Problems with the Problem of Evil

[Lion IRC]

What is decided happens milliseconds prior to your conscious thoughts and actions.

Of course it's decided beforehand.
It would be cart before the horse otherwise.

I bet if you drill down you could probably observe/measure events along the way in the chain of causation happening nanoseconds...yoctoseconds before the eventual "conscious" actions.

The point is that it is not decided by what you call free will. It's not even decided by an act of will. It's not even decided consciously. It's the information processing activity of the brain that 'decides' and reports the action in conscious form, thoughts and feelings, for it to be acted out.

You can take twice as many words to say the same thing or three times as many words, it doesn't matter, you're still just describing a process called deciding, choosing, volition.

If you believe in the illusion of hard determinism and think you are just a robot that lacks the ability to freely choose anything, you have my sympathy. Who made you that way?

Your claim that free will is the driver of decision making [...] puts the cart before the horse...

No it doesn't.
Do you think there is no cart for the horse to pull? Do you think that if the person driving the horse and cart comes to a fork in the road they have no free will to choose left or right?

...but [it] gets the agency of cognition completely wrong.

No it doesn't.
And, yes I'm going to keep gainsaying your gainsaying.

Agency is agency. Free is free. Will is will. You don't get to redefine a term into the opposite meaning.

Your belief that free will is an illusion is self-refuting because if you lack free will then your pronouncements aren't your own and you can't know whether to trust 'yourself'.

 

[Elixir]

Maybe the problem is not @Learner but your assumptions about Learner.

That’s what I said.

And it still doesn’t look that way to me, despite his disclaimer.

Yeah right.
Tom

"What was NOT obvious (to me) was the Learner was capable of sarcastically mocking typical creo-speak"
-Me
Yeah, RIGHT.
But thanks for your misdiagnosis.

 

[Lion IRC]

Could Biblegod commit an act so diabolical that even the conservative Christians would admit it was incomprehensibly evil?

Yes. God can do whatever He wants.
(Assuming God's free will isn't an illusion)
But under this hypothetical, the wording of the bible would change accordingly and there would be fewer conservative Christians.

(My guess is no -- their reasoning is ever so elastic, and Biblegod commits frequent infanticide as it is.)

You might find it hard to believe but there are humans who think killing babies is justifiable.
Killing their OWN children.
Without anaesthetic.

 

[Elixir]

But under this hypothetical, the wording of the bible would change accordingly

Like ... with magic?
You go to bed one night, and in the middle of the night the words in your favorite book just up and change because god decided to be an asshole?
Uh huh... yeah, that happens.
Oh well, makes as much sense as the rest of the superstitious nonsense involved in major religions.

if you lack free will then your pronouncements aren't your own

Non sequitur. That you can't change them doesn't make them someone else's.

and you can't know whether to trust 'yourself'.

Sure you can.
The words you attribute to god aren't your own but yet ... you profess to trust them.

 

[Lion IRC]

Like ... with magic?

It's a hypothetical.
If God was different, what would it hypothetically be like ?

 

[Jarhyn]

Like ... with magic?

It's a hypothetical.
If God was different, what would it hypothetically be like ?

It wouldn't look like anything different to us, any more than it looks any different from Mario's perspective if it was Billy or Timmy hitting the button on frame 3.

 

[Elixir]

Like ... with magic?

It's a hypothetical.
If God was different, what would it hypothetically be like ?

God is already hypothetical. And god is already "different", depending on who you ask.
People with gods create them custom fit for themselves.

 

[pood]

Incidentally, a 2012 study debunked Libet’s original study. It shows people make their decisions just when they say they do.

 

[Lion IRC]

It wouldn't look like anything different to us...

God is already hypothetical.

Well then what's the point of ideologyhunter asking the original question?

 

[pood]

The point is that it is not decided by what you call free will. It's not even decided by an act of will. It's not even decided consciously. It's the information processing activity of the brain that 'decides' and reports the action in conscious form, thoughts and feelings, for it to be acted out.

Why, then, does the brain need consciousness for its “decisions,” as you put it in scare quotes, for those decisions to be acted out?

If hard determinism is true, consciousness isn’t needed for anything — it’s falling dominoes all the way down and all the way back. Decisions would be acted out hard deterministically without the need of consciousness, that cumbersome and energy-intensive phenomenon that would have evolved through heavy selection pressures only if it were actually good for something.

But, anyway, see my link above. Libet’s study redone notes that people make decisions when they say they do — i.e., when conscious. But regardless, as noted, Libet’s study, even if true, does not rule out free will for reasons I gave.

 

[Lion IRC]

if you lack free will then your pronouncements aren't your own

Non sequitur. That you can't change them doesn't make them someone else's.

I don't assert they are someone else's.
I assert they aren't your own if you have no control over their origin.

and you can't know whether to trust 'yourself'.

Sure you can.
The words you attribute to god aren't your own but yet ... you profess to trust them.

Yes. And I have free will.
Thanks for helping to make my point.

 

[ideologyhunter]

You might find it hard to believe but there are humans who think killing babies is justifiable.
Killing their OWN children.
Without anaesthetic.

So... when God commanded wars of extermination, did he tell the Israelites to use anaesthetic? Were the flood victims anaesthetized? Is God's infanticide justified in your eyes because we have the pro-choice movement? Inquiring minds wanna know.

 

[Lion IRC]

So... when God commanded wars of extermination...

Hey. This is my tu quoque
Get your own.

 

[Jarhyn]

So... when God commanded wars of extermination...

Hey. This is my tu quoque
Get your own.

Tu Quoque as a response doesn't apply here, since the argument made by theists (your side) is "god is perfect".

We don't have to be perfect for our argument to hold water, but your God does actually have to be "perfect" for your argument to hold water.

 

[Elixir]

I assert they aren't your own if you have no control over their origin.

So your left arm is not your own.
Again I can only stare, slack jawed in wonder, at the illogic of religiosity and its attendant philosophic stupidity.

 

[steve_bank]

There are Christians who think abortion AT any stage is killing a baby. Yet when the baby pops out it is shit out of luck if it is born with a crippling birth defect, who pays for that? Christian conservatives oppose universal health care and guaranteed nutrition for kids, so when the bay pops out it is again shit out of luck if cant get decent nutrition or health care. Ditto with education.

You can take so called Christian morality and put it where te sun don;t shine,.


It makes me sick when I hear it from our politicians, their Christian values.

 

[DBT]

What is decided happens milliseconds prior to your conscious thoughts and actions.

This process has nothing to do with 'free will' or even general will, the impulse we feel to act.

This thread was doing just fine without you bringing in your dubious "understanding" of cognitive processes.

Can we NOT have this argument in this thread?

It was not I who brought up the free will defense. Pull your head in.

 

[DBT]

What is decided happens milliseconds prior to your conscious thoughts and actions.

Of course it's decided beforehand.
It would be cart before the horse otherwise.

I bet if you drill down you could probably observe/measure events along the way in the chain of causation happening nanoseconds...yoctoseconds before the eventual "conscious" actions.

The point is that it is not decided by what you call free will. It's not even decided by an act of will. It's not even decided consciously. It's the information processing activity of the brain that 'decides' and reports the action in conscious form, thoughts and feelings, for it to be acted out.

Your claim that free will is the driver of decision making not only puts the cart before the horse, but gets the agency of cognition completely wrong.

First, you must. know, from our previous discussions, that this is not completely or even substantively correct. The Libet experiments, for example, as we have pointed out, showed that the conscious mind has a veto power over subconscious decision-making — Libet called this “free won’t,” and, speaking of his own experiments, decided that they do NOT rule out free will. However, we’ve discussed this, and this has been repeatedly pointed out to you, and yet you continue to make the same erroneous assertions after multiple corrections.

Second, it doesn’t matter if most, or even all, of our decisions are made subconsciously via information processing, because it is still US making those decisions — our subconscious is not separate from US. Moreover, much of that subconscious processing occurs as a result of a feedback loop which processes conscious activity previously registered.

You seem to have the idea that in order for us to have some kind of free will, our decisions must always be made consciously, else we are puppets of our subconscious. But that would be absurd, because it would be saying we are puppets of ourselves — which is meaningless. I am a writer, and I am very familiar with the oft-described sensation, by many writers, of often feeling that when the words are flowing and everything is clicking into place, that one is taking dictation — not producing the words at all, but simply transcribing them. But the source of this phenomenon is simply that the writer’s subconscious has sorted through the options and has come up with the solution for the conscious mind then to consider. But the product still belongs to the writer, because the subconscious is PART OF the writer.

Of course it's correct.

The evidence we have shows that the brain is the sole agency of cognition, conscious thought and action.
Where conscious will, feelings, thoughts and actions are generated through interactions of inputs and memory by means of neural networks processing information.

Which is why the free will defense that theists tend to invoke fails, where it is implied that a belief in God is a matter of free will, as if you choose to believe God as a matter of free will.

That through an act of free will you can choose to believe in God.

The idea that God gave us free will so that we can choose good or evil, that we can choose to believe in God or not.

 

[DBT]

What is decided happens milliseconds prior to your conscious thoughts and actions.

Of course it's decided beforehand.
It would be cart before the horse otherwise.

I bet if you drill down you could probably observe/measure events along the way in the chain of causation happening nanoseconds...yoctoseconds before the eventual "conscious" actions.

The point is that it is not decided by what you call free will. It's not even decided by an act of will. It's not even decided consciously. It's the information processing activity of the brain that 'decides' and reports the action in conscious form, thoughts and feelings, for it to be acted out.

Your claim that free will is the driver of decision making not only puts the cart before the horse, but gets the agency of cognition completely wrong.

First, you must. know, from our previous discussions, that this is not completely or even substantively correct. The Libet experiments, for example, as we have pointed out, showed that the conscious mind has a veto power over subconscious decision-making — Libet called this “free won’t,” and, speaking of his own experiments, decided that they do NOT rule out free will. However, we’ve discussed this, and this has been repeatedly pointed out to you, and yet you continue to make the same erroneous assertions after multiple corrections.

Second, it doesn’t matter if most, or even all, of our decisions are made subconsciously via information processing, because it is still US making those decisions — our subconscious is not separate from US. Moreover, much of that subconscious processing occurs as a result of a feedback loop which processes conscious activity previously registered.

You seem to have the idea that in order for us to have some kind of free will, our decisions must always be made consciously, else we are puppets of our subconscious. But that would be absurd, because it would be saying we are puppets of ourselves — which is meaningless. I am a writer, and I am very familiar with the oft-described sensation, by many writers, of often feeling that when the words are flowing and everything is clicking into place, that one is taking dictation — not producing the words at all, but simply transcribing them. But the source of this phenomenon is simply that the writer’s subconscious has sorted through the options and has come up with the solution for the conscious mind then to consider. But the product still belongs to the writer, because the subconscious is PART OF the writer.

Guess we're having this argument in this thread...

I'm trying to focus on the theist claim that free will is the key to choosing good over evil or a belief in God over atheism. I don't don't want another free will debate. It's the last thing I need.

 

[Learner]

Well ok, I was talking generally in context about people from all walks of life and various genetics who could potentially be obese, some less than others of course.

You were talking as though you knew something about genetics, while making abundantly clear the fact that you know absolutely nothing about genetics.

Like your comrade, you're trying to force a false argument I actually never made.

No, I am just pointing out that you are obviously clueless about this subject matter.

That's what I am asking. Where is it that you see me having a conversation specifically on genetics? Simply mentioning the word 'genetics.' without the intention to specifically detail and focus on that particular subject matter......
is not a knowledge claim!

IOW, since there is no specific conversational dialogue to genetics as a topic - means there are no 'clues' here Sherlock that should warrant your faulty conclusion for "clueless".

You quoted the above post of mine... but where is that bit you say I seemed to know all about genetics? You could you have quoted that very bit instead, give your argument a bit of credibility?

Nowhere did I say anything of the kind. I said "You were talking as though you knew something about genetics, while making abundantly clear the fact that you know absolutely nothing about genetics."

That's the exact opposite of me saying you seemed to know all about genetics.

I could place the above response here. So, I was talking as if I knew something about genetics? It's intriguing you say that because my specifics was on dietary causes. BTW... I do know something about genetics, and even if it's very little knowledge compared to your knowledge of the subject matter - it ain't exactly "absolutely nothing" as you willfully like to assert.

As usual, you have confident beliefs, and the delusion that these are equal to the knowledge of others - indeed, you probably assess that others who speak confidently about genetics, have a similar level of knowledge to you.

As usual your line of argument are your personal opinions, illustrated preferably in mind to you even when its not necessarily factual.

You are totally incapable of assessing what is or is not factual in this subject area. You are of the mistaken opinion that everyone is, as you yourself are, making up shit as they go along based on their opinions.

See top response.

But we are not doing that; Unlike you, others in this thread have put decades of study in, to find out the basic facts, before attempting to express our opinions.

You are like the guy who is asked if he can play the violin, and replies: "I don't know, I have never tried". And you are trying to engage in a discussion between actual musicians.

You imagined the conversation on genetics, see the above.

You are wildly wrong; But you are so wildly wrong that you are incapable of grasping just how wildly wrong you actually are.

Again... barking up the wrong tree, you claiming I'm disputing against the science/genetics

I am claiming that you are ignorant of the science/genetics. You would need to actually learn something in order to get to the elevated heights where you would be disputing anything.

Your claim is false and wishful. I am not ignorant of science or genetics, see the above responses.

- but then... I think that's your intention like our friend Elixir. Stealthily we go, shifting the angle of the argument within the topic matter.

I was talking from my own experience. I have never had any signs of obesity in my life until about 6 years ago. So...through the advice and guidance of medical professionals, I have acquired from them the knowledge which says: this is not unusual to the general wider population!

So what? What makes your single personal anecdote worthy of inclusion in a discussion of genetics, which is a population level phenomenon?

Discussion on genetics now was it? This is what I'm on about. You may be able to dupe some on the thread but... oh nevermind.

The discussion in particular I engaged in was on obesity and possible causes. My personal experience was used as an example that it could happen to anyone who's never had it before in their lives. In my case later in life just from my dietary habits, 'which is quite common'.
(As said in previous posts, you're shape-shifting the angle of the debate)

Your knowledge in this area is less than zero - for every true fact that you believe, there is more than one falsehood that you believe with equal or greater confidence.

Opinion noted ( even when you're in error...again).

That's not an opinion, it's an observation.

Your observation was imagined and wishful. No clues to genetics being a discussion specific, especially from me...so therefore it's an opinion!