Dude, you can believe in aliens and tooth fairies for all I care, as long as you refrain from calling their existence "empirically factual" it doesn't matter to me. The reason I took issue on this thread was because of post #113, where you claimed that your views were based in empirical fact.
I was very careful to distinguish what is, and isn't, empirical fact. It IS an empirical fact that electrons do not behave as rodgertutt thinks everything behaves: it can be in a position where the spatiotemporal distribution of material particles makes it 90% likely to do A and only 10% likely to do B, but you cannot know for sure which it will do, not even if you have absolutely complete information. By that, I don't mean just "complete information up to the Heisenberg limit of what is observable": de Broglie worked on a "hidden variable" formulation, in which particles really do have exact positions and velocities at every point in time (although we can't get the data through photon exchanges), but von Neumann showed that this was impossible (even if there is some other method of observation, which could evade Heisenberg and give us the exact position and motion of everything, that STILL wouldn't tell us which way the electron is going to choose).
What I cannot claim as empirical fact, and was careful not to claim, is that OUR choices are quantum-indeterminate. In most macroscopic systems, the quantum effects all cancel out and make zero difference (more precisely, the probability of them making a difference is ten-to-the-minus-ridiculous); I have reason to believe that the brain is different, and systematically magnifies the quantum indeterminacies up to macroscopic effects, but I was upfront that I cannot at this time prove that.
I am sure you think you have a point here.
I certainly did have a point. The late David Bohm worked on a "non-naive" hidden variables theory, in which everything is determined by some hidden variables which are not in the simple form of spatiotemporal positions and motions (what he called the "implicate order", which doesn't look anything like space-time but somehow gets processed to create that appearance), but nobody's really made it work. What Bell is saying when he talks about superdeterminism is that he thinks there MUST BE some such hidden-variables theory that work; everything must get determined SOMEHOW, but we can't see what does it. But Bell doesn't actually have any such theory, and Neumann's impossibility proof puts tight constraints on how it could work.
c0de, how about this analogy?
Chess pieces are moved by the chess players. Chess players are not moved by the chess pieces. Is that logically "contradictory"? Not at all.
If the chess pieces can perceive the other chess pieces, but nothing else, then it is possible for them to figure out the "rules" of chess, which determine that only certain moves are possible. The positions of the chess pieces also make certain of the possible moves much more likely than others. It is not at all the case, however, that from each position there is one and only one move that can follow.
Is this supposed to be an analogy of dualism? Because it isn't. The player is not "inherently independent" from the chess pieces. Both the pieces and the player are part of the physical world.
The analogy to the "material plane" (space-time and all the particles that live in it) here would be "the chessboard". Yes, the chessboard plus the players plus a lot of other stuff makes up a larger system (within which, the players are not pushed around by the pieces, although the pieces are pushed around by the players, since the players do not live on the board); just so, the material plane plus a lot of other stuff makes up a grander cosmos, almost none of which we can observe, operating by laws which have as little to do with the laws of physics (that is, within space and time), much as, within the analogy, the laws of physics have little to do with the rules of chess.
By internal influences I mean any internal condition that affects my choosing; e.g. I normally love a certain food, but at the time I am offered it I have a stomach ache and have no desire for that food.
That is just another material condition, then.
So, back to the point that I am asserting is true.
Every choice we have ever made was the only choice we could have made at the time, considering internal perference combined with external influences.
Which is precisely the point that I am asserting is false. It is an empirical fact that elementary particles do not behave that way, and it is my belief that we do not, either.
In Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, when something is unconditioned, that something would be independent of every other thing. However, if that independent something can interact with other thing, that something cannot be considered as independent anymore since for an interaction to have meaning, there has to be change(s).
That is not what I am meaning by "independent"; when I say X is independent of Y, I don't mean that X cannot affect Y, but that Y cannot affect X. The relationship is not symmetric: Y is not independent of X.
It may interest you to know that in Tibetan Buddhism, Buddhas do not make choices. All their actions are spontaneous.
This time I am not so much disagreeing with your usage of words as baffled by what your usage means. They are "spontaneous" to me means precisely that they DO make "choices", and make them "freely", without compulsion from the karmic history of dependent origination.
So if by unconditioned mind, you are referring to the Buddha within each being, then no choosing is required. But this is not in accordance with reality isn't it?
The
Vajracchedika ("Diamond Cutter")
Sutra has a repeated refrain, "This is how the
Tathagata chooses the one, and not the other" (about a dozen times, I'll have to look back at the text). The Diamond Cutter talks about how everything is in essence the same as everything else, and then denies the apparent implication that it must not matter what you do. Again, your picture of Buddhism as some kind of fatalism is not just different from what my understanding of Buddhism is; it seems to be downright antithetical.
