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So do I. My desires are outputs of a function incorporating my history and a bit of randomness. Nothing mystical about it.
"Free will" isn't required to model humans as organisms with intrinsic drives and memory that respond to incentives.
Sure, but there's a pretty strong case for post-big-bang materialism.
I'm not sure any physics can answer the question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?", at least not without recurring into a different "something ". This question vexes me, but seems independent of consciousness and experience and so on, which we can explain using physical laws given the singular prior that something indeed exists.
Can you elaborate on these falsifications? To be clear, I'm not talking about naive functionalism. Human actions are not merely the result of immediate inputs. We have state. We have an internal history. We can introspect. I'm merely asserting that parsimony suggests we treat this reflection as a computational process grounded in the material world.
Assuming "function" here means some sort of mechanistic/deterministic process, what direct evidence do you base this claim on?
"Free will" is the data provided by observation. We evidently have it in all senses and in all ways that we can empirically test. That doesn't preclude it being an illusion generated by some hidden process, but if so, all that can be said is that we have no direct evidence of that process.
With the exception of free will, sure. But now we're at two really important things that Materialists predicted their approach would explain, and those explanations failed without apparent recourse. "Materialism answers all our questions, except the questions we ignore because Materialism can't explain them" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
To put it another way, we have two very important phenomena that cannot be explained by empirical materialism. If empirical materialism itself is forced to resort to non-empirical explanations or to "material" that cannot be observed even in principle, then it has no grounds to object when other philosophies do likewise, does it?
We can't explain either consciousness or experience, though. Like, at all. We can tell a story where they're the outcome of vague, undefined processes, and we can insist that these processes must be materialistic even though we can't rigorously define them or explain how they work, but that is not in fact an "explanation".
Demonstrate either mind reading or mind control, and I'll concede that you have explained consciousness and experience. This doesn't seem like an unreasonable request, since many prominent scientists have previously claimed that they could totally do either or both, and no small number of materialists still insist it should be possible, occasionally claiming it's arrival as soon as the next decade.
Sure, but all these things were equally obvious to epiphenomenalists, Marx among them, who concluded that thought was essentially meaningless and the brain was a simple machine to be engineered to our preferences. Likewise Watson and Skinner and the behavioralists, who claimed that they knew how to arbitrarily shape minds as they saw fit. And certainly, in retrospect, it's obvious that all these claims were very stupid, and that the people making them were being absurdly overconfident. But it evidently was not obvious to either those making the claims or to their contemporaries, and that fact should give us pause.
It doesn't seem to me that parsimony can be validly applied in a case where you know that significant data is missing.
Treating the mind as a computational process grounded in the material world will be reasonable when doing so allows us to either make testable predictions or engage in engineering. Right now, it does neither. "Treating the mind as a computational process" enables only speculation and philosophical discussion, and it seems likely to me that this will not change in the near future.
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