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Originally Posted by Interesting Ian  Does determinism view physical laws as governing reality rather than merely describing reality? |
That feels wholly nonsensical to me. Governance is the management of a population by a subset of that same population. It demands sentience and control, neither of which are possessed by "physical laws". We don't say that the commutative property of arithmetic governs addition simply because 1 + 2 = 2 + 1. It's not having a say-so over arithmetic: it's just a generalized observation.
The word "law" has never been a good choice in science. There's a poetic flair to it that's annoyingly ambiguous in today's postmodern society.
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Originally Posted by Interesting Ian What I'm interested in are the people who deny the existence of mental causal powers. That's the issue that should be addressed before discussing "free will". It seems to me that materialists, and more generally those who believe that mental events simply follow physical events in the brain, are unable to believe in mental causation. |
And yet, there is no evidence that human beings, or anything else, are progenitors of cause. It is fairly well-established that human beings do not appear out of thin air: they are born and raised. They are effects of a cause, known as reproduction. Previous to this, it is postulated that they are effects of a different cause: evolution. Evolution is presumed to be the effect of abiogenesis, or whatever the fashionable theory is today, which is in turn a result of atmospheric effects which resulted from the coalescence of some nebula's space dust into a solar system, which probably came from some half-crazed phenomenon we like to call the Big Bang.
We are made of star stuff, as Carl Sagan says. It says nothing about consciousness. Nothing about choice. Only predictability, that it is possible to determine the cause of actions.
I would recommend looking up the literature on mind-altering drugs. I've never read the stuff myself, but I think that would be a good source to discover that mental functions can be altered by very physical actions. That hardly seals the case: it does not suggest that all mental functions are sourced from physical changes. But it's a starting point.