Given that Carrier's objection 3 is about morality, and my previous post on Carrier addressed that aspect, I'll skip it and examine the objection 4 and 5.
Carrier's objection 4 is this:
(Objection 4) When it comes to cognitive science (as some have noted here already) Alex succumbs to a common error: trusting scientists to be good philosophers. Alex mistakenly follows the error of Libet in confusing our perception of ourselves, with our actual selves. Just because it takes your brain about a fifth of a second to generate a model of what you just did (and thus represent it as a coherent conscious experience), doesn’t mean it wasn’t you who just made that decision. Once you abandon the fallacy of conflating the two, Alex’s conclusions from Libet’s experiment no longer follow. Philosophers long ago settled this issue: even if determinism prevails, free will exists in the compatibilist sense, which is the only kind of free will anyone would ever really want. Science has never proved otherwise.
Let's to examine this objection in parts.
1- Carrier says "Alex mistakenly follows the error of Libet in confusing our perception of ourselves, with our actual selves"
Carrier's reply assumes (without any argument) that perception of ourselves is different of our selves. But, if naturalism is true, what's the difference between them? What's the "self" without any conscious perception of the "self"? What's the referent of that conscious perception, but the conscious perception itself?
2-Carrier says "Just because it takes your brain about a fifth of a second to generate a model of what you just did (and thus represent it as a coherent conscious experience), doesn’t mean it wasn’t you who just made that decision. Once you abandon the fallacy of conflating the two, Alex’s conclusions from Libet’s experiment no longer follow"
Carrier's reply misrepresents Rosemberg's point. What Rosemberg said is "Then there is the fact, discovered by Libet, that actions are already determined by your brain before you consciously decide to do them!"
Note that Rosemberg's point is about the implications of determinism (as apparently shown by Libet's experiments) to free will.
Even though I disagree with the common interpretations surrounding Libet's experiment, Rosemberg's point is that if the deterministic interpretation is true, then free will is a mere illusion. It doesn't actually exist, because your choice was already determined by your brain.
Carrier's reply miss the point. When he says "Just because it takes your brain about a fifth of a second to generate a model of what you just did (and thus represent it as a coherent conscious experience), doesn’t mean it wasn’t you who just made that decision", he's arguing against a straw man.
Rosemberg is not saying that Libet's experiment implies that we don't make our decisions. His point is that our conscious decisions (made by us) is DETERMINED by previous processes in our brain. And therefore, it implies that free will is illusory, because our "choice" is fully determined in advance (hence, it's not actually free).
Claiming that we did the choice is irrelevant, if our choice was determined in advance by factors not dependent on us. Let's to see that in a diagram:
Cause ----> Cause -----> Cause ----> Cause (Jime's choice)-----> Cause ----> Cause (ad infinitum).
Note that "Jime's choice" is a link of a impersonal and deterministic causal chain, and that choice is fully DETERMINED by all the previous causes (1,2...) which are not dependent on me.
Therefore, my choice is actually an EFFECT (absolutely determined) of a previous causal chain, not an actually free and self-determined choice. So, saying that my choice is "free" because it was MY choice is a clear fallacy, a rhetorical sleigh of hand intented to fool unwary and unthinking people into the idea that determinism is actually compatible with free will.
If determinism is true, free will doesn't exist. (Only exist a causal chain whose one of the links- my choice- is arbitrarily called "free" by naturalists who don't want to reject determinism but don't dare to accept the full implications of their position)
3-Carrier asserts this falsehood "Philosophers long ago settled this issue: even if determinism prevails, free will exists in the compatibilist sense, which is the only kind of free will anyone would ever really want. Science has never proved otherwise"
This is simply false. Carrier presents the topic about free will as something that philosophers have already "settled". He misleads the readers into the thinking that "philosophers" have solved the free will debate and have agreed that free will exists in the compatibilist sense.
Readers familiar with the philosophical literature know that the free will problem hasn't been settled by philosophers. In fact, there are many positions (in addition to compatibilism) regarding the free will problem, and some philosophers even think the problem has no solution at all.
Again, Carrier begs the question against Rosemberg by assuming as truth one position (compatibilism) which is only one of the positions in the free will debate, and doing it without any argument.
As Rosemberg said in his reply to the commenters: "As for Libet, the aim of my appeal to his experiment, and to its vast number of replications, was to undermine our confidence in introspection as a source of reliable information about the mind, or anything else for that matter. I credit Libet with the conclusion that the consciousness of willing is no reason to suppose that willing is a conscious act of the mind. If my précis seemed to say more, that was overhasty of me. The point is when it comes to the nature of the mind and will, “never let your conscious be your guide.”
Scientism is physicalist—the physical facts fix all the facts. But it is not eliminativist about higher-level ontologies, provided that they are compatible with physics and supported by reliable empirical evidence. That means it must be eliminativist about free-floating designs and purposes, original intentionality and ethical values. It accepts higher level ontologies, so long as they play roles in our best (most predictive, transparent and unifying) explanations and theories. If some higher level ontology is incompatible with physics, then it cant do any of these things, since all the evidence for physical theory is evidence against them. Naturalists unwilling to eliminate so much must dispense with physics. And with it, they lose their most compelling argument for the hegemony of the higher-level process they really need—the one Darwin discovered." (emphasis in blue added)
Naturalism leads unavoidably to irrational conclusions, but most naturalists, by self-delusion or intentionally, carefully avoid critically examining the full implications of naturalism, because doing such thing would destroy their position and undermine their faith on it. They prefer to spend their time in imaginary battles with creationists (thereby the well known obsession with creationism by most naturalists and materialistic atheists) instead of examining their own naturalistic position with critical rigour, honesty and objectivity.
As a rule, naturalists want to leave all the doors open (except the divine or spiritual door) to avoid making explicit predictions or implications of their worldview, and so cleverly avoid being refuted by contrary evidence or by philosophical arguments. This strategy allows that, whatever is the evidence or philosophical topic under discussion, naturalists can always, through ad hoc and post hoc modifications, force a compatibility with their naturalistic ideology. (If they specify in advance ALL the implications of their worldview, most people would realize the fallacies and self-refuting conclusions essentially implied by naturalism.)
Fortunately, honest naturalists like Rosemberg, Fodor, Nagel, MacArthur, and some others don't swallow that obvious fallacy. They have the courage to critically examine and make EXPLICIT the actual implications of naturalism and to face the ethical, moral, spiritual, social and intellectual consequences of that worldview.
Carrier's objection 5 is this:
(Objection 5) Alex commits a similar fallacy when he says blindsight suggests we might have to reject the conclusion “that when you see a color you have a color experience.” To cut right to the chase: since neither he nor any scientist has ever had a conversation with the part of the brain cut off from the cerebral cortex in blindsight cases, neither he nor any scientist can claim to know whether that part of the brain does or does not experience color qualia. The evidence of split-brain patients, however, should lead us to predict that it does. Which puts Alex’s inference to the contrary back into the circular file. Nevertheless, apart from this objection and the last, all Alex says about the errors of folk psychology is quite correct. The actual facts are quite different in cognitive science (such folk notions often being as wrong as the facts have turned out to be in cosmology and biology and everything else we’ve thought about for the last few thousand years). He just draws the wrong conclusions from those facts
Let's to examine it in detail:
1- Carrier says that "Alex commits a similar fallacy when he says blindsight suggests we might have to reject the conclusion “that when you see a color you have a color experience.”
Here Carrier again misrepresents Rosemberg's actual argument. What Rosemberg said was "Neuroscience will eventually enable us to understand the mind by showing us how the brain works. But we already know enough about it to take nothing introspection tells us about the mind on trust. The phenomenon of blindsight—people who don’t have any conscious color experiences can tell the color of a thing—is enough to give us pause about the most apparently certain conclusion introspection insists on: that when you see a color you have a color experience."
Note that Rosemberg is not suggesting that we have to reject the conclusion that we have a color experience; his point is that we have to have a pause when considering what introspection tell us about the mind, because there is evidence (like the phenomenon of blindsight) that cast doubts on the reliability of introspection as a method to discover what's actually happening inside of our minds.
Even though I disagree with Rosemberg's point, I agree that Rosemberg is right IF naturalism is true and consciousness is an illusion. Would you take the contents of an illusion seriously or at face value? Would you trust the contents of your illusions?
As naturalist, professional skeptic and consciousness scholar Susan Blackmore has argued: "Different strands of research on the senses over the past decade suggest that the brave cognitive scientists, psychologists and neuroscientists who dare to tackle the problem of consciousness are chasing after the wrong thing. If consciousness seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed sights, sounds, feelings and thoughts, then I suggest this is the illusion.
First we must be clear what is meant by the term “illusion”. To say that consciousness is an illusion is not to say that it doesn’t exist, but that it is not what it seems to be―more like a mirage or a visual illusion. And if consciousness is not what it seems, no wonder it’s proving such a mystery."(emphasis added)
Note that Blackmore includes "sights" (and hence color perception) as part of the illusion.
Blackmore adds that by "illusion", she's not referring to something non-existent; rather, she's talking about something that is very different than what it SEEMS to be (like a mirage or visual illusion).
Therefore, if the contents of consciousness are illusory (in the sense mentioned by Blackmore), and color experience is part of that illusion, is not logical Rosemberg's argument that we shouldn't take the results of introspection at face value? Is not the right position (like Rosemberg argues) tot take a pause when considering the qualia (including color) contents of such illusory experience?
Instead of refuting Rosemberg's argument, Carrier misrepresents it and begs the questions against him.
2-Carrier says " To cut right to the chase: since neither he nor any scientist has ever had a conversation with the part of the brain cut off from the cerebral cortex in blindsight cases, neither he nor any scientist can claim to know whether that part of the brain does or does not experience color qualia. The evidence of split-brain patients, however, should lead us to predict that it does"
But it's irrelevant and misrepresent Rosemberg's point. Rosemberg's argument is not based on this or that part of the cerebral cortex having or lacking experience color qualia, but in the reliability of such experience given the illusory character or nature of consciousness (and hence of experience color qualia).
As Carrier cannot refute Rosemberg's argument in its actual and best formulation, he creates and refutes a straw man.
Unlike Rosemberg, Carrier doesn't want to draw the full implications of his naturalist position, because he perceives its self-refuting and irrational consequences. He accepts the premises of naturalism but carefully and uncritically avoid their implications.
At least, Rosemberg (and a growing number of reflective naturalists) has the intellectual courage to assume the actual implications of his position and to follow the (naturalistic) argument where it leads.
TO BE CONTINUED...
Part 1 of this series here.
Part 2 of this series here.
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