In another thread, Seversky complains:
And it’s irrational nonsense to deny that much of who and what you are was determined by past events of which you were unaware and over which you had no control. What you inherited from your parent’s genes and the formative influences of childhood and adolescence means you, like everyone else, are a product of history. You can’t change that so the question becomes, to what extent can you be said to have free will.
Seversky makes an argument based on false assumptions and misrepresentations that don’t characterize either side of the argument properly. He is simply attempting to word-smith a collection of phrases (like so many other physicalists here) that build nothing more than a rhetorical case without any meaningful foundation whatsoever. Like rvb8 who put together the collection of sentences that made no sense whatsoever which caused this interchange, Seversky relies on throwing out an ill-considered word salad to gain some traction.
First and foremost, Seversky looks at the non-physicalist side through a physicalist lens, as if he can put himself in the shoes of those he is arguing against. He seems to think that it is a necessary non-physicalist position to hold that we did not choose the situation we are born into, and did not choose the circumstances of our life – including our gender, sexual orientation, parents, society, physical characteristics, etc; the problem is, that is precisely what many non-physicalists believe. There are many spiritual doctrines that assert we deliberately come to this world and enter the circumstances of our life in order to learn or help others, among other things. This is in fact what I personally believe.
Second, given that many here do not believe that, Seversky has still mistakenly confused the physicalist “I” for the non-physicalist “I” in that he characterizes our physical attributes and circumstances as being a significant portion of one’s “I” that we do not have any control over. I don’t know of many non-physicalists who consider they physical properties or predilections of their physical being to be a significant aspect of their “I”. Rather, it is the quality of one’s character and the direction of one’s conscious will that many non-physicalists hold as the essence of one’s being. In other words, what Seversky claims it would be “irrational” for a non-materialist to think (based on itour physicality being a significant aspect of our “self” that we “have no control over”) is a position that has nothing whatsoever to do with any facts about any particular or general non-materialist position or view. It’s an entirely invented view of non-materialists.
Third, Seversky make a case that “many aspects of our self” are generated by historical lineages of physics and chemistry (when you boil it down), and then says that the question is “how much free will do we have”, when under physicalism there is no such thing (other than word-salad rhetorical redefinitions of the term). Seversky and rvb8 would have no free will at all; everything they say and do will have been determined by ongoing sequences of cause and effect via chemistry and physics. Yet, as I have pointed out here before, they argue as if and imply as if we all have some kind of capacity to override those processes and make decisions and come to conclusions based on an objective evaluation of logic and evidence rather than a happenstance effect of chemical interactions operating entirely below our awareness.
This is the kind of irrational nonsense you get when you cling to a worldview that logically obliterates rational discourse.