I am quite aware of this proposed difficulty! And I have tried to address what people have said along these lines, here. Here briefly, are a couple of points I made in response, Does this also apply for us, when we have partial knowledge? The more we know a choice is certain, does that proportionately remove freedom somehow? Then does this apply to the past? We definitely know the past, does that somehow remove freedom from past decisions? They can’t therefore have been free?
OK, go on.
I’m not sure what you mean, choice of ice cream may well be based always on our strongest desire for a flavor, unless someone has a gun to my head and says “Choose strawberry!”. And I was showing that the view in the Bible states believers are “free indeed”, and can make real choices, but unbelievers are “slaves to sin”, and don’t have real choices. As I recall, I was being asked to expound my view, not to prove it.
See, you should have watched the video I suggested. Maybe that would have prevented you from asking pointless questions that only confirm you do not actually understand the problem.
Or, maybe not.
True, and even with the strawberry or die scenario, I would order strawberry in keeping with my predominant motivations at the time. There is still agency in spite of external coercion.
Free will does not come into play just with big moral decisions. Do you go for that jog or laze out? That is the daily exercise of mostly routine choices made. It makes sense that, as you say, such choices may well be based on our strongest desire at the time - why would anyone choose otherwise?
contingency/contingence
No, @Gisteron clearly stated that that was NOT the issue. Please read before responding.
Good grief. It was explained to you clearly. You claimed it was without argument, when the argument was presented–and you quoted it!
Still incoherent. I’m trying to help you, and Rumraket did not point to “the incorporation of ATP like a nucleotide.” I don’t even have to check to know that he wouldn’t have written something so incoherent. We understand this basic stuff, you obviously don’t. Review the evidence. In this case, there are zero controversies about the relevant evidence so text will do.
It, as your claim above, is an example of your incoherence. You are good at picking and repeating those!
No, it is not.
No, not ATP itself. I added “itself” to help you to understand. Have you considered trying to meet this simple challenge?
Why not learn something while you’re here?
Nucleotides are incorporated. You still don’t get it.
I see no evidence in your incoherent writing that you understood any of it. If you write out the reactions, you MIGHT understand.
I’ve given several examples, like a person with paranoia, or with delirium, or with dementia.
I did say “if”! But I also appealed to decisions in courts, they will put you in the pokey, or in an asylum, if you say “It was motions of atoms in my brain that made me do it!” And I made other arguments.
And what would that me? I need evidence for your assertion.
More context, please, in your quotes? I’m tired of scrolling back to find out what I said, more specifically.
But I’m not arguing this for every possible A and B, I’m saying reason must come from a self-existent reason. And again, I really need more context in what you quoted of me, to be able to respond with more confidence that I am addressing the point at issue.
All right, I went back and looked this one up, here is the exchange:
But “that would not be a reasoning cause” was my conclusion, I was not quoting someone else! Or putting words into somebody’s mouth, I’m not saying these words were theirs. This is why I’ve kind of stopped scrolling back to get context, I just find mere confusion about what I said, or something similar.
But that should be quite clear, there are many differences, practical ones, people are said to have a soul, in one view, in the other, they are said to be “dancing to their DNA.” And so on.
I don’t know that you could prove in this way that there are no humans with souls, or p-zombies, or leprechauns! You could only tell them apart, in your proposal, if they did all exist. But I don’t know of a good way to distinguish beings with souls from beings without them, other than looking for evidence of souls in the beings! So that is the approach I took.
In all the discussion that follows, you have not showed me the paradox you mentioned, though. Actually, I think you said there were more than one. But it seems you meant the second possibility I mentioned, affirming or denying something. But again, that doesn’t fit, I believe self-existent is a property, implied by it being an adjective, not a proposition, which you deny in your discussion. And people can use the word without affirming that there is such a being!
My view is that God can know what a person will freely choose in the future. I have given various reasons I believe that the opposite view is unreasonable.
I also mentioned that psychiatrists do look for unreasoning causes for peoples’ complaints! And I point to people doing this very thing in this forum, again and again. So this is not just my word, I’m giving evidence.
How do I conflate “unreasoning” with “insane”, though? And I’m not saying every thought a person with mental illness has is invalid, I have mentioned people with mental illness knowing how to get to the kitchen just fine.
The usual Christian claim is that a person acquires a soul at conception. So fertilization per se does not cause reasoning human life in my view, that would be the materialist view, actually.
And why are those psychiatrists even looking to begin with, with respect to irrational thoughts?
Think man, think!
OK, you give up. Let me help you out.
Because the patient has exhibited behavior and made statements that indicate he is out of touch with reality. You have it backwards; the behavior is where it starts, the diagnosis follows later.
So, contrary to your answering machine message loop, we do not ultimately measure reason against its source, but the merit of the statement under evaluation. The inference of this is that reality provides the context for reason, and reality could be expected to have shaped reason itself.
Go ahead and persist in being deaf to this, but do not project your flaky outlook on others. As others and I have tried to explain in the plainest of English, we do not measure reason against some label assigned to the source.
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I will just mention that, as a psychiatrist, I can confirm that your characterization is wrong, for the reasons others have articulated quite well.
Exactly. As is often the case, you don’t realize when you have undercut your own argument.
Well which is it? The pokey or the asylum?
Obviously, you are unaware that which place the person ends up is based on whether they are held criminally responsible for their actions. i.e. whether it was actually an act of free will.
For your infomation, such a decision is not based on whether the act was the result of an immaterial soul rather than the brain alone.
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