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Perhaps I should state it in a slightly different way. There is no reason for me or anyone else to doubt the clear perception we have of our own free will. Prove to me scientifically that it does not exist, that it is some kind of illusion that all human beings experience.
In my opinion you have made a rather egregious error in your evaluation of the issue of free will. You seem to have a dearly held pre-conceived notion that for anything to be established as true it must be proved in a laboratory. From which Mount Sinai did you receive this proclamation? In fact it is an article of faith.
The perception of every human being who has ever lived and is alive today tells us clearly that our actions are based on free will decisions. I can change the way I feel, I can change the way I behave by exercising my free will. I can decide what I want to think about and when I want to think about it. I can decide whether to shut off the alarm and go back to sleep or get out of bed early and do my daily exercise regimen.
if "Science" doubts the existence of free will then there is something wrong with Science not my clear perception of my free will (along with the clear perceptions of just about everyone alive and who has ever lived). It is your problem to "prove" that free will does not exist, not my problem to prove that it does exist.
One thing I do agree with; Free will is something that is beyond the material world. But of course we are involved in non-material (supernatural, spiritual, etc.) activities from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep. Communicating in written language like everyone on this blog is doing is one of them. We type absolutely meaningless symbols on a screen and somehow the ideas in my head get conveyed to whoever "reads" them. Take the most advanced laboratory in the world, and have them analyze the ink on a piece of paper and the paper itself. The laboratory can tell you everything about the chemical and molecular structure of both, but it cannot hope to ever figure out the message that is written there, AND YET IT IS THERE NONETHELESS. We attach non-material ideas to meaningless symbols on a piece of paper or on a computer screen.
It seems to me this would have been a wonderful prayer to pray before going into battle against an evil enemy like the Germans or Japanese in WW 2.
In his rant against intelligent design theory , Yudkowsky seems to have overlooked a simple fact. Darwinian Evolution is irrelevant to the whole discussion. Darwinian Evolution is only operative and relevant from the moment you have a DNA based organism capable of self replication. (I know that there are highly speculative theories of earlier "simpler" self replicating molecules. There is no evidence at all that they ever actually existed, and no one has ever seen one outside of a laboratory where even the highly limited ability to self replicate is a product of the intelligent design of the chemists and microbiologists involved)
Since absolutely no one has ever come up with anything even approaching a plausible naturalistic explanation of the origin of life from non-life, the obvious truth is that the first DNA based bacterium (the simplest life form we know of) with it's staggeringly functionally complex digital code was created by a supernatural intelligence.
Again, all forms of life are possible (I.e. Darwinian Evolution and Natural Selection are possible) if, and only if, the proper molecular machinery is in place. The irony is that not only is Darwinian Evolution not an explanation nor the cause of the fantastic and astounding functional complexity of life on this planet, Darwinian Evolution is a process that is the result of the astounding functional complexity of life on this planet.