Jesus and free will

No need to. All I need to do is Google "Organic Robot Paradigm". If it was a paradigm worthy of consideration, there should be plenty of hits leading to scientific papers, right?
Enjoy.
Google search for organic robot paradigm

Your nemesis posted this in response to what you said here:
There are too few people that can provide good parental support.  Too many people just have kids without giving it a thought - it's what their friends are doing, or their parents expect to have grandkids or, oops, the birth control failed.  The 'pro-lifers' only care about the fetus before it's born; once it's out of the uterus, they couldn't care less about how the child is raised, can the mother be a good mother at age 15, will the child be abused or neglected.  And they certainly don't want their tax dollars going to more social aid programs.

And no one seems to think about whether the earth can continue to support as much life as there is now.  I look at pregnant women in the grocery store with another two kids in tow and wonder, what are they thinking, bringing more kids into a world that is going to be stressed to the max.

I know I made the right choice.  My non-existent children were spared a dysfunctional childhood and troubled life.  I feel my life has been enriched by not having children; I've pursued other interests.  The animal rescue groups I have volunteered with have a policy; any animal that comes in to the rescue is spayed or neutered before being put up for adoption.  No unwanted litters to be abandoned, drowned or thrown into a dumpster in the heat of summer.  And if an animal comes in that is too sick to survive and is suffering, it is humanely euthanized.  Reduce the suffering. 

You know perfectly well what I meant. Obviously, I mean a deterministic/mechanistic account of human decision making in which the outputs that we create are a product of all of the inputs, with no magical 'ghost in the machine' (except perhaps randomness) that we can point to and call 'free will'.

 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.

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. <- 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*.

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Morally I would be fine with post-birth abortions, but I realise that this would probably be too radical to ever be implemented.

Pure deranged morbid thinking on so many levels.  Just one little example - pray () tell how in the world is "suffering of the child slave in the Bangladeshi clothes factory so that you will be able to buy your own clothes cheaply" inherently linked to child-rearing?  You're a reasoning god (of Death).  And you'd make a fine televangelist (of Death).

The "collateral damage" being just one of the countless things that you freely make up.

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And if society wants the fairest possible state of affairs, that would mean no humans and no society.

There's never been any satisfactory justification for the adjective "free". It has been demonstrated that humans have a conscious will, but it has never been demonstrated that the will is "free" in any meaningful sense. And logic dictates that the will is not "free", as in existing in a vacuum, unaffected by external influences. And the Indonesian mental asylum was to illustrate the absurdity of your doctrine that life is always infinitely preferable to death, irrespective of the conditions in which that life has to be lived. The purpose was to get you to consider whether you'd rather be a mental patient in a Belgian psychiatric hospital (with the 'risk' that the doctors would respect your wishes to die), or a patient in the Indonesian asylum where you be chained to your bed and your teeth would rot in your head, but you could rest assured that the staff would always respect the sanctity of life.

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.



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.



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.



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.



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.

The child would not have to slave away for pennies an hour making cheap clothes if the child had not been born in the first place. And if life itself was not a burdensome and onerous millstone around one's neck, it would not be perceived as necessary to exploit the poor Bangladeshi sweatshop workers in order to make life a little less burdensome for the privileged.



"Collateral damage" (as explained any number of times) refers to the harm which is caused by the unequal and unfair distribution of suffering. The losers in the lottery of birth are the collateral damage, which you seem to think is acceptable (because they're the ones who have to bear the suffering that, by dint of fortune, you were spared).

My husband was horribly abused by his mother; at age 8, his mother turned him over to child services and he spent most of the rest of his juvenile life in and out of correctional facilities.  So he felt rather nasty and judgmental about her.    

We pick the only option that we can pick under any given set of circumstances. And Christians are 'regular people' whose theology requires that they be able to override their own preferences, conditioning, biases and circumstances. This is necessary both to exculpate God for the suffering which exists (and lay 100% of the blame on human free will), and also to allow an individual to be 'saved' even when absolutely all causal factors and the individual's predisposition are conspiring to prevent the individual's salvation. 

If we don't allow people to commit suicide, then we're still imprisoning them (especially if they are too physically disabled to be capable of suicide). My solution is both reform within the mental health system, so that fewer people desire suicide and people are supported through crises, combined with the right to painless suicide for those who are determined that this is the right option for them.



Everything is set up to prevent suicide, except for keeping the entire population under surveillance 24 hours a day. And I have never brought up the subject of involuntary euthanasia.



When you're asked to define this "meaningful free will", all you can do is come up with a list of the factors which act as constraints to freedom (our preferences, biases, traits, etc). So you're saying it's free and then going on to state how it's not free.



That's the implication of the beliefs held by the vast majority of people who have ever lived. 'Compatibilist free will' does not serve the function that needs to be served within Christian theology (and doubtless others, such as Islam). The only type of free will that would work for Christianity is one that is based on dualism, where the immaterial soul chooses what the material brain is going to think. Any other definition of free will gives succour to the religious and enables all of the harm and oppression that is being caused in the world by religion, because Christianity/whatever religion and 'free will' (in the "imaginings of madmen" sense) are a package deal.