if decisions, evaluations, actions and outcomes are predetermined, then processes cease to have any meaning, as do methodologies like critical thinking, and concepts like “useful”
This an appeal to consequences fallacy: "a fallacy in which someone concludes that a statement, belief, or hypothesis must be true (or false) simply because it would lead to desirable (or undesirable) consequences if it were so." It's not an argument that something is untrue or impossible, which is what a rebuttal of a claim needs to be to be more than hand-waving. What you're saying here is that if there is no free will, then critical thinking is just another manifestation of nature or that when one calls something useful he is saying nothing. I've already told that I disagree, but I can stipulate to that and say that if that's how reality is, then that's how it is however unsettling and disorienting confronting that might be.
you’ve surprised me as I didn’t have you down for an anti-realist.
Isn't it you that is the antirealist? You're insisting on a version of reality based on an intuition that can't be confirmed. I'm open to another possibility, one that I've become accustomed to as apparently have many others in this and related threads, who also say that they believe that will is not or might not be free.
you cant show empirically that:
1 You exist
2 That you live in a physical world (andnot in the matrix)
3 that you are awake , and not dreaming
Agreed, but I don't need to. I only need to know the rules of interpreting evidence properly which allow me to predict future outcomes accurately or more accurately.
Did you see these words in this thread written to a different poster? :
"It's exactly the same regarding the question of whether all of experience is an illusion, not just free will. Suppose you somehow learned for an undeniable, iron-clad fact that there was no world outside of your consciousness corresponding to what you experience, that perhaps you are a brain in a vat after all or in some kind of matrix. OK, now that you've had a chance to get over the shock and assimilate and accept the truth of the idea, what are you going to do differently? You now know that what looks like your finger isn't real, and neither is that burning candle, so you will the finger into the flame knowing that no such thing actually exists or is happening, and you feel the pain of fire anyway. Are you going to do that again? No. It's not like you would have a choice if you also lacked free will. NOTHING CHANGES, and this free will matter is the same. Realizing that free will is or might be an illusion changes nothing about how I go on living my life, because as with fingers and flames, what worked before still works following these kinds of revelations."
We don't need to know what really lies beyond the theater of consciousness to navigate and more or less manage the parade of sensations, feelings, memories, urges, intuitions, etc. that comprise conscious experience. The value of belief is to inform decisions and drive actions. Actions then influence events in the external world, or so it appears, and those effects lead to objective consequences.
To reiterate, we should expect similar decisions made under similar circumstances to lead to similar outcomes. The measure of a true or false proposition lies in its capacity to produce expected results. If an idea is true, it can be used to generate predictable consequences, and different ones if that idea turned out to be false. In other words, the ultimate measure of a true proposition is the capacity to inform decisions under the expectation of desirable consequences regardless of what's on the other side of the curtain.
All we need to know is that we have desires and preferences, we make decisions, and we experience sensory perceptions of outcomes. If a man has belief B that some action A will produce desired result D, if B is true, then doing A will achieve D. If A fails to achieve D, then B is false. Either you agree that truth should be measured by its capacity to inform decisions and produce results or you don't.
This is another of those ideas such as free will possibly being an illusion that is a little unsettling when initially countenanced, but with time, becomes acceptable. I live with both every day, and live the same life I did before I accepted those ideas for the reasons given above. The rules work whatever the ultimate nature of reality is. If our lives are foreordained, and one deserves no credit or blame for how they unfold, then all I can say is that I'm happy to have lived this one and am having this enjoyable discussion whatever is responsible.
I'm not asking you or any other Abrahamic theist to join me. Why should you? You have a large investment in the belief that the god of Abraham exists, is honest and benevolent, created our world, and granted man free will the exercise of which can lead to damnation or salvation. If you buy into even the possibility that reality is very different from that, you're on the slippery slope to skepticism, and I'm sure that you're well aware that many religious teachers exhort the faithful to never entertain such thoughts, that they're blasphemous, come from Satan, and can lead to personal destruction.
It's red pill blue pill stuff. Which do you prefer - a comfortable and comforting narrative even if incorrect, or something somewhat unsettling if it happens to be the truth? I chose the latter. Or something chose it for me. It's all good, whatever is actually the case.
if there is no free will, by definition there is no reason nor critical thinking, nor way to determine truths.
Not at all. It just means that those process occur without being freely willed.
You are just a robot preprogramed to think that the universe is 13.8B years old.... while a YEC is a robot preprogramed to think thst the world is 6,000yo.
Yes, that might be the case, and if it is, I'm OK with it. The believer needs to continue resisting that idea, but his argument is yet another fallacy of consequence (described above). The statement above must be denied, because if it isn't, the consequences would be unacceptable.
The problem is that without free will there is no way to test who is correct .
Disagree. The methods we have for deciding such things don't require that free will be involved, which is why we can program machines to reproduce that method. Suppose free will is an illusion. You and I robotically add the same column of numbers and come to two different sums as was always foreordained. You seem to be suggesting that those robots have no means to decide which was correct. Sure they do.
