[Interesting Ian]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

It does? How would you know that there are no competing desires?

In one sense you could say that everything we do is due to some desire or other. But not always some desire which is due to ones physical state of ones body. If say I feel hungry I will most often eat. Yet I could choose not to. If it is not the self (or soul) which chooses to ignore my hunger, then presumably it must be some other physical state of the brain? But obviously you have to prove this in order to give evidence against my notion of free will.

Sorry, I don't understand this. What does cause the second snooker ball to move?

Well there are a couple of possibilities. For a start what's wrong with the metamind that you keep banging on about doing it? Only mental causality exists. Finite selves are able to move their own bodies, the infinite consciousness (or metamind) is responsible for all other physical processes in the Universe.

Or similar to this it is possible that we are all some specimens put in a toy Universe by some super intelligent aliens, just to see how long we will go about our lives until we realize that something is strange about the world. In that case it's simply the aliens doing it in a similar way that computer programmers program a computer game. When you're playing a computer game -- say tomb raider -- and your character Lara Croft gets crushed by a boulder, it's not because the boulder has any innate causal power, it's just been programmed that way.

Or finally there could be no reason whatsoever why the 2nd snooker ball moves. Contrast this with the question of why the Big Bang occurred. It did so for no reason whatsoever, yes? Likewise all physical processes occurring after the Big Bang also unfold as they do for no reason whatsoever. I think this last option will be the one which most appeals to the skeptics/materialists/atheists. It is surely preferable than to suppose that there is this mysterious innate causal power underlying reality. And from their perspective obviously better than hypothesising a metamind or the alien hypothesis.