Thinking critical wrote: ↑August 18th, 2018, 1:44 am
If you sincerely believe, that the fact that you still do not except that freewill isn't real after watching that video, is proof that the claim is wrong, then your understanding is clearly mis-guided.
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!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27 ... f_validity
These three laws hold to a good approximation for macroscopic objects under everyday conditions. However, Newton's laws (combined with universal gravitation and classical electrodynamics) are inappropriate for use in certain circumstances, most notably at very small scales, very high speeds (in special relativity, the Lorentz factor must be included in the expression for momentum along with the rest mass and velocity) or very strong gravitational fields. Therefore, the laws cannot be used to explain phenomena such as conduction of electricity in a semiconductor, optical properties of substances, errors in non-relativistically corrected GPS systems and superconductivity. Explanation of these phenomena requires more sophisticated physical theories, including general relativity and quantum field theory.
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter
These 'laws' can hardly be denied when they refer to abstractions which by their nature conform to such laws, like numbers. When you try to make laws apply to real things, sometimes reality does not play along. When it does not, and yet we hold to our 'law' anyway, how are we doing any different than the Rabbi? The scientific method or rules of logic which seem to guide you dictate that you can or should withhold judgment when facts point more than one way and one can not arrive at a satisfactory level of objective truth. 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!
Thinking critical wrote: ↑August 18th, 2018, 1:44 am
The point he drives home which is the foundation of the claim that freewill is an illusion, is simple. You cannot will yourself to not know something that you already know, nor can you will yourself to know something that you don't. There are no influences from the outside world which the subject brings into being, therefore knowledge is a cosequence of an external causal process.
I can not choose not to be exposed to what I am exposed to, but I can definitely choose how to interpret events (see: the Rabbi, above). Logic and math can lead to undeniable conclusions for a rational person, but only if they apply to the problem at hand. These systems of thinking arrive at certain answers because they apply to abstractions that allow them to work, like numbers, or propositions. Real life is a lot messier. The real use and need of a free will is for choices which by their nature must, or at least should, be made on the basis of ethics or morality.
Math doesn't care if I walk my dog and play with her or leave her alone on a chain in the yard all day. Logic doesn't care if I yell at my kids or encourage them. Science doesn't give a lick if we go to war or not. There is a lot more to life than raw knowledge, and people are ends, not means. Ironically, you are in the ethics and morality sub-forum, arguing that there is no basis for, no possibility of ethics or morality.
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.
To be consistent, 'you' must accept yourself as a complex tree, in the sense that you will only develop exactly as your dna and environmental inputs dictate. There are no 'good' or 'bad' trees, because a tree can not decide to do anything good or bad, and neither can you. Is this really the way you see yourself, or are you holding some inconsistent beliefs when you get down to it?
"If determinism holds, then past events have conspired to cause me to hold this view--it is out of my control. Either I am right about free will, or it is not my fault that I am wrong."