https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/25/11501230/blake-ross-cant-...
If there are people who can’t picture and people who don’t have an inner dialogue, I think it lends more credence to the idea that we don’t have free will and are just a bunch of chemicals controlling our behavior. It also makes you think about consciousness and whether it’s even real.
That seems like a bizarre leap. What's the connection?
I’m not willing to die on this hill by the way so if someone else comes along and argues otherwise, I’m open to other ideas.
Is "just" a synonym for "exactly" in this context?
"Clearly" because exterior stimuli clearly influence both thinking and feeling, a concept supported by common experience and scientific understanding of human cognition and emotions.
Private experiences may be very important for individuals and like I said elsewhere, free-will is certainly a useful idea in religious contexts. I do not believe this has any bearing on practical matters such as our ability to predict or understand the actions taken by any given system such as humans or computers.
Are you saying that these two claims have some sort of scientific ~proofs:
1.Thinking isn't even a path to "free will".
2a. Thinking is pretty clearly determined by exterior stimulus
2b. just like feeling is.
Note: a definition for "determined by" (in percentage of total causality) would be required in the specification, as would a non-ambiguous definition for "just like".
No. I think this statement is a conclusion only indirectly supported by scientific fact. This is a logical leap from more and more behaviors and internal states being correlated with various external stimulus over time. I believe it only a matter of time until it becomes entirely possible (though silly and will likely not be done because it only serves to prove a foregone conclusion and would be a unfathomably huge undertaking) to provide a complete accounting of all the factors that influence a system bringing it to the state where it reacts in a given way to some stimulus.
The only other conclusion I can see is that human beings are not deterministic and there is some magical spark IE everlasting soul making randomized decisions for us.
Can you expand on this "supported by" scientific fact? Is it something more than is not inconsistent with, and more towards must be, necessarily?