Belinda wrote:If you believe that something is real simply because it feels as if it's real, then you are at risk of all manner of self deceptions.
True, but incomplete. It is also true that if you insist that only that which you can verify by methods
you choose to prescribe arbitrarily is true, you are also at risk of self-deception. Pick your poison.
Look at it this way: we have this very, very powerful intuition that we exist as a "self," not merely as a collocation of predetermined atoms.
Everybody feels it, even those people who most ardently want to deny it. Everybody acts like this intuition reflects some important truth. Even its deniers
argue -- showing thereby that they imagine they can sway the judgment of free agents. But at the same time, they will tell you that these agents are not free. That's clearly nonsense, since they cannot even stay consistent with their own philosophy. If they could, perhaps we'd have reason to believe them: but then, they would not be offering
arguments. They'd just be waiting for predetermined outcomes to play out as they inevitably must, and they wouldn't bother to argue.
So people are of two types: those (like Henry) who
know they believe in some measure of free will, and those (like the Determinists) who
claim not to but actually
act like they do believe in it anyway.
And there are no other types, apparently. There are only those who affirm free will by ideology, and those who affirm it by their practices.
So we need to ask what we can make of this powerful, universal intuition. Is it wrong? What is our theory for the
reason it's wrong; that we think all intuitions are automatically wrong? That's clearly untrue; some intuitions turn out to be right...everybody recognizes that. So it begs the question of what this inuition really means.
I think it means we know we're all morally-responsible agents, ultimately.
Let me show you a simple illustration of why we have that sort of intuition.
Take an optical illusion...say this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f1G6Nx5VDw. But don't start the video just yet -- pause it right at the starting image. Just look at the still image, and ask yourself what it is.
Can you see both images? Most people can, after a few seconds. If you can't, then click on the video, and you'll see it. They'll morph it for you.
Go back to the starting image, and pause the video.
Now,
before the video started morphing to the old woman, when you had just arrived at the site and seen the still picture, which one did
you see first? Which one did
you see second?
Now play around with this. Can you now focus your mind so as just to perceive one and not the other, and hold that for a second or two? Now can you focus your mind to see the other one, and not the first one?
Almost everyone can do that. But notice this: THE PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF THE STILL VERSION OF THE ILLUSION DO NOT CHANGE. Nor did I tell you which of the two images you had to perceive first, and which you had to perceive second. Moreover, when I asked you to hold onto one, I didn't specify
which one. Then, when I told you to revert to the other, again, I didn't tell you which one that one had to be. I left all that to you.
So let me ask you this: who is doing the manipulating of the image?
Of course, you can
imagine it was some sort of physical causality, but that gets less plausible because no
physical property is being manipulated as you move from the one image to the other, and back again, as often as you may happen to please. Only your own individual
perception is changing. And I am not making you change it, because I was non-directive in my instructions as to which you would choose to see.
I suggest to you that you are feeling the sensation of your own free will. And that powerful feeling you've just had is exactly what the Determinists want to tell you means nothing.
Having done the experiment, and having felt yourself make the decision to go back and forth on the image, are you still with them on that?
