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Old 04-15-2008, 08:26 AM
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos Paul C. Anagnostopoulos is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by David
Well the conventional logic is that if the decision got made some time earlier - before you thought you made the decision - your consciousness simply acted as a rubber stamp. To me, it is another example of the way that the concept of consciousness gets progressively weakened to fit into conventional science. If you take the physicalist approach, it seems to me that it is very hard to avoid falling into the pit of no free will, no responsibility, no real values, etc.
Perhaps your consciousness acted as a rubber stamp, but that does not mean that the nonconscious decision wasn't a libertarian one. Perhaps the definition of free will requires an act of free will to be conscious, but I do not see why that has to be the case. In particular, if we require that, then the vast majority of your decisions are not free.

~~ Paul
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