So you think that the causal chain exists up until it impinges on you, then causality is suspended for a minute while some magical property of your brain allows you to make decisions outside of the causal chain, then once you've made your decision, causality kicks back in? No. Every atom in the universe is a part of the causal chain at every moment, including the ones that make up your brain. If you think that you can "consciously choose what to do, based on the causal chain," you don't understand causality.
So? Are you saying that because you feel like you're consciously making decisions, you must actually be doing so? Consciousness is pretty irrelevant to this issue. As Think explains, your brain is like a black box with a huge number of inputs, a huge number of outputs, and a lot of complex clockwork inside. The fact that you feel conscious doesn't change that.Originally Posted by mutton
You are correct that causality, as a principle, emerges from observed relationships between events. We see two events and label one the cause, and one the effect, and there's never any way to actually detect a causal relationship between them. Yeah, maybe tomorrow I'll drop a bar of soap and it won't fall--who knows. Nevertheless, causality has never failed us yet; and in science, that's about as good as it gets. The principle of causality is the foundation stone of science. It's held even more dearly by scientists that utterly ironclad, exhaustively tested theories like the theory of gravitation or the theory of relativity. If you really don't want to accept it, that's fine; no one can force you to. Human understanding of the universe DOES rest on causality, because science rests on causality. So I guess that you believe science is "faith magic". Okay.Originally Posted by mutton
Yeah, I set aside quantum randomness in trying to explain that to no_brains. You can see that I do mention it earlier in the thread. Either way, free will gets the boot.Originally Posted by mutton
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