The neurologists say that free will is an impossibility -based on many years of studying how the brain works.There is no place for indeterminacy to exist in any of the parts or actions of the brain.Two things follow that conclusion ; God could not give you free will that no person has. No one can suffer from free will since they do not have free will.
Each person who has ever lived is unique . From long before history the brain was being shaped not only from all the generations that preceded you, each brain in its time is being molded by interaction with its culture. The architecture of the brain continues to be shaped by all the experiences of each generation Especially traumas to the head of various body systems are in a complex feed back loop with the brain. The experience of the body adds to the architecture of the brain.There is no place in this 300,000 years of shaping and passing information generation by generation for free will to enter the physical system.Experiments show that test subjects fire neurons in the brain 5-10 seconds before they indicate they are executing an intent.It is at the point of execution that the long history is deterministic. All of the action have been material and the final neuron is contained by this long specific history of interaction with the environment/ cultures. Ìt cannot be predicted. There cannot be but a rudimentary map of the history of the evolving architecture of this great multitude of brains.
If you want to know where your feeling comes from, the most proximate cause is any one or more of 20 hormones that stimulate different parts of the brain. External or internal events or things trigger the appropriate hormone to the specific section of the brain.
Yes. Or as Vonnegut said of his protagonist in 'Breakfast of Champions'... "Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth."
Just like in our scientific ignorance we created gods to comfort our need to understand and try to control our environment, we now flatter ourselves by extolling the majestic mystery of our consciousness, our awareness of self... which is really pathetic. We will one day understand precisely how our minds work, and we will see that it follows the same physical laws all else does, and it will be materially understood.
If it pleases you to flatter yourself by wondering at the miracle of consciousness, fine. However, it will be seen in the future that it makes as much sense as Genesis and the resurrection.
The sequence of human beliefs over time started with magical thinking, leading to religious thinking and we are now at scientific thinking - a reductionism of being to components.
We will never comprehend how time has put the human existential machine together through the ages, the epochs, the periods, the eras and the eons from a single common ancestor.
We are foolish creatures indeed trying to explain why we are here - just accept the fact that you are a part and not the whole of everything.
If we're going to consider gods, we should start with the plural, as so many religious traditions have (including Judaism, before they were all conflated with YHWH/Jehovah). Just as the physically-apparent universe scales from the subatomic up through swarms of galaxies, with many stages between, why should we expect the spiritually-apparent universe to jump directly from the human scale to unfathomable largeness? If we are to have any humility before the vastness of reality, polytheism is far more likely than monotheism to come closer to apprehending the truth of it.
If we call the materially-evident universe "the Great Thing" we haven't understood it at all. Same with what some call "the Great God."
I follow the leading-edge of research from within materialist research programs. I read stuff from SFI, and read papers. I'm open to the idea some major discovery could prove me wrong on these counts. But as I've written about over the past year: various empirical results in cosmology, biology and neuroscience have actually made some of these mysteries deeper and paradoxes worse. So the direction of travel on materialist metaphysics is retrograde.
This is why you're seeing an explosion of interest in panpsychism and monisms at theoretical physics conferences now.
My objection is to treating materialism as something the scientific method has already established. I follow the research because I want to understand whether it can answer the questions that trouble me, and I remain open to being wrong. But your analogy also needs an argument: why should physical reality having different scales make multiple gods more likely? I don’t see how that conclusion follows.
“Just as the physically apparent universe scales from the subatomic up through swarms of galaxies.”
That analogy assumes the reductionism under dispute. We can describe reality at different scales, but we have not established that each level is metaphysically reducible to the one beneath it. Complexity and emergence name the problem; they have not yet shown how consciousness, agency, or meaning are produced from an exhaustively material base. I await that demonstration with bated breath. My metaphysics does not require it. :)
You misunderstand. I'm making an analogy. Are you disputing the size of the visible universe? Why should the invisible (at present) be any smaller? I'm a dual-aspect monist, favoring a panpsychism that's similar to Whitehead's. Believing that the God one may hear from or speak to is as large as the universe is bizarre (surely there are angels to delegate it to, even on the Christian model) -- the universe should be as large and diverse when viewed in the spiritual aspect as when viewed in the material. There may be as many Gods as there are stars -- or more!
The notion that the proper question is "one God or none" dodges the whole question of whether there may, indeed, be many. And if the whole of it, at the vast scale which encompasses the galaxies as well as all that physics currently doesn't have a handle on, is some sort of super-conscious Being, that still doesn't rule out speculation that the Sun may, at a scale still immense but closer to ours, be conscious. Who are we to call the ancient Egyptians wrong?
Well, the only thing I will say about the natural of a God/creator, is that such a God would almost certainly NOT be omniscient or omnipotent in a dual-aspect monism model. God could have created the universe, and created the conditions for our emergence, and may even intervene in some ways, but a good with unlimited knowledge and/or power is incoherent.
If a God knew everything there was to know, then that would elide creation. I think O'Connor has made this point, too.
Many philosophers of religion — including many Christian ones — hold this position.
So the most likely characteristic of a God if one exists, is a limited being relative to us.
Limited, but obviously VASTLY more powerful than us.
I think it was Voltaire who said, of religion, that “doubt is indeed a disagreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” Thus I am in the camp of agnostics. I do have a question, though. If homo sapiens has been around for approx 300,000 years, what sort of a god would allow 298,000 years of humankind to languish without the hope of salvation Christianity claims to offer?
The most plausible explanation is simply that God gave human's free will and that freedom is not possible without suffering — which is a core insight from Buddhism — and mirrored in various interpretations of the Fall, such as my own and that of Alan Watts.
The problem of evil is predicated on the idea that God is omnipotent and omniscient.
But there are many conceptions of limited Gods — and those accounts would be more reasonable than the Sunday School depictions most people are arguing against in their heads.
An interesting observation: “ You are god and you are not. It’s good not to get the two confused. It is one.” Sister Mary Corita Kent
another observation, "We are both the Ocean, and the Wave"
The neurologists say that free will is an impossibility -based on many years of studying how the brain works.There is no place for indeterminacy to exist in any of the parts or actions of the brain.Two things follow that conclusion ; God could not give you free will that no person has. No one can suffer from free will since they do not have free will.
Each person who has ever lived is unique . From long before history the brain was being shaped not only from all the generations that preceded you, each brain in its time is being molded by interaction with its culture. The architecture of the brain continues to be shaped by all the experiences of each generation Especially traumas to the head of various body systems are in a complex feed back loop with the brain. The experience of the body adds to the architecture of the brain.There is no place in this 300,000 years of shaping and passing information generation by generation for free will to enter the physical system.Experiments show that test subjects fire neurons in the brain 5-10 seconds before they indicate they are executing an intent.It is at the point of execution that the long history is deterministic. All of the action have been material and the final neuron is contained by this long specific history of interaction with the environment/ cultures. Ìt cannot be predicted. There cannot be but a rudimentary map of the history of the evolving architecture of this great multitude of brains.
If you want to know where your feeling comes from, the most proximate cause is any one or more of 20 hormones that stimulate different parts of the brain. External or internal events or things trigger the appropriate hormone to the specific section of the brain.
Yes. Or as Vonnegut said of his protagonist in 'Breakfast of Champions'... "Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth."
That's us; our brains, our minds, our consciousness: it's mechanistic.
Just like in our scientific ignorance we created gods to comfort our need to understand and try to control our environment, we now flatter ourselves by extolling the majestic mystery of our consciousness, our awareness of self... which is really pathetic. We will one day understand precisely how our minds work, and we will see that it follows the same physical laws all else does, and it will be materially understood.
If it pleases you to flatter yourself by wondering at the miracle of consciousness, fine. However, it will be seen in the future that it makes as much sense as Genesis and the resurrection.
The sequence of human beliefs over time started with magical thinking, leading to religious thinking and we are now at scientific thinking - a reductionism of being to components.
We will never comprehend how time has put the human existential machine together through the ages, the epochs, the periods, the eras and the eons from a single common ancestor.
We are foolish creatures indeed trying to explain why we are here - just accept the fact that you are a part and not the whole of everything.
I politely decline your invitation to pause my inquiries in this direction.
I did not say decline the thinking but just change the category.
I know quite a bit about categories. Tell me more ... https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/on-categories
Well, I am no Gilbert Ryle nor wish to argue along the lines of Hitchen's epistemological razor.
I am saying we seem to be ignoring Eastern Philosophy in our Western type thinking.
If we're going to consider gods, we should start with the plural, as so many religious traditions have (including Judaism, before they were all conflated with YHWH/Jehovah). Just as the physically-apparent universe scales from the subatomic up through swarms of galaxies, with many stages between, why should we expect the spiritually-apparent universe to jump directly from the human scale to unfathomable largeness? If we are to have any humility before the vastness of reality, polytheism is far more likely than monotheism to come closer to apprehending the truth of it.
If we call the materially-evident universe "the Great Thing" we haven't understood it at all. Same with what some call "the Great God."
I follow the leading-edge of research from within materialist research programs. I read stuff from SFI, and read papers. I'm open to the idea some major discovery could prove me wrong on these counts. But as I've written about over the past year: various empirical results in cosmology, biology and neuroscience have actually made some of these mysteries deeper and paradoxes worse. So the direction of travel on materialist metaphysics is retrograde.
This is why you're seeing an explosion of interest in panpsychism and monisms at theoretical physics conferences now.
My objection is to treating materialism as something the scientific method has already established. I follow the research because I want to understand whether it can answer the questions that trouble me, and I remain open to being wrong. But your analogy also needs an argument: why should physical reality having different scales make multiple gods more likely? I don’t see how that conclusion follows.
“Just as the physically apparent universe scales from the subatomic up through swarms of galaxies.”
That analogy assumes the reductionism under dispute. We can describe reality at different scales, but we have not established that each level is metaphysically reducible to the one beneath it. Complexity and emergence name the problem; they have not yet shown how consciousness, agency, or meaning are produced from an exhaustively material base. I await that demonstration with bated breath. My metaphysics does not require it. :)
You misunderstand. I'm making an analogy. Are you disputing the size of the visible universe? Why should the invisible (at present) be any smaller? I'm a dual-aspect monist, favoring a panpsychism that's similar to Whitehead's. Believing that the God one may hear from or speak to is as large as the universe is bizarre (surely there are angels to delegate it to, even on the Christian model) -- the universe should be as large and diverse when viewed in the spiritual aspect as when viewed in the material. There may be as many Gods as there are stars -- or more!
The notion that the proper question is "one God or none" dodges the whole question of whether there may, indeed, be many. And if the whole of it, at the vast scale which encompasses the galaxies as well as all that physics currently doesn't have a handle on, is some sort of super-conscious Being, that still doesn't rule out speculation that the Sun may, at a scale still immense but closer to ours, be conscious. Who are we to call the ancient Egyptians wrong?
Well, the only thing I will say about the natural of a God/creator, is that such a God would almost certainly NOT be omniscient or omnipotent in a dual-aspect monism model. God could have created the universe, and created the conditions for our emergence, and may even intervene in some ways, but a good with unlimited knowledge and/or power is incoherent.
If a God knew everything there was to know, then that would elide creation. I think O'Connor has made this point, too.
Many philosophers of religion — including many Christian ones — hold this position.
So the most likely characteristic of a God if one exists, is a limited being relative to us.
Limited, but obviously VASTLY more powerful than us.
I think it was Voltaire who said, of religion, that “doubt is indeed a disagreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” Thus I am in the camp of agnostics. I do have a question, though. If homo sapiens has been around for approx 300,000 years, what sort of a god would allow 298,000 years of humankind to languish without the hope of salvation Christianity claims to offer?
The most plausible explanation is simply that God gave human's free will and that freedom is not possible without suffering — which is a core insight from Buddhism — and mirrored in various interpretations of the Fall, such as my own and that of Alan Watts.
The problem of evil is predicated on the idea that God is omnipotent and omniscient.
But there are many conceptions of limited Gods — and those accounts would be more reasonable than the Sunday School depictions most people are arguing against in their heads.
No magic. If a god needs magic then that god doesn't exist. That still leaves magic as undefined. As I think about it, I ralize it's not simple.
See my comment on Robert Pirsig a couple of posts back (An Argument in Three Costumes). https://mikebrock.substack.com/p/an-argument-in-three-costumes?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=347111982