Top 3 reasons you probably don't understand compatibilism; or, why you should at least reconsider your position in the free will debate.

The mind is part of the body. Mental state tokens are brain state tokens (at least in humans).

Which part?

Somewhere in a region a few centimetres above my skin, it is irrelevant to the question of free will exactly where since I have been precise enough for one to uniquely identify the relevant agent.

Ok so the agent ends at the skin. There is one boundary.

It's in the brain. I can't tell you precisely where in the brain we process the sensation of pain, do I need to to convince you that the brain processes this sensation?!

The sensation of pain is not processed only in the brain. See you are arbitrarily setting a boundary there because you are poorly informed. Just as with pain processing, you could be wrong about decision processing and so are hiding the fact that you have not mapped the metaphysical concepts you are using through vague definitions. Vague definitions for mental constructs are OK in a colloquial discussion but not in an argument for free will.

Care to respond to my elaboration?

I think I just did that.

You believe that we feel pain right? That we have vision, memory, the capacity to reason and the ability to dream? Do you know the exact neuroscience of all of these processes? If you don't, then exactly what you say here would entail that we ought not believe that we have these processes, which is preposterous.

First, decision making is not the same thing as sense perception. Second, it is one thing to claim that these processes exist and another to claim that you know where they begin and end. If you claim to be able to delineate a process then the burden of proof is on you. If you can't delineate decision making processes, then just admit that you don't know where the processes of decision making begin and end.

As long as you can to be able to clearly delineate these processes the burden of proof is on you. And if you can't, you have no basis for claiming that you know where that are specifically contained.

And I guess you say the same to non-neuroscientists who claim to see or remember anything, right?

You are making it seem that your claim is as trivial as "we have the subjective experience of making decisions." It isn't.

I'm just pointing out that you seem to have only one argument that you're throwing at everything you can and hoping it sticks.

Or, you just keep giving me vague definitions and I keep claiming they are not satisfactory. This line of reasoning is ridiculous because it presumes that if I don't accept your vague definitions after they have been presented a certain number of times then the fault lies with me.

/r/DebateReligion Thread Parent