If the laws of nature encompass all matter [including brain matter] unfolding from the past into the present into the future only as these laws compel it to, what isn’t nature responsible for?
And how would not the laws of matter be wholly responsible for any definitions that any particular brains – as matter – are compelled by nature to think up?
I’m still perplexed [compelled or otherwise] by how you reconfigure [compelled or otherwise] these relationships “in your head” into the “choices” that we make that “for all practical purposes” would seem to unfold only as they must.
There you go again making these “exceptions”. This mysterious “choice” that “I” makes in the present that is both somehow compelled by nature and not compelled by nature. And over and over and over again, it can be pointed out that in regard to human interactions that come into conflict over value judgments, what some construe to be right behaviors others construe to be wrong behaviors. And precisely because in behaving either way someone gets hurt.
I challenge you to bring this part…
…down to earth. Note a particular context in which behaviors come into conflict over hurting others and note how this might be “removed” by the author’s discovery.
In other words, assuming that we do possess some measure of autonomy and all of these words that we are typing back and forth were not only as they ever could have been typed back and forth.
My only recourse here is to repeat myself:
Now, nature will either compel you to wiggle out of actually responding to these points once again, or it won’t.
So these qualitative differences exist but for all practical purposes nothing changes. The matter in our brain is still no less a necessary part of the natural world unfolding per the immutable laws of matter.
Only “I” get to “choose” to type these words that I was never able not to type.
What you mean of course is that the more nature compels us to define words more specifically the more nature will still unfold only as it ever could have.
In other words…
Again and again: even in a world where free will prevails, once a choice is made it stays made. That’s just common sense. But if we are a part of nature and nature unfolds in sync with its own inherent material laws, than nothing can be external to it. Yet somehow you and the author [b]in the moment of “choosing” itself[/b] are external to it. Or, rather, so it seems to me.
But that is “demonstrated” to us in a world of words said to be defined only as all the rest of us are obligated to define them in turn. Even though obligations themselves are but another inherent manifestion of nature having evolved into human brains compelled to make them.
Your own brain being compelled to note things like this:
And all of those things that influence us…how are they not in turn but more manifestations of nature and the laws that propel it?
You got knocked down by the crane because nature compelled you to “choose” to be where the crane could knock you down. And you “chose” to be there because nature compelled you to think/feel/believe that being there embodied your greater satisfaction.
Now the crane operator was compelled by nature to knock you down. But some are compelled by nature to think that he knocked you down on purpose. Nature then compels them to go to the police who are in turn compelled to arrest him so that nature can compel the court system to put him on trial.
And yet in the midst of all these “choices” there is a flicker of “I” that is somehow “external” to nature.
Which nature has now complelled you to fail to demonstrate. Or so nature now compels me to insist.
How can I not but stick to the meaning that nature has compelled me here and now to believe is correct? I don’t profess this capacity at the moment of “choosing” itself to be external to nature.
But if you are compelled to believe by nature that the author was compelled by nature to define all of his words such that no further demonstrations are needed to insure our “progressive future”, then you’re the lucky one. Nature has provided you with a frame of mind that comforts and consoles you. It has provided me with no such thing at all. Quite the opposite. At least until someday [perhaps] when, in the moment of “choosing”, nature will compel me to be outside of it long enough to delude myself into believing that I am not just another of its dominoes.
In other words, nature has yet to compel me to define cause here as it has compelled you to.
Look, as long as you keep your arguments revolving around “concepts” all you’ll ever need are words to define.
Only when nature compels you to understand that how you insist it all works when your brain as an inherent component of nature compels you to shift the blame to me will you recognize that what you construe to be your “permission” at the moment of “choice” here is really just the psychological illusion of choice that nature has in turn compelled you to embody.
Only I’m at least willing to acknowledge that I have no capacity to demonstrate that this is true. Why? Well, because, among other things, I am not a neuroscientist probing actual brains functioning in the the act of choosing. I [like you] am stuck instead with a world of words that define and defend other words in that gap between what “I” think I know here and now and all that there actually is to be known about all of this.
Then you post another “world of words” assessment from the author.
But, again, in all those words…
“I challenge you to note even one thing here that folks like us [here and now] can do to verify this account. Something that is beyond all doubt “scientifically confirmed” to be true about this future.”
How is his “scientific miracle” manifested in a way that becomes clearer to us? How is it described in such a way that we can grasp its application to and implication for our own lives?
All the while demonstrating in turn how, at the moment in which we “choose” to react to it, we are somehow both at one with nature and simultaneously beyond nature compelling us to choose only what the laws of matter propel us to.
Then provide us with that which you construe to be the best examples of this.
Note to others who have read parts or all of the book:
Does the author [in your view] provide hard evidence to back up his theoretical assumptions about this progressive future?