Free Will: Egnor shows neurological proof - PART ONE (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, January 07, 2021, 09:18 (1416 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God is all purpose with no self-aggrandizing intents. As a designer myself it is easier to do it directly than hand it off to a secondhand design mechanism which will have to have an enormous set of instructions to produce proper results.

dhw: But you have your God preprogramming every undabbled design in the history of life. That’s a pretty enormous set of instructions, isn’t it? In my theory, there are no instructions at all. Just as humans use their intelligence to invent new things, so too would other intelligent organisms. What are your criteria for “proper results”? If your God wanted a free-for-all, then a free-for-all would be the proper result.

DAVID: Preprogramming is just one possibility, direct design the other. The complexity requires careful design of all new stages.

I specified “undabbled” (dabbling = direct design). Every single programme would have had to contain detailed instructions, whereas cellular intelligence would require no instructions at all. See your misleading statement above, now bolded.

dhw: “All purpose” sounds convincing, except that you refuse to go beyond the one and only purpose of designing humans plus food supply. (See “Miscellany” and elsewhere for your illogical combination of beliefs.) “Self aggrandizing” is of course possible (he wants humans to worship him and admire his works) but creating a free-for-all, and wanting something he can watch with interest to fill the eternal void, is not self-aggrandizing.

DAVID: Why does He need to be human-like with things to watch? Your usual minimizing of God.

You emphasize that your God is “all purpose”, and you refuse to discuss what his purpose might be. Even if his one and only purpose was to design H. sapiens, he must have had a reason for doing so! There is no “minimizing” involved. You have said that you are sure he watches us with interest. So what is your logical objection to the proposal that he wanted to create something he could watch with interest?

DAVID: As usual I'll accept logic. I don't think He does anything to satisfy His personal emotional needs. He has none in my opinion.

dhw: If you’ll accept logic, then you will have to accept that it is perfectly feasible to argue that if our part of his consciousness produces certain thought patterns and emotions, they may well be similar to his own. Your opinion does not change the logic of the argument.

DAVID: Logic tells us that His degree of consciousness may be vastly superior to ours and we may have a simple version of it, with n o direct comparisons possible.

Of course his degree of consciousness/intelligence must be vastly superior to ours (if he exists). Does anyone seriously believe that we can create a universe that will spawn life? But that does not mean he cannot have thought patterns and emotions similar to ours, as you have so rightly pointed out in the past.

DAVID: My comments are not set in stone. I have a right to alter your misinterpretations of my comments.

dhw: How can anyone possibly misinterpret the statement that “He and we probably have similar thought patterns and emotions beyond just simple logical thought”? But I’m pleased to hear that your comments are not set in stone. That is why I continue to challenge them – though in this case, you have my full support!

DAVID: Thank you.

I must thank you for the above comment in bold, which explicitly justifies our probing into God’s possible “humanized” purposes for creating life.

DAVID: Emergence requires the invention of life. Only God does that.

dhw: I am not discounting God! I am proposing (theistic version) that he designed materials from which both life and consciousness emerge. This = theistic materialism. What is your objection?

DAVID: Life and consciousness are both immaterial aspects of the materials God used. That is dualism, not "theistic materialism".

If life and consciousness emerge from materials, we have materialism. If life and consciousness are separate “entities” from the materials, we have dualism. What I have proposed is a compromise between the two theories. Theistic version: your God created a material machine which generates life and consciousness. We leave open the question of whether what is generated (the immaterial living and conscious “self”) can survive the death of the machine. As far as I know, most materialists reject the concept of a God and therefore rely on chance as the creator of the original “machine”. They would almost certainly reject the possibility of an afterlife. What is your objection?