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Originally Posted by psyang
A big hurdle with the materialist point of view is that it removes free will. If you are a materialist, your phrase "I don't see why you think this" becomes nonsensical. peter12 has responded because that is how the confluence of stimuli and atoms have combined. He had no other choice. Rationally, it removes any possibility of argument.
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Your statement is partly right. There is no room for the concept of
libertarian free will in a purely materialist world view; it doesn't deny the role of intention. What this means is that the deliberate, intentional choices you or I make are the result of the state of our brains at the time we make those choices - we could not have done otherwise, and if you take a time machine back and re-play the same moment over a thousand times, we'll always choose the same thing. But this is no more than saying that the choices we make are the result of who we are, and who we are is the result of our biology, combined with the external forces that have acted upon us throughout our lives and caused us to develop in a particular way. You characterize this as a problem and I know some people struggle with it intuitively, but I don't characterize it that way. I characterize it as the rational conclusion drawn from the available evidence.
Given all of that, you're right to say that "peter12 has responded because that is how the confluence of stimuli and atoms have combined." However, my non-understanding of his response is no less valid for that, so you're wrong to say that my question is meaningless: that process of stimuli and responses is every bit as inscrutable to me as it is to him.
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When he talks of loneliness and wondering, he is considering the existential questions we face as humans. Do animals wonder why they are here, what their purpose is? Are they bothered by the possibility that they are alone in the universe, a blip in the history of all things?
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To the extent that they don't, in my view in light of what we know about the universe, it's just a matter of difference in the construction of their brains. We're all animals, we just happen to be built in such a way that our cognitive function is capable of more. We've got better hardware.