Free Will: Egnor shows neurological proof (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, November 26, 2020, 15:56 (1458 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: The sick, let's say psychotic, brain stops the soul from rational thinking, since the soul is forced to use the brain to think with in life. Your dualism is muddled.

dhw: It is your dualism that is muddled. You have agreed that in life the dualist’s soul does the thinking and it uses the brain to provide information and implementation of its thoughts. So the soul should be able to think rationally about information provided by the sick, psychotic brain. It doesn’t. Your patients never tell you that during the seizure they had rational thoughts about what was happening to them. How, then, can you conclude that there is a soul that does the thinking if the soul can’t think when the sick brain sends it information (whether true or false)? The clear implication is that if the patient can’t think rationally when he/she has a brain seizure, it is because the brain is the source of thought!

Again total muddle. The schizophrenic brain forces the soul to have schizophrenic thoughts. The soul can only think with the form of brain it has to work with: sick brain, sick thoughts created by the soul working through it and getting the result it is forced to accept..

dhw: Whether you think your will is free or not depends on which of these approaches you take: 1) you are not free from all the causes that have made you what you are and that therefore influence your decision (no free will); 2) you are what you are, regardless of the influences, and it is you who take the decision, and nobody else. You are free from all constraints other than those of the situation and of your own limitations. (You have free will). I still can’t see why you refuse to acknowledge that belief in free will depends on what you think the will is free from.

DAVID: I don't agree. As time passes I can think and analyze about all my past influences, and choose to ignore them. I can be what I wish to be. I'm not like you, always taking both sides of a discussion.

dhw: If you actually know ALL your past (and present) influences, you are the superest of all Supermen.

DAVID: You are agnostic on this point, and I have a positive view. Note this also carries over to our discussion about God's personality: yours is wishy-washy and mine very purposeful.

dhw: A positive view of one side of an argument indicates a negative view of the other, and although the following most emphatically does not apply to you, positive views of one side at the expense of another have led to the most appalling examples of human conduct, still horribly rife in today’s society. In short, being positive is no guarantee of being right. As for purpose, you totally refuse to accept ANY form of purpose beyond your God designing the universe and life for the sake of designing humans. You refuse to contemplate what purpose your God might have had in designing humans, and you have absolutely no idea what his purpose might have been when designing all the life forms and food supplies that had no connection with humans, or when designing bad bugs. Why you think that creation out of interest is “wishy-washy” I really don’t know. It can hardly be wishy-washier than your inability to come up with a purpose for humans and for bad bugs.

Bad bugs may have a purpose we as yet do not know. Some of the attributes about God you seek to know are unknowable, but I have positively decided on a God with a purposeful personality without questioning what He obviously decided to do as evidenced by the history He created. Why do you try to force me to come up with God's purpose? I can't know it. I can guess and you make fun of the guesses. Study God from His works is reasonable, and since humans arrived by the process of evolution, that is what He did, and therefore decided to do, OR was limited to do. All points covered. Anything further is sheer speculation that you like to delve into. I don't.