply go through life without the need to to even cotemplate and concern myself over such arbitrary concepts such as freewill.The fact that you feel the need to pretend you have a free will to get by in the world shows that you may be on the wrong track. You might call that a 100% fudge factor!
We draw from our previous experiences to help interpret the present, how we express the temporal experience of each moment is determined my the minds perception or reality. In other words, how the mind percieves external data in turn determines how we respond and react to it, the response/reaction is the mind experiencing the manifestation of knowledge.
Again you neec to abandon this deterministic approach you keep enforcing, it grows tiresome.There is no hard evidence being presented to you that 'requires' you to take the stance of determinism. You are rather taking a supposition as fact. The opposite supposition also fits the facts and leads to a better place, and most people choose that path of free will. If you choose instead to take that path of determinism, then you must fairly accept the conclusions that naturally follow, like the idea that nobody is accountable (morally) for their actions, or that self-determination is not possible. 'You' did not choose to play the guitar, but rather it was forced on you by circumstances. 'You' don't exist at all, in the sense that you can decide your own fate in the slightest degree.