Pointing to the general laws of physics and saying that they leave no room for free will in man amounts to assuming what you seek to prove.

I think a person could only make this statement if they do not have a complete appreciation of what the laws of physics are and what they mean about reality and existence. The laws of physics and the full extent of knowledge and evidence entailed by our understanding of them can not be dismissed as "assuming what you seek to prove". Science assumes little and tests and verifies extensively.

It appears rather that those who believe free will based on a non-physical dual entity such as spirit or God are simply assuming with no evidence that their own macroscopic observations of human behavior could only be explained by a thing called "free will' that exists only by definition and in the abstract.

It is a pre-scientific understanding of humans, and it seems like the most reasonable guess absent any detailed scientific understanding. It was an understanding that was possible for humans to adopt long before the iron age, and it has changed little since those ancient times. It's an understanding that is clearly based on unverifiable assumptions whose only merit is that they fit into narratives that are intelligible within the framework of human families, human psychology, and human emotional and mental experience. It's an understanding that becomes hardly possible to indulge once one acquires the kind of detailed knowledge of nature that science has given us.

which illustrates the silliness of demanding a huge, detectable influence by the spiritual free will.

Anything that can influence the behavior of a physical system is inherently detectable. It doesn't have to be huge, but if it can exert any influence on the behavior of matter at all, it is detectable by an instrument or experiment designed to utilize the changes exerted by that influence on a physical system.

If it is not detectable, it may as well not exist because it can not change anything in our behavior, observations, or experience.

Causation and Freedom again: http://disq.us/p/1mn4eyo

Miracles and therefore Being and Will as per the Principle of Proportionate Causality also are said to violate the laws of nature.

Sigh.

http://disq.us/p/1mlp8yz

This is a pigeon chess answer. You need your view to be unfalsifiable, that's why you won't commit to explaining how the soul would, in principle, interact with the physical.

I answered you more than adequately in my prior post. The robot example was just that, an example of how a tiny cause can influence a large physical system – which illustrates the silliness of demanding a huge, detectable influence by the spiritual free will.

You didn't answer adequately at all. When you send a signal to a robot that makes it do something, you are sending energy to the robot that was not already there, and that is measurable. It has to be measurable because otherwise the robot wouldn't be able to receive the signal. And the system as a whole is physical, and no laws are violated.

So you're giving me an example of a physical system in which no laws are violated, in order to show how a non-physical system where laws are violated works. And that's just silly.

I suspect that your last debating technique is to just keep repeating your losing argument.

There is no losing argument. If a soul could effect the body to do what it otherwise wouldn't do, that would require it be measurable since the amount of force would have to be great enough to get the body to do something. This is just standard physics. Your view that souls exist, violate the laws of physics, but in a way that is undetectable is blatantly false.

But there is no point debating you because your view is faith based. You want it to be unverifiable and unfalsifiable in order to avoid it being shown wrong - which I did.

Now you are just plain being silly.

“If a soul could make you get up when your body would
have just continued sitting, that would easily be measurable.”

You repeat the same error I exposed in the prior post. You gratuitously assume that the free will must have some gross sort of effect in order to affect human actions – so that you can defend your indefensible claim that its effects “would be detectable.”

I answered you more than adequately in my prior post. The
robot example was just that, an example of how a tiny cause can influence a large physical system – which illustrates the silliness of demanding a huge, detectable influence by the spiritual free will.

I suspect that your last debating technique is to just keep repeating your losing argument.

You may have the last word. Or, just continue debating
with yourself.

Good debating effort to shift the burden of proof onto me, but you are the one who made the claim that free will “would be detectable,” and that is what we are discussing.

Shifting the burden? You bear a burden. If your position requires that the soul violate the laws of physics, that is a positive claim. Your burden is to describe how that happens, at the very least. If you want me to show how it would be detectable you need to tell me how the soul effects the body. Then I can show you evidence you're wrong (which I technically already did).

You yourself affirmed earlier that “we absolutely can” detect the “subatomic influence of free will.” And yet, “subatomic influence” would be far too small to be detected with the instruments, such as fMRI and EEG, you describe.

Therein lies your dilemma. If the influence of the soul is too small to detect, it's too small to have any influence in your body. And I didn't rely only on fMRIs and EEGs, I linked a whole paper that describes how the laws of physics apply to biological systems.

So, the defense of your claim that free will events would be detectable rests on the gratuitous assumption of them being relatively large:

“Meaning, if you claim a free will soul can make you climb a mountain, or beat someone to death, the energy that soul would have to create that didn't exist already in the physical system would have to be so great that this would easily be measurable.”

This reminds me of the foolish error made by earlier materialists who thought that you could weigh the human body at death to see if it suddenly weighed less, so as to prove that the soul left the body. It did not. So they concluded the soul did not exist!

Oh not at all. If the soul has a causal influence on the body, it must inject energy that didn't previously exist. In order for that energy to do the things required for free will to make you do anything the physical system wouldn't already do, that amount of energy would have to be measurable. If a soul could make you get up when your body would have just continued sitting, that would easily be measurable. So the burden is on you to show how a soul affects the body. You have no explanation and you know it because your view is hopelessly illogical, unscientific, and contrary to what we already know from science.

Expecting the spiritual soul to have physical weight is about as misguided an assumption as expecting free will to have a detectable effect on the living human body.

I never said the soul has weight, and nothing I've written requires that. If the soul moves atoms in a way they weren't already physically determined to move, that would require an injection of new energy that didn't previously exist, and that would violate the laws of physics -- and yes it would be detectable, because the brain and body would be burning energy that wasn't already stored up in the physical body. This would make all nutritional science (which shows the energy you expend is already stored in the body) completely false.

You are making the philosophical error of assuming that the free will as a cause must be a proportionate cause of the entire completed act, whereas it need only be a very subtle influence on the total causal forces that produce the final observed effect. As such, it may be undetectable.

That's scientifically impossible. It's akin to saying that a ghost can move a cup along a table by just nudging it for a second and the cup will just continue to move. The ghost would have to continually push the cup along the table. Even Aristotle knew that things stop moving after you stop applying pressure on them. So your claim here is totally false. This is why your view is hopelessly illogical and anti-scientific.

Powerful robots lift heavy objects, yet are directed by data signals in the milliamps.

Those signals are detectable! So your analogy fails. The whole robot is also physical, and fully described by the laws of physics.

As I said earlier, “There is no way we could know if there was some subtle violation of the law of conservation of energy that takes place inside a living cell.”

But such an effect of free will would be too small to detect – unless you make the gratuitous assumptions you have made above.

And that was all we were debating.

Since the human body is made of quadrillions of cells, a subtle violation would be exponentially magnified given the quantity, and this would have to be the case for the soul to do anything meaningful to affect the body. There's no gratuitous assumptions here. I'm simply outlining the logical consequence of your views.

And again, if the effect is so subtle as to not be detectable it would not be able to have any real influence over you. This is your dilemma.

And technically, libertarian free will is logically impossible. So I can be totally wrong on the physics and free will would still be false.

I told you at the top of the thread that I did not intend to get into a debate about free will itself. I do not have time for it. And yes, I am aware of the controversial studies by Benjamin Libet and others on this topic going back to the 1980s.

Good debating effort to shift the burden of proof onto me, but you are the one who made the claim that free will “would be detectable,” and that is what we are discussing.

Pointing to the general laws of physics and saying that they leave no room for free will in man amounts to assuming what you seek to prove.

You yourself affirmed earlier that “we absolutely can” detect the “subatomic influence of free will.” And yet, “subatomic influence” would be far too small to be detected with the instruments, such as fMRI and EEG, you describe.

So, the defense of your claim that free will events would be detectable rests on the gratuitous assumption of them being relatively large:

“Meaning, if you claim a free will soul can make you climb a mountain, or beat someone to death, the energy that soul would have to create that didn't exist already in the physical system would have to be so great that this would easily be measurable.”

This reminds me of the foolish error made by earlier materialists who thought that you could weigh the human body at death to see if it suddenly weighed less, so as to prove that the soul left the body. It did not. So they concluded the soul did not exist!

Expecting the spiritual soul to have physical weight is about as misguided an assumption as expecting free will to have a detectable effect on the living human body.

You are making the philosophical error of assuming that the free will as a cause must be a proportionate cause of the entire completed act, whereas it need only be a very subtle influence on the total causal forces that produce the final observed effect. As such, it may be undetectable.

Powerful robots lift heavy objects, yet are directed by data signals in the milliamps.

As I said earlier, “There is no way we could know if there was some subtle violation of the law of conservation of energy that takes place inside a living cell.”

But such an effect of free will would be too small to detect – unless you make the gratuitous assumptions you have made above.

And that was all we were debating.