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July 28th, 2006, 01:23 PM
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Member
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Posts: 483
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Re: free will, determinism, and morality
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MM: However, the amazing thing to me is that the person most certain of their position that free-will actually exists - is the one who has never actually described, in simple terms, what free-will means (at least to them). That being Fred, of course.
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More unthinking knee-jerk nonsense from MM. For example, from my 2/22/06 post at
http://www.behavior.net/bolforums/sh...0&postcount=37 I noted the following:
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Although “free will†may be difficult to clearly define, we seem to all have some intuitive sense of what it is—essentially choice, choice made by our higher cognitive conscious self, choice that is something more than merely a conscious cognitive illusion being driven by primitive algorithmic subconscious neural mechanisms, mechanisms concerned primarily with survival and reproduction; and free will seems to require, using LeDoux’s term, “downward causation.â€
The available evidence indicates that human consciousness—sentience, sapience, self-awareness—is indeed something real, something that does indeed exist; although it also seems to be beyond the precise explanation of any currently available science. More to the issue, the available evidence also indicates that we humans use our cognitive consciousness to discern objective mathematical truth, and that we then use that objective truth to understand, explain, and, to some extent manage, our physical world and ourselves.
Accordingly, the available evidence overwhelming supports the view that we humans do indeed have some sort of, and some amount of, free will (and also implies that we humans are probably the only creatures that do have it.)
(Additionally, for those asserting that we humans do not have free will, that free will is some sort of illusion, then the burden is on them to come up with a definition and/or theory for this “illusion of free will,†to show that this definition/theory is falsifiable; and also to show how creatures that lack free will and that are unable to discern objective truth could ever “know†and/or “prove,†and/or evaluate the reality of anything.)
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