Hey, You Guys Make Ultimate Claims About Reality You're Going To Have To Put Up With People Noticing Their Logical Results And Your Violating Those

To declare that free will is an illusion because our minds are entirely the determined product of physical causation in the brain has some rather profound consequences.  Among those are the ones I noted yesterday.   There is no "right or wrong" material state, there just is a state that matter is in.  Under materialism there is an inevitable interaction between physical objects, between atoms, molecules, crystals, tissues arising out of physical causation and in the materialist model of the mind, made up out of their ideological holdings and not out of evidence, our ideas and thoughts.   In the most extreme extensions of materialism, everything in the universe up to and including our ideologies are material, the product of inescapable material causation as governed by immutable physical laws.

As Eddington pointed out almost 90 years ago, under materialism there is no meaning to the idea that a boy who gives you the answer to 6 times 7 of 46 and the boy who gives you the answer of 42 have given you a "wrong" or "right" answer because both of their answers would be the inevitable result of the physical causation in their own brains as they were giving that answer.  It would be no more right or wrong than the differences in crystal formation that you get depending on what chemicals were present as the crystal was forming and what was incorporated in the results.  As he said, you shouldn't worry too much that materialism will dissolve religion because it can't even assert the rightness of the times table.

That is if materialists really believe in their monist faith that everything is a result of material causation.   The results of that have been written about from before the Birth of Christ.  As is typical of Indian thought, the Indian materialist school of Carvaka documented that inevitable logical conclusion of materialism, probably even before the Greeks, Romans, "enlightenment" materialists and the post-Darwinian German and other materialist philosophers who, over and over again, admitted that total amorality was an inevitable result of holding that the material universe, operating under physical law was all there is, ever was or will be.

The consequence of their own ideology, when taken to its logical conclusion is that nagging, scolding busy-body materialists should shut their traps and stop interfering with the operations of physical causation in the minds of other people whose brains don't lead them to believe in materialism or atheism or scientism.   As I've pointed out before, under a really rigorous system of materialist thought, there is exactly the same truth value in Six-day Creationism as there is in Coyne's favorite interpretation of neo-Darwinism or Sean Carroll's favorite imaginary God-avoiding cosmos under cosmology or someone who spends their life frittering it away on computer games or comic books.  All of them are the moral equivalent of iron oxidizing or an acid combining with a base.   All of them are just the result of physical causation in different brains.

I, of course, don't buy that crap because I can see that materialism is about the most intellectually vacuous, vapid and logically incoherent ideological system ever devised.   To the extent that materialists nag and scold people who don't believe or who they claim demonstrate non-adherence to their faith is the extent to which they display that they don't really believe in it, themselves.  A logically consistent true believer in materialism would do what those Carvarkists advocated, pursue their own pleasure and not assert that their materialism had a transcendent attribute of truth or good which it can't have, under its own holdings.

Update:  Reading this over for editing, as I recall the Carvakists also denied the reality of causation.  Which is an interesting thing to think about.  Everything we think about causation, really everything we think, would fall under the same umbrella of non-transcendence that envelops free will.  How could the human concept of causation have any truth value, itself, how could it be anything other than a product of random actions of atoms, molecules, etc?   How could we establish that there was anything other than a delusion of truth to it?

Update 2:   Well, I only remember that from the course in Indian Philosophy I took as to fulfill a prerequisite in college but googling to look for the pertinent texts I found this:

Indian philosophers extensively discussed a number of issues relating to causation, including the nature of the causal relation, the definitions of cause and effect, and classifications of kinds of causes. Typically they stressed the importance of the material cause, rather than (as in Western philosophy) the efficient cause. In India only the Cārvāka materialists denied causation or took it to be subjective. This is unsurprising given that a concern with demonstrating the possibility of liberation motivated the theories of causation, for only the Cārvākas denied this possibility. The orthodox Hindu philosophers and the heterodox Buddhists and Jainas all accepted both the possibility of liberation and the reality of causation, though they differed sharply (and polemically) about the details.

It's interesting because it relates the denial of causation to the materialist agenda of denying that there was any transcendent soul or a need for us to follow a course of moral conduct to achieve salvation.  The notion that the perception of causation is merely subjective goes exactly along with what I wondered in my first update.  How, if our thoughts are merely the product of random combinations and interactions between atoms and molecules, could we possibly have any confidence that even the perception of causation is anything but a delusion, an epiphenomenon of that physical causation, a hold over of natural selection having possible survival and reproductive value but having no quality of truth that transcends that.  If natural selection had produced the many illusions, such as religious belief, according to the current pudding-headed dogma of materialists, why shouldn't we believe that causation, itself, is not just another delusion?   And with that, all of science is exposed as merely another delusion, as well.  The infinitesimally small probability that any such delusion has some kind of relevance to any reality outside of living minds would be fun to quantify, though the result would probably be subjective.  I doubt it would be nearly as probable as the effectively infinite improbabilities expressed in those stupendous exponents in the "fine-tuning" arguments.