Reclaiming Freedom
Steve Taylor says of determinism: “I refute it thus!”
Of course one might note that arguing “all of these factors have some influence on our behaviour” is in itself just another attempt at an all-encompassing explanation. But the fact that so many of us do seem compelled [naturally or not] to fit everything into one overarching account speaks volumes regarding how the brain seems to function. And that makes sense. We go about the business of doing so many different things it’s got to provoke us from time to time into thinking about the existence of something that fits everything together into what in some mental capacity is thought to be an ontological and teleological TOE.
It could be God, it could be nature, it could be something that no one has [so far] even thought of as existing at all.
Then back to this: He [like you and I] have no way in which to determine beyond all doubt that the “conscious self” either embodies or does not embody merely the illusion of free-will. Does nature dictate everything we think, feel, say and do? Or did nature’s matter actually succeed in evolving into an autonomous capacity to question its own existence?
This part:
Sure, maybe. But what is this but one more presumptuous assertion that it is so. How does this particular author go about producing the hard evidence necessary to convince the world that there could be no other explanation?
Or, that, even should someone seem to accomplish this, that this too is not only as it ever could have been?
How would we ever be able to detach ourselves from something we a clearly a part of in order to gain that distance said to be crucial in establishing that much sought after objectivity.