Chelonian

I have no idea what you're asking. What would the scientific investigation of logic measure?

@FrankHubeny OK, thanks for the discussion.

If so, I'm not sure I agree with that degree of interpretation on SE.Philosophy questions. His first sentence and last are direct questions asking for alternative explanations. Even if the OP doesn't think there can be any, isn't it appropriate to provide them when they do, in fact, exist?

@FrankHubeny Than you for the explanation; I see how you interpreted now. Something like the OP is saying, "Can you give me support for my position, which is that there can be no benevolence without God?". Is that right?

Words like "minds" and "choices" are ones that need to be defined carefully before we can discuss them effectively. I'm happy to try to do that if you want to, but otherwise it's hard for me to respond to your final comment.

I also disagree that OP is "setting up a case". He's merely asking a question. He sees no other explanation for human benevolence but some spirit of goodness coming from a god. Yet there are other reasonable explanations.

@FrankHubeny I disagree that the EANN can be phrased that way. First, benevolence is not a cognitive ability; it's not primarily a matter of cognition, that is, thinking and symbol manipulation. It's a behavior. Second, that is not the argument of the EANN. The argument of the EANN is that the combination of naturalism + evolution is self-defeating, because we can't know if anything is correct, since we may have evolved in such a way to have faulty truth-detecting faculties.

I also have challenges to your response in the comments, but let me let you address this first. Thank you.

The OP isn't claiming anything about atheism being self-defeating, he is saying he doesn't know of any reasons that would explain human benevolence OTHER THAN a god existing. But now he has four reasons from me and one from you (panpsychism).

@FrankHubeny How can you see the OP asking any other question other than the one he asked? He asked "If there is no god..." and asked for reasons why people would be good given that scenario. In my answer, I provided four possible reasons that adhered to that supposition.

Maybe I'd have to read the authors you cited.

@FrankHubeny Thanks for that explanation regarding rocks, computers, etc. Definitely not what I was expecting. Seems rather far afield from what people generally speak about when they use the term "free will" (either in the libertarian/Christian way or the compatibilist way). If we are to say a rock has "free will" in some sense, then I don't know what that "free will" actually is.

@FrankHubeny I should've realized the ping would work that way, thanks for letting me know. Anyway, back to philosophy: So, just to be clear, you don't think there is any physical world? This is something like Idealism? Are rocks "agents", in your use of that word? (the point is: Are there are any things that are not agents?). And are all agents--including animals without nervous systems--conscious, at least to some degree?

Thanks for your responses. Your view is more interesting than I had initially imagined. I'll have to follow up with some questions later, but at the moment I will have to put that aside.

@FrankHubeny Whoops, not sure if you can address a person in chat in the middle of a sentence, so let me repost that:

Thanks for your responses, @FrankHubeny . Your view is more interesting than I had initially imagined. I'll have to follow up with some questions later, but at the moment I will have to put that aside.

I'm still not sure what I feel about compatibilism. I sort of see that the view is right, but I initially thought it was a bait and switch with the term "free will". I still kind of think that, but on the other hand see some value in it.

In other words, I am a hardcore determinist. That grows out of my materialist/physicalist metaphysics. I allow some wiggle room for quantum mechanical effects, but I really don't understand that enough. For human actions in our world, I don't think quantum mechanical effects make any difference whatever, so our behaviors are just part of a causal chain.

@FrankHubeny My view of free will is that, very strictly speaking, I don't know what the answer is. However, my default model, and one that I tend to believe in most situations, is that we have no libertarian free will, and that the concept of libertarian free will is (probably) incoherent.

@FrankHubeny So, you think the mind is non-physical?

@FrankHubeny Thanks for that. So, do you think voluntary human actions (e.g. choosing which flavor of ice cream to order in an ice cream shop) are due only to the workings of the brain, or do you think they actually originate in a non-physical "something", like a soul? Or a combination of both?

@FrankHubeny This whole time, I've been under the impression that your concept of free will is the libertarian one, not the compatibilist one. And that your libertarian free will view is rooting in your religious beliefs. Is that correct?

Therefore, says A, the sun does move across the sky.

As an example, consider how Person A may look at the sky each day for hours and conclude that the sun travels through the sky. Person B may tell him, no, it doesn't. A then says "but my experience of it is that it travels...if you wait, you can observe it moving slowly across the sky yourself." B says that is an illusion. A then says that B has self-defeated because if everything B believes is an illusion, B shouldn't trust his belief that the moving sun is an illusion.

I'm saying that some of our experiences--namely, our experience of libertarian free will--may be incorrect. Not necessarily all our experiences or thoughts. And the reason to deny that we have free will is that it seems inconsistent with our other observations of the universe, ones that have brought us to our current understanding of physics.

> @Chelonian The problem with claiming our experiences (which include our rational processes) are illusions is that we use those experiences and rational processes to claim that determinism is true. Essentially that is how I understand Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism. There must be some reason to deny our experiences besides claiming they sometimes are wrong.

@FrankHubeny In response to this:

@FrankHubeny Well, our experiences and feelings about what has happened are often out of alignment with the underlying reality (cf. optical illusions). It seems to me that free willed (in the sense of libertarian free will) and fully determined human actions would appear the same to us. I agree that further understanding of who we are (neuroscience, etc.) would help us understand these issues better.

What is this evidence?

@FrankHubeny So, the part I don't understand is this: "Derive a contradiction from our empirical evidence that we do experience free will with what the assumption of determinism concludes."

@FrankHubeny OK, thanks. I didn't realize "defeater" could have this "lighter" sense (I see online that maybe this is called an "undercutting defeater").

I could see the conclusion being, "We just don't know one way or the other."

I'm just having trouble understanding why this point means one must reject determinism.

Is this basically the "defeater"? Because you also mention illusion/delusion.

In any case, what you provide here seems like a clear statement, thanks.

I can accept "our view that we initiated it is an illusion", under some definitions of "we", but I did have more trouble with "everything is an illusion"--unless you just meant everything to mean every action.

@FrankHubeny I agree; I wish more people would bring things to chat.

Not sure I agree with the use of "illusion" exactly in your answer, either.

@FrankHubeny Nice deflection to this ongoing chat in your response today.

But what is "I" in this? What are you? Because you are describing this "I" as if it were something apart from your brain.

> "If are other neural events, then , it seems to me, i am not really in control. The choice i make are merely a result of what happens inside my brain.

@NikolajDiRondò Hi. In your last comment, you use the word "I", as in:

@FrankHubeny How does Mark Balaguer reconcile libertarianism and physicalism? (if there is an "in a nutshell" summary you could make).

@FrankHubeny So, if I understand you, people have free will, and God concurs with it. But does God still know about it from the beginning of time, and is that still a problem for you?

@FrankHubeny Thanks for the explanation. Is your feeling that the "concurrentist" version is the one you find correct? And does that clear up your initial concerns?

@FrankHubeny OK, how does Occasionalism address your concern about God's omniscience and free will?

@GeoffreyThomas Hi, are you getting this in chat? If so, we could continue our back-and-forth about "hand waving" here, rather than misuse the comments section of your answer.

@KonradRudolph. If you say so; I never once heard anyone in grad school mention that papers were badly written, only that some 1950s papers were particularly good in terms of detail and design. Just for the heck of it, I took the first bio paper I saw on PLoS, and started reading the intro. Aside from some jargon I'm not familiar with yet, I found this very readable: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/…

@KonradRudolph In my experience in biology, at least, I essentially never think a paper is badly written. They are written in a very clear, standardized way. I'm curious what field OP is reading.