More "miscellany" PART ONE (General)

by dhw, Saturday, January 21, 2023, 09:12 (433 days ago) @ David Turell

PART ONE

The playwriting analogy

dhw: There is no point in repeating all the details, since the analogy leads straight back to your God’s incompetence: he writes scenes and introduces characters, 99% of which have no connection with the plot. […] Here’s a different analogy for you: If you try to cook supper for your wife, and your first 49 dinners are inedible but the 50th hits the spot, would you regard yourself as a competent cook?

DAVID: Your analogy is not an evolutionary process as seen in the known history, in which success is built on failures and the development of ecosystems of food supply.

So what on earth were you doing trying to compare evolution to my playwriting? In my analogy, your 50th dinner would have been a success built on the past 49 failures. Perhaps you might have learned something from them. That’s your kind of evolution, isn’t it? The present building on past failures? Why are your 49 failed dinners and final success not to be viewed as parallel to your God's 99 failed experiments leading to the final success? And how can your failures and his be called competence?

DAVID: Give me your definition of the evolution of life that all will accept.

More dodging. I have given you the same definition many times: “The process by which living organisms have developed from earlier ancestral forms.” NOT “the process by which God designed all living organisms, 99% of which were mistakes or failures which did not provide ancestral forms for the only organisms he wanted to design: sapiens plus food”.

Free will

dhw: My own view is that it depends entirely on what you mean by the term “free will”. If you mean it is you and nobody else who makes your decisions, then you have it, since you are still you, regardless of all the influences. If you mean your decisions have been influenced by factors beyond your control, then you don’t have it.

I have repeated this comment because you have ignored it.

DAVID: I feel I know exactly what I am doing, thinking, producing here.

dhw: Of course you feel that. Why don’t you respond to my comment on the meaning of the term? You’ve adopted the first viewpoint: You are still you, regardless of the influences (some of which may be negative – you can’t expect me to know what made you into the person you are now). You have totally ignored the second viewpoint. Of course you may not be conscious of the influences that have led to your decisions.

DAVID: Your response is nebulous. I feel I know all the factors that led me to who I am today.

Good for you. Some people would argue that it is impossible for anyone to know all the factors that make them what they are and hence make them decide what they decide (free will entails making decisions), and this would include the influence of our brain structure and all the processes inside us which we do not control. If disease or alcohol or drugs can affect the decisions made in the brain, who knows what other less obvious influences may be at work when you decide to tell us that you know everything about yourself instead of deciding to tell us that you don’t know everything about yourself?

Denisovan immunity contribution:

Covered on the evolution thread.


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