The Physicalists' Dilemma

I said that Galen Strawson was a crappy philosopher because he is a materialist, or in his preferred construction a "realist physicalist" who has devoted a good part of his time to trying to invalidate the idea of free choice.  I've been through that so many times already, that as a materialist, OK, "physicalist" the possibility of free thought and free choice has to be attacked because those would be impossible if materialism were true.   Everything in materialism has to be reducible to matter-energy.  Really, they can't get out of the 19th century.  And the more recent pose of calling materialism "physicalism" that dodges the problem of old-fashioned materialism by deferring the definition of what the physical substance everything is by just claiming that everything has to abide by physical laws means that everything deemed to be real must be held within the nets of determinism,   That only makes their dilemma more obvious to anyone who thinks it through.

That is why those who push atheism, the real motive behind the banal trinity of "materialism, physicalism and naturalism" are continually trying to debunk free choice, free thought, the mind and consciousness, the most basic aspect of our existence, our experience of consciousness, can't be made to conform to their ideological support for their hatred of religion and God.

However, they always, always need and insist on exempting one thing or another about their own preferred areas of thought from their, otherwise, universal and iron clad rules of reality.   Especially those who call their ideology "physicalism" can't contain his debunking of free choice to merely that one area of our minds, insisting that the experience of free choice is merely illusion  while maintaining that any other area of our experience and the conclusions we draw from it are any less of an illusion.   Everything, from our perceptions of physical reality, to our measurement and counting of things, the logical analysis of those experiences, the descriptions that even the most rigorous of scientists might publish about them, to the conclusions of peers who read and agree with what they say are every much as bound by the same proposed disqualifications of the experience of free choice as Strawson and others insist that free choice is falsified by.

Those philosophers who debunk free choice, minds or consciousness, removing any possibility of transcendence from physical causation for those, has to grant themselves a logically incoherent exemption from their same insisted upon conditions in order for what they are saying to have any possibility of not also being an illusion.   They are merely producing a different set of experienced sensations caused by their own particular and randomly present chemical and physical constituents working themselves out.   As I've said before, if they are right, nothing any of us thinks or says can be any more true that what happens when you put an acid and a base together or melt an ice cube.   Their own framing could only be true if it were false.

Any philosopher who spends their professional life doing that without realizing the inevitable consequences of their position can't have thought very hard about the matter.