Grant Bartley wants to know what the problem with freedom is all about.
Then my own predicament here. On the one hand, I believe the compatibilists are no less compelled by their brains to believe that strong determinism and moral responsibility can be reconciled. But at the same time I flat-out acknowledge that I have no way of thinking this through other than as my own brain compels me to. And then the part where all of us are confronted with "the gap" between what we think about all of this "here and now" and what we have no true understanding of [philosophically or scientifically] in regard to this:Compatibilism is so called because it maintains that free will is compatible with strong determinism, which in turn implies that moral responsibility is compatible with strong determinism.
All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was "somehow" able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter "somehow" became living matter "somehow" became conscious matter "somehow" became self-conscious matter.
But if the reasons are in turn entirely determined by brains wholly in sync with the laws of matter, how is this not but another example of how nature "somehow" sustains but the psychological illusion of autonomy?Compatibilists argue that although our actions are entirely predetermined, we are nevertheless moral agents because our ‘choices’ are justified by reasons.
More or less my own conclusion. Assuming of course that any conclusion I do come to "here and now" is in fact the actual embodiment of my own autonomy.But to me compatibilism is the wolf of determinism in a sheepish guise of moral respectability, assigning moral responsibility based on the mere illusion of choice.
More to point here [mine] there's the profound mystery of dreams here. Night after night after night I am absolutely convinced that while dreaming, I am not dreaming at all. My interactions in the dream certainly seem as real to me "in the dream" as in my waking hours. But I am choosing only to fall asleep here. The rest is my brain doing its own thing chemically and neurologically.But this is would be responsibility an illusion couldn’t have. Thinking that we’re choosing when we’re not doesn’t make us responsible for our acts, any more than we’d be responsible for them if we were hypnotised into doing them. There too we’re thinking that we’re choosing our actions when we’re not.
Right. As though it is not the obligation of those convinced that mental causation is is within our reach autonomously to demonstrate this instead...beyond worlds of words here.For these reasons, the onus is on the determinist to demonstrate that physical causation is the only causation, before presuming there’s no such thing as mental causation, ie will.