Determinism questions

[Odell]

I read in a book that has confounded me for some time. Maybe someone can help me here “For example, how can the thought, ‘my thought is simply a firing of neurons, nothing more,’ itself be a firing if neurons? Logically, the person thinking is (so to speak) standing apart from his neurons and thinking about them.”

So cant the standing apart thinking of this thought be a firing of neurons??

It trys to clarify next by saying “Similarly a strict determinist cannot rationally say, ‘my every thought is determined by an outside force.’ If this is true, how would the person ever have become aware that his thought was determined? The fact that humans are self-aware shows that humans have the freedom to stand apart from themselves and consider the causes that influence, but do not fully determine their beliefs and behaviors.”

 

[balto]

I read in a book that has confounded me for some time. Maybe someone can help me here “For example, how can the thought, ‘my thought is simply a firing of neurons, nothing more,’ itself be a firing if neurons? Logically, the person thinking is (so to speak) standing apart from his neurons and thinking about them.”

So cant the standing apart thinking of this thought be a firing of neurons??

It trys to clarify next by saying “Similarly a strict determinist cannot rationally say, ‘my every thought is determined by an outside force.’ If this is true, how would the person ever have become aware that his thought was determined? The fact that humans are self-aware shows that humans have the freedom to stand apart from themselves and consider the causes that influence, but do not fully determine their beliefs and behaviors.”

I think you are bringing up a good point about the inherent difficulties of trying to justify a deterministic materialist viewpoint. At most all you could say is that, if determinism is indeed true, it’s impossible to come to that conclusion rationally. The reason is that rational thinking involves reasoning from ground to consequent. Determinism makes all thinking cause to effect thinking. The fundamentalist’s thinking is just as caused as the materialist’s thinking, so how are we to know which is true?

This kind of problem would be similar to saying “one of the words in this sentence doesn’t mean what you think it means.” The conclusion, if true, invalidates the entire argument because the sentence no longer leads to the conclusion. It’s the same thing with saying that determinism is true. If determinism is true, then the argument presented in its favor is no argument at all, only a firing of neurons as you have said.