Is free-will an illusion?

You make a fine cheerleader for the team you choose to align yourself with and root for

Brian, my position is that anyone who thinks these issues are, at their core, about "data" or "empirical evidence" simply misconstrue the nature of the problem and are looking for "solutions" in the wrong places.

I am not a thing but a collection of many things...in none of this I feel I have control on who I am being. I just am.

I meant: You CAN'T inspire your own ideas.

You've explicitly said that you do not think that data are important in the discussion, and my attempts to say, "Hey, look at these data and tell me what can account for them." has been completely ignored.

"it was meant in the context of the discussion I was having with someone else,"

Well, Fil, I was actually referring to our discussion, where you tried to claim that "reasoning" is equivalent to "computation" (or calculation, whatever), which it isn't--as amply demonstrated by the excerpt from wiki which I had already cited.

If you want to call it non linear parallel complex computation or whatever else is a matter of semantic quibbling and much debate between

I choose to not comment at this time.

Empty conclusions and flaccid attacks. An informed position would sound different. I don't blame you. Your histories led to these types of responses.

I choose to not comment at this time.

BULLSHIT, Neo!

You don't choose nuthin. You are forced not to comment...well, except to the extent that you comment on your (illusory) "choice" not to comment, which you were forced to do.

The point is that the whole edifice of science is built on the premise of human agency , which comprises reason, ingenuity, careful observation, etc. Without the use of reason to understand, predict and change the world, ie without agency aka free will as I define it, THERE CAN BE NO SCIENCE AT ALL

Got any research done by actual scientists that specifically demonstrates free will?

When I decided on a scientific career, one of the things that appealed to me about science was the modesty of its practitioners....This attitude was attractive precisely because it stood in sharp contrast to the arrogance of the philosophers of the positivist tradition, who claimed for science and its practitioners a broad authority with which many practicing scientists themselves were uncomfortable.

The temptation to overreach, however, seems increasingly indulged today in discussions about science. Both in the work of professional philosophers and in popular writings by natural scientists, it is frequently claimed that natural science does or soon will constitute the entire domain of truth. And this attitude is becoming more widespread among scientists themselves. All too many of my contemporaries in science have accepted without question the hype that suggests that an advanced degree in some area of natural science confers the ability to pontificate wisely on any and all subjects.

Is scientism defensible? Is it really true that natural science provides a satisfying and reasonably complete account of everything we see, experience, and seek to understand — of every phenomenon in the universe? And is it true that science is more capable, even singularly capable, of answering the questions that once were addressed by philosophy?

Reading the work of Quine, Rudolf Carnap, and other philosophers of the positivist tradition, as well as their more recent successors, one is struck by the aura of hero-worship accorded to science and scientists. As a biologist, I must admit to finding Quine’s constant invocation of “nerve-endings” as an all-purpose explanation of human behavior to be embarrassingly simplistic....a (largely justifiable) admiration for the work of scientists has led to a peculiar, unjustified role for scientists themselves — so that, increasingly, what is believed by scientists and the public to be “scientific” is simply any claim that is upheld by many scientists, or that is based on language and ideas that sound sufficiently similar to scientific theories.

The multiverse theory holds that there are many different universes, of which ours is just one, and that each has its own system of physical laws.... Smolin postulates that black holes give rise to new universes, and that the physical laws of a universe determine its propensity to give rise to black holes...

Physicists might once have been dismissive of metaphysics as mere speculation, they would also have characterized such questions as inherently speculative and so beyond their own realm of expertise. [But now] physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow open their 2010 book The Grand Design by asking:

"What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? ... Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge."


Even if we can be confident that our universe has unchanging physical laws — which many of the new speculative cosmologies call into question — how is it that we “mere collections of particles” are able to discern those laws? How can we be confident that we will continue to discern them better, until we understand them fully?

A common response to these questions invokes what has become the catch-all explanatory tool of advocates of scientism: evolution. These invocations of evolution also highlight another common misuse of evolutionary ideas: namely, the idea that some trait must have evolved merely because we can imagine a scenario under which possession of that trait would have been advantageous to fitness. Unfortunately, biologists as well as philosophers have all too often been guilty of this sort of invalid inference. Such forays into evolutionary explanation amount ultimately to storytelling rather than to hypothesis-testing in the scientific sense. For a complete evolutionary account of a phenomenon, it is not enough to construct a story...

What van Fraassen, Quine, and these other thinkers are appealing to is a kind of popularized and misapplied Darwinism that bears little relationship to how evolution really operates, yet that appears in popular writings of all sorts — and even, as I have discovered in my own work as an evolutionary biologist, in the peer-reviewed literature....To speak of a “Darwinian” process of selection among culturally transmitted ideas, whether scientific theories or memes, is at best only a loose analogy with highly misleading implications. It easily becomes an interpretive blank check, permitting speculation that seems to explain any describable human trait.

Advocates of scientism today claim the sole mantle of rationality, frequently equating science with reason itself. Yet it seems the very antithesis of reason to insist that science can do what it cannot, or even that it has done what it demonstrably has not. As a scientist, I would never deny that scientific discoveries can have important implications for metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and that everyone interested in these topics needs to be scientifically literate. But the claim that science and science alone can answer longstanding questions in these fields gives rise to countless problems.... From this perspective, scientism appears to have as much in common with superstition as it does with properly conducted scientific research. Scientism claims that science has already resolved questions that are inherently beyond its ability to answer.

Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence. Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole. The ultimate outcome will be an increase of radical skepticism that questions the ability of science to address even the questions legitimately within its sphere of competence.

It is possible to influence endogenous processes of movement preparation externally without disrupting the conscious perception of volition.

God, this slavish devotion to scientism gets tedious.