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For the record, the troll part wasn't about the claim of determinism, which seems to me to be the consensus view among participants here, for the reasons you describe.
This is my understanding as well. But it seems to me that this argument ought to cut both ways: if Materialism necessitates determinism, then determinism's implausibility should translate to Materialism. And it seems to me that Determinism is exceedingly implausible, to a degree that people do not accept from arguments they do not dearly wish to adopt.
If Determinism were merely unfalsifiable, that would be bad enough. But in fact, many previous versions of Determinism were in fact falsified, at least in terms of the long-term claims of their most prominent proponents, and the present position of complete unfalsifiability is the Determinism-of-the-gaps that remains when all other possible arguments have collapsed. The claim of Determinism didn't start modest; it has ended up modest because it has a great deal to be modest about.
To the extent that these phenomena are verifiable and falsifiable, I do not see a reason why they should be relevant to the point at hand. A better question would be why you believe the room around you exists; after all, might not your senses be deceived? In the same way we both experience the room around us and so are highly confident of its existence, we both experience choice and free will. We each have, numerous times this very day, asked ourselves some variant of the question "should I...?" One cannot rely on Cogito Ergo Sum on the one hand, and conclude that one's lifelong experience of actively exercising one's Will is simply an illusion on the other.
We've discussed the idea that beliefs are chosen before, if I recall correctly. This is an example of how beliefs are, in fact, chosen. If evidence forced conclusions, then our collective observations of choice and Will would count against Materialism. But in fact, Materialism is adopted axiomatically, and then Determinism becomes "obvious" despite it possessing negative predictive value and being directly contradicted by all available evidence. With the right axiom, any amount of evidence can be pushed aside, even reversed. And this is in fact how all humans think; all it takes is introspection and a little honesty, and you can observe the process yourself.
Skinner's failure to describe everything in terms of operant conditioning by no means reaches the level of "falsifying" determinism. At most, it shows a particular, highly crude approach to prediction fails.
What it doesn't tackle is-
A) Humans are made of particles with nearly perfectly defined properties we can simulate with arbitrary accuracy. B) At no point, going up the chain, do we encounter a reason to posit phenomenon that can't be explained in terms of interactions of more fundamental elements, even if the emergent behavior isn't computationally tractable.
Those two are nigh impeachable, and in combination are sufficient to banish free will.
Of course a complex macroscopic object like a human is enormously difficult to simulate from the ground up, but that's no different from a beach ball or a protozoa. I fail to see how this is a rebuttal worthy of consigning the project to the gaps of our understanding.
The fact that such intuitively obvious notions can be verified and falsified is evidence that something like the "sensation of free will" can be too. I think there's sufficient evidence to make that claim with confidence, what I find perplexing is that it doesn't convince you.
You're talking to someone who assigns a non-negligible probability to everything around me being a simulation. However, since I have no tools to robustly explore that notion, and since, without gross incompetence on the part of the entities doing the simulating, it makes no practical difference, I find it moot.
My senses can be deceived. I've seen plenty of insane people who chose to trust their senses over other conflicting streams of information, to their detriment, and should that discordance ever build up sufficiently, I will certainly consider that I might be going mad. That's not the case today.
Negative prediction value? How on Earth?
That's as prima facie ridiculous to me as claiming that Quantum Mechanics has negative prediction value because I can't apply it to myself, or because I'm not tunneling through walls as I speak.
Perhaps one might say that the true Determinism has never yet been tried?
The problem with this analysis is that it's entirely post hoc. The fact is that neither Skinner, nor his colleagues, nor their peers in the Academy, nor the public at large recognized their approach as "highly crude" in advance. Nor did they frame their efforts as a risky attempt at breaking through a formidable obstacle. Rather, they claimed that they already had the method to arbitrarily shape human behavior, and all that remained was to implement it.
Having claimed the ability to demonstrate determinism experimentally, they were gifted considerable resources at elite institutions with which to carry out their work, and given enormous leeway and influence on society even before their methods had been rigorously verified. And of course, the result was absolute, categorical failure. They demonstrated no greater insight into shaping human behavior than previous, non-Determinist methods had offered, and in fact their influence coincided with a general degradation in such capabilities society-wide. All their predictions of a demonstrable determinism were falsified, which is why we are now discussing unfalsifiable determinism instead.
Suppose I predict with 100% confidence that a stock is going to double in value. You buy some, and it drops to 0. I tell you that this was just a weird confluence of one-off factors, but seriously, here's a new stock that's totally going to double in value. You buy some, and it drops to zero. I tell you that it was criminal activity by competitors, who are being investigated by the FBI now, but hey, here's another stock that's totally going to double in value.
At this point, your confidence in my latest stock pick actually doubling in value should be lower than for a stock you picked completely at random. My track record not only gives you no confidence in my current prediction, but negative confidence, especially if you discover that I directly benefit from people putting faith in my predictions. Determinism was by no means the first branch of Psychology claiming to have "solved" the question of the mind, only to have all its predictions categorically falsified. Neither was Determinism the first branch to derive considerable social, political, and economic benefits for its adherents by lying in this fashion.
You claim that Free Will cannot work the way it appears to, because that would violate Materialism. Then you claim that there's no evidence of anything other than materialism. It is certainly true that there is no evidence contradicting materialism, provided we discard all the evidence that contradicts materialism because it contradicts Materialism. This is fair enough, because Materialism is an Axiom, and all reason is irreducibly axiomatic. The trouble comes from losing sight of what we have actually done, and allowing ourselves to imagine that what was chosen was instead compelled.
However one approaches the question, though, the fact remains that all the evidence available to us about free will is that it actually exists, and it works exactly the way one would expect it to. We can, in fact, exercise our will, intentionally strengthen or weaken it, and otherwise manipulate it by treating it as Will, by bringing the act of choosing into focus in our minds. We cannot manipulate it arbitrarily through other mechanisms, only use it or use it against itself. We can only seduce, we cannot compel, and that result has been surprising to a great many previous and even current Materialists.
And yet it has not been, despite numerous predictions to the contrary. We are confident saccades exist because we can observe and record them and directly compare them to our subjective experience. There are no saccades for free will, no observations that show a clean break with our understanding of our ability to choose. Claiming that such a break might exist is not evidence that it does exist, especially not after previous predictions that it did exist have been falsified.
Why does the apparent existence of free will not dramatically increase your prior of being in a simulation?
Certainly. And that is why you are skeptical about gravity, no? Free will is equally ubiquitous as gravity, after all.
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