That is you making an unwarranted assumption that there is an agenda behind the definition.
I specifically and explicitly excluded any "agenda" on your part. I observed instead that you and the rest of the naive materialist cadre were apparently not even aware of your assumptions - to the point that you could not recognize them. I repeated many times the observation that you were oblivious and self-contradictory in your postings.
That is the opposite of assuming you had an agenda. The direct opposite. And I posted that direct opposite over and over and over, in dozens of different wordings, with multiple explanations and examples. Right in front of you.
That kind of idiotic misreading,
that continual demand on my typing for correction of your latest bizarre failure to paraphrase or recount or reply to even the simplest of many times repeated postings -
is why, when you declare that you know what I am claiming and what my argument is and so forth, I remind you that you don't. By all the evidence here, you don't have a clue. None of the naive materialists seem to.
The definition is the one we use, and it it’s an assumption, what you fail to comprehend is that it does not assume anything supernatural.
But it does, see. I quoted and pointed. I explained. James explained, at length and patiently. Several times.
It's fundamental to every argument you make here, and most of your assertions, claims, etc. "Able to do other than it must" - that notion, which defines the supernatural here - is ubiquitous in your posting.
The rest is a matter of creating a causal chain, from cause to effect which becomes the next cause, creating the next effect etc. Cause A leads to effect B, which becomes cause B which leads to effect C. And since we know that for each individual interaction we know that A always leads to B, and B always leads to C, we end up with cause A always ending up with C, albeit one link further along the chain than B. Extrapolate all the way to Z and we know that if we have cause A then we will ultimately end up with Z. No ifs, no buts, just certainty. No opportunity for deviation.
And yet another repetition of that confused irrelevancy.
Notice that James is right - again - when he finds significance in the strangeness of that obsession with something nobody is arguing about, and everybody agrees with. What is going on in your heads? Typing is that much fun for you?
{
Agrees with, that is, aside from the deceptive rhetorical reliance on "a cause" in a universe where almost nothing happens from just one cause or any definable single cause, in a context in which significant causes such as quantum probabilities have been denied deterministic causal status by these posters, for some reason,
and aside from the deceptive implication that prediction is relevant here, when predictability has almost nothing to do with the causal determinism involved (and a good thing, too, because it is usually impossible - regardless of knowledge, in theory and in practice, impossible. The equations cannot be solved exactly, the nature of the causation does not allow perfect knowledge to be exact in the first place, and so forth) }
OK, colour me obtuse, but can you just connect those dots from 'since nothing has freedom' to ' therefore supernatural'?
?
In my posting there are no such dots. There is no such connection, either.
You appear to have inverted and bollixed the reasoning in my posts, lost track of their context and content, and reworded stuff confusingly.
Try reading the actual posts, attending to the actual vocabulary, and ignoring the various paraphrases.
Yes, I'd really like to see how exactly iceaura et al connects those dots.
Read the posts. Discover - again - that you can't find any of that shit in them.
You can find other dots, and these have been provided with connections - often simple quotes, highlighted or formatted to draw your attention to the exact matter involved. Some day you may even choose to reply to them. It's possible. But you would have to drop your supernatural assumption, and pay attention to the nonsupernatural degrees of freedom involved in human decision making. The example of a driver approaching a traffic light is still available.
Here's a possible starting point: none of the observed capabilities possessed by that driver are "illusions", neither does the concept of "illusion" make any sense in that context. The future does not determine the past, or change the nature of things in the past, in a causally deterministic system. Causes precede effects, only.
