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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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I want to do things, and I do them

So do I. My desires are outputs of a function incorporating my history and a bit of randomness. Nothing mystical about it.

and every functional system humans build or interact with is based on the assumption that this apparent reality is how things actually work.

"Free will" isn't required to model humans as organisms with intrinsic drives and memory that respond to incentives.

pretty sure you don't have an empirically-verifiable explanation for what caused the Big Bang,

Sure, but there's a pretty strong case for post-big-bang materialism.

This does not mean that there might not be some deeper version of physics inaccessible to us that is, in fact, seamlessly complete, only that we have no access to any such deeper physics, and thus appeal to that deeper physics is is strictly unfalsifiable.

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.

consistent falsifications of testable Determinist theories

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.