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Originally Posted by Aaron W.
How can I persuade you of anything? You've asserted a particular hypothesis: "Determinism is true." Then you go on to essentially deny that hypothesis by trying to make some affirmative claims about your ability to make "decisions" as if that has a meaningful interpretation UNDER YOUR HYPOTHESIS.
Over the course of this thread, between madnak, myself, smrk, and others, a philosophical argument that compellingly lays out a determinist (modulo QM) understanding of the universe has been put forth, with attendant challenges to the traditional and/or libertarian conception of free will. A complimentary challenge to free will has also come from Strawson's account (
linked by smrk) of the no-freedom pessimistic argument.
Having processed, thought through, and evaluated the robustness and soundness of these positions, I (and others) then began to wonder about what happens to traditional, freedom-oriented concepts like responsibility, punishment, human effectuality, and so on.
My own direction at that point has been to suggest that we evidently experience what I'm stipulating (in light of determinism) is a powerful illusion of willfulness, agency, relative freedom, and effectiveness in everyday life.
The details of all of the above, including the latter-most part, are laid out in prior posts, obviously. What your grand objection to all of this is, I cannot tell, because you continue to speak in blunt and blanket dismissals, rather than point-by-point.
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The ability to string a lot of words together does not mean you've actually made an argument for anything.
Can you really not imagine yourself on the other side of a comment like this when deciding to make it? It's essentially a terse and total rejection of the meaningfulness of anything I've said. Here I am in previous posts citing or paraphrasing specific statements you've made and thereby trying to engage with your remarks directly, and in return I find you summarily disqualifying entire posts of mine as mere strings of words that amount to nothing.
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I think it's actually a very powerful philosophical argument. What would philosophy be without daily human experience? If we had no "daily human experience" what would we "philosophize" about?
Your call to the "scientific" is a red herring.
Do you not see you error here? Please attend carefully. You say you think that daily experience is a "very powerful argument." Then you ask what philosophy would be without it, and what we would philosophize about without it. In your very own account, you are equivocating about daily experience. You begin by calling it "an argument." Then you shift to saying that it is what we "philosophize about." Which is precisely my point. Daily experience
by itself is not an argument; it can be the matter or subject
of an argument; as you say, what we philosophize about.