| | Joseph:
Why do you waste your time with responding to me? What good does it do you to set up strawmen to knock down? You know perfectly well that the discussion here is not about the belief in God, but how to account for the universal human experience of profoundly important phenomena that is at odds with everything we understand about the material universe.
We experience consciousness as self-awareness and volition as free will. We experience these things as though we are truly in command of them and free without consideration of existing circumstance to invoke them as we please. Science offers NO explanation of these phenomena, yet they are central to our lives as rational, moral human beings.
So how do we account for them? This is no small matter. If we believe science is capable of explaining all, then we must face the fact that our experience of volition and consciousness are nothing but illusions, because our actions and our awareness of those actions must have been pre-ordained by a chain of causation stretching back to the beginning of time. If so, any doodling about morality is utterly pointless. We are going to do what a deterministic material universe has already set us in motion to do. We have no choice.
Perhaps then it is reasonable to consider that there are limits to what science can explain. This makes our reliance upon reason all the more imperative, because we lack the authority of scientists to reveal to us the nature of our consciousness and volition (which is what all of do who are not scientists directly involved in the research of these things). If we truly are free to experience and act as we please, this certainly mandates the need for a moral code. Moreover, it invokes wonder as to what this reality is that allows for phenomena not enslaved to the deterministic machinations of the laws of physics.
A third way to account for our experience of self-awareness and free will is to not think about it. This is the Objectivist solution. While Objectivists have the sense to scorn materialism, they seem to fear any possibility that might allow for the existence of the divine. So they define reality to preclude the possibility of the divine, hence all is material and explicable by science, all the while ignoring the materialistic implications of such a definition.
Which is precisely what you have done here. For all your prattling about my embrace of magic and fantasy, not a word from you as to how Objectivism resolves the experience of consciousness as self-awareness and volition as free will without reducing itself to materialism. The reason is, Joseph, you have no resolution to this fundamental problem with Objectivism. And so you send out the strawmen instead.
I do not like being obnoxious with you, Joseph, but the plain fact is that you are a very intelligent person who knows his stuff. Some others may not know better when they retreat to safe ground to make a response to me, but you do. So I can tell you are evading, and I'm not going to pull punches, because I do respect you. I would appreciate a modicum of respect in return. Namely ignore me if all you desire to do is defame my intellect with trite Randisms.
Regards,
Bill a.k.a. Citizen Rat
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