chazwin Wrote This: 1) Whatever reality is, our understanding of it has to account for the succession of events.
2) Any claim to freedom of the will forms a contradiction of the notion of reality in which the necessity of the succession of events exists. 3) ANy quintessential quality is a god of the gaps to fill any thing we can't account for. 4) That does not mean that any inference can be drawn from what is nothing more that a metaphysical concept. 5) Why should we not simply except that consciousness is a property of matter and energy in time and space which exists in particular circumstances? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1) Precisely. If we account for the succession of events without free will, we reduce ourselves to being puppets of material forces. 2) Correct. So then, that notion of reality is therefore flawed. 3) We must fill in gaps in our understanding all the time. Our finite minds cannot encompass the infinite. We infer, for example, that all of nature operates on the same fundamental core principles, even though we cannot articulate what the final core principle is. 4) Free will is hardly a mere metaphysical concept. Along with consciousness, which we observe in ourselves (but have no explanation for in physics), we must order our lives according to the axiom that we choose our actions, rather than asserting that our actions are imposed upon us. To do otherwise leads to absurd assumptions which lead us to no good result. 5) We can indeed accept that consciousness is a property of nature. But to do so, we must expand our concept of nature. Physical nature is best viewed as a subset of reality. There must be a larger overarching context, else, we not only cannot explain our vital concepts (order, natural law, logic, etc), but we actually go so far as to deny things that are right in front of our noses, such as free will. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
