Post by Deleted on Sept 7, 2017 15:21:22 GMT
Free will has been demonstrated everywhere humans have existed, your weaseled-out "reliably" notwithstanding. And now "matter of perspective". 
Like the perspective that having kids is by definition attacking them, or that the existence of third-world dungeon-asylums is a sane reason to facilitate mental patients offing themselves.- purposefully ungrammatical
I don't really know what determinism is supposed to mean, as everything will only happen one way and will have reasons by the time it is over. That doesn't yield that no creatures have the very thing we exercise and care about, our meaningful free will. You can separately but relatedly navel-ponder about the implications of your mother and your father and how much fluoride was in your water when you grew up, but you are still a creature with traits and preferences and you make choices according to them, the only meaningful and relevant free will.
What I'm absolutely convinced of and vehement about is that the irrational ramblings of the unabashedly tendentious can be trivially lampooned. Particularly the requirement of the demented "choosing what they will think before they think it", or making ice cream rain from they sky by sheer force of will, or being invisible by thinking _real_ hard, or changing what is by definition unchangeable, or whatever other infantile nose-twitching is demanded. Or that parents mistreat their (nonexistent) children by virtue of having them without their prior express permission, or "the dead can't care" as a sound argument for anything, and anyone save sociopaths.
It is quite sad that you are compelled to have thought processes that are irretrievably incoherent. To supposedly not recognize the inherent self-contradictions and pathologically bent framings that you are constrained by your Fate to continuously field.
Clearly (⊙_⊙) what I experience and observe both directly and through considered intake of the actual relevant science is anything but fact-free. I'm just not so guileless nor dishonest as to uncritically run full speed with the highly speculative highly debated bouncing-around pronouncements, opinions and still crude yet rich with assumption studies, nor let the fame hounds, con men, and the mentally ill (not necessarily mutually exclusive) energizer bunny the conjecture and/or crazy through as "fact", or even as sensible, by overworking said opinions, speculations and controversial and criticized incredibly coarse studies *whew*.
Morally I would be fine with post-birth abortions, but I realise that this would probably be too radical to ever be implemented..
The only justification that a reasonable and compassionate society needs for allowing assistance to suicide is that an individual is the owner of his or her life and should therefore be freely allowed to determine whether that life is worth continuing, and that it is the role of a progressive government to empower them in whichever decision they feel is right for them.
You've not explained how it would be possible to distinguish your existence from that of a created creature of an intelligent (if sadistic and deranged) maker. By your beautiful reasoning, ergo we were created by Intelligent Design. Or how the Great Predetermination started off. Since you couldn't distinguish any reason prior to the reach back of our evidence, you're allowed to pick anything you like, just as long as it utterly contradicts what you live and breathe every day. I pick that we're not actually conscious brains that have thoughts, but actually are just egotistical mushy rocks with non-thoughts that just think they're above their raisin.
The question of whether or not we were created by an intelligent designer makes no supposition about the properties that we posses. You are making a claim that humans are endowed with something called "free will", but cannot explain how it would be possible to distinguish between a human endowed with free will and one lacking in free will. You claim that free will is evidenced by the fact that people act in accordance with their preferences, biases, traits and conditioning. But then that would mean that the person without free will would ignore all of these deterministic factors. So therefore the "free will" condition would be the one that is constrained by factors not of their choosing and the "constrained will" actor would be the one that is not constrained by determinism. So in your argument, the adjective that is used to describe the type of will that is possessed by the actor actually describes the opposite of what that adjective normally means.
I don't really know what determinism is supposed to mean, as everything will only happen one way and will have reasons by the time it is over. That doesn't yield that no creatures have the very thing we exercise and care about, our meaningful free will. You can separately but relatedly navel-ponder about the implications of your mother and your father and how much fluoride was in your water when you grew up, but you are still a creature with traits and preferences and you make choices according to them, the only meaningful and relevant free will.
None of this provides any justification for the adjective "free" to describe the nature of our will. If every decision has reasons, then that means that the decision was constrained by those reasons. It wasn't unfettered and free.
What I'm absolutely convinced of and vehement about is that the irrational ramblings of the unabashedly tendentious can be trivially lampooned. Particularly the requirement of the demented "choosing what they will think before they think it", or making ice cream rain from they sky by sheer force of will, or being invisible by thinking _real_ hard, or changing what is by definition unchangeable, or whatever other infantile nose-twitching is demanded. Or that parents mistreat their (nonexistent) children by virtue of having them without their prior express permission, or "the dead can't care" as a sound argument for anything, and anyone save sociopaths.
An absurd proposition has absurd requirements. And it is not possible to commit a trespass against a non-existent entity, but it is possible to commit a trespass against an entity that will exist in the future. This is why most people would agree that it is morally unacceptable for a pregnant woman to abuse drugs and alcohol; because the wellbeing of the future child is worth taking into consideration even though that child does not yet exist.
early (⊙_⊙) what I experience and observe both directly and through considered intake of the actual relevant science is anything but fact-free. I'm just not so guileless nor dishonest as to uncritically run full speed with the highly speculative highly debated bouncing-around pronouncements, opinions and still crude yet rich with assumption studies, nor let the fame hounds, con men, and the mentally ill (not necessarily mutually exclusive) energizer bunny the conjecture and/or crazy through as "fact", or even as sensible, by overworking said opinions, speculations and controversial and criticized incredibly coarse studies *whew*.
You have never experienced or observed the process of freely willing what you are going to will. You have a preferred interpretation of your conscious experience of decision making; but your decision making can be fully accounted for by mechanistic processes. You have not demonstrated any need to invoke the nebulous concept of 'free will' to explain these experiences, or illustrated the deficiencies of a theory which attributes these experiences to mechanistic processes.