Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”
Like that definitively refutes Berkeley’s assumptions. Or, “I think therefore I am”. Like that necessarily excludes someone in a Sim world being programed to think that. Nothing is really either established as true or refuted as false until everything and anything is agglomerated into an explanation for existence itself. Yet even here someone convinced that they are cognizant of this may well be compelled to by someone or something beyond his or her grasp.
This merely takes me back to dreaming. I don’t know about your dreams but in mine “I” am utterly convinced I am confronted with a “variety of choices of thoughts and actions in front of me”.
Last night I dreamed myself back into to a set of circumstances involving an old childhood friend, Roger Rasnake. We were involved in some construction project that we were working on for free. I then insisted that we ought to be paid for what we did. Back and forth we went while continuing to work. Everything was vividly real including my confrontation with others in my family.
Yet the whole “experience” was created entirely in my brain, by my brain…for my brain?
Though, sure, there must be an important distinction between my “I” in that dream and my “I” here and now choosing to types these words rather than others.
But who out there in science, in philosophy, in theology has actually been able to demonstrate it such that there is no other possible explanation but free will in the human species.