FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
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User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
55m ago
So I don't exactly disagree with you, but the things that give me pause are things how people change after brain damage. So I think at the very minimum the material medium in some way constrains or shapes free will.
The brain damage examples give me pause too, but we've had two centuries since Phineas Gage, and for a good portion of the last one people were actively attempting to make progress of psychosurgery. As I argued in the threads linked above, my position is not a dogmatic one, and I'm entirely willing to admit that I'm wrong if Determinism could be demonstrated. I will even readily admit that it's entirely possible that determinism will be demonstrated within my lifetime. I'm betting it won't be, though, and I'm very certain that all attempts to demonstrate it to date have failed.
I'm also certain that people who believe in Determinism, and further believe that their belief is based entirely on direct evidence that proves Determinism, have made a serious error in their reasoning.
I might not consider hitting my wife, but jam a needle in my brain and I might choose just that. And I will probably think it is my own free choice.
It is entirely possible that this is true, but I will believe it when I see this process actually demonstrated under controlled conditions, and not before. What I notice is that a lot of people seem to easily slide from the hypothetical of a needle in the brain, to a belief that the needle in the brain is an actual, verifiable reality right now. Worse, a lot of people seem to be completely unaware of the numerous, well-funded failures to actually design needles for the brain, in a sort of crowd-based file-drawer problem. Massive, well-funded efforts to develop Determinist methods of controlling or engineering individual humans repeatedly fail, and those failures not only do not cause an update on peoples' priors, but are completely forgotten.
This seems like a pretty serious failure of rationality to me.
shoot, I mangled the link. here's the correct version. For what it's worth, my understanding of hypnotism is the same as yours, but @jimm has a very, very different perspective.
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