sublunar wrote: ↑02 Aug 2017
It's such a convenient argument to make. Ultimately convenient. Completely un-provable. Every day countless decisions are made. Life changing things happen and split second reactions occur. Yet, without tangible proof, the deterministss will tell you that decision was already made. Prove to me that every movement of my mind and body was pre-ordained (you can't because you'd have to first locate the alternate universe in which the same decisions were repeated 100% of the time by the same biological organism) or cram the philosophical nonsense up your patchouli chute.
Dude, first, fuck your antagonism.
Okay.
Look, nothing can be "proved" in the sense of irrefutable facts from Heaven, and I suspect you're not even that willing to listen to any evidence whatsoever, but here goes:
We are assuming, in my argument, that nothing supernatural exists. That everything happens as a result of natural processes with no magical interventions. (If you want to believe in some higher power then you can disregard the rest of the argument entirely, but then you have far
less evidence for your position than a determinist.)
What we do know about the observable universe, is that everything follows predictable rules. Gravity operates just so. Light has a particular speed. Atoms combine in certain ways under certain conditions. And these rules don't just spontaneously abrogate themselves - a gold coin isn't going to suddenly turn into a helium balloon. Gravity doesn't just turn off randomly. We can observe asteroids and predict their paths, they don't "wander" randomly.
Chemistry and electricity follow these rules. And as far as anyone's been able to see, the human brain is made up of chemicals, with tiny electrical impulses going around.
Therefore, the human brain either must completely follow these physical laws, or we have to imagine some kind of "x-factor" that we currently have no indication of or evidence for.
Since there is no evidence for this "x-factor", I operate under the assumption that the brain is wholly organic and consciousness is a product of rules-following chemical systems.
If all this is true - and as yet there's no compelling evidence that it isn't - then the chemicals are always going to react in certain ways. They cannot react in ways not in accordance with their nature. Wherever two or more types of chemicals meet in the brain, they are going to react in a certain way and deliver a certain result in accordance with the physical laws of the world.
Now, none of this means that some scientist can just sit down with a scratchpad and work out what you'll choose for dinner two weeks from now. The brain's systems are bafflingly complex and we're far from a complete understanding of them all. In a practical sense, we can't predict how any person's life will turn out - there's simply too many variables and unknown factors.
But we don't have to be able to completely predict a person's actions to understand that it all comes from processes that obey chemical laws and as a result, will only happen one way in accordance with whatever chemical balance is running through one's system at the moment a choice is made. The fact that you can imagine an alternate course of action that you might have taken is largely irrelevant: when the actual time for choosing came, you made a choice and it was always going to be that choice, because all your choices before that brought you to that point, and all those previous choices were also the result of chemical reactions that were only going to happen in one particular way, just as the matter that formed our solar system was only going to solidify in one way according to physical laws.
Now, I can't point to a specific neuron in your brain and say that's the one that made you do such and so. But I can make a statement about determinism based on things we know to be true. For me to be wrong, some part of this chain of reasoning has to be shown to be false. But so far, nobody challenges the
actual facts, they just say the equivalent of "well,
you don't know!"