cladking

Any free will expressed by spermatozoa or ova is wholly independent of us or our consciousness. We didn't and wouldn't exist until we actually did when two specific ones became a zygote. They no longer existed at all by this time.

You seem to be assuming a spermatozoon has no consciousness and no free will. You are also assuming that ova drop by mere chance alone. I'm guessing you also think that babies are born when they're "done" rather than by consensus.

It's been tough but I've survived so far.

What any individual believes has no bearing on whether or not free will exists. It's irrelevant whether or not a Deity exists. If there's no free will what is stopping people from harming themselves? There are plenty of miserable people yet very few wait for the train on its tracks.

You can be quite certain there is free will. Reality is an infinite number of orders of magnitude too chaotic for consciousness to be driven by any sort of chemical reaction or mechanical process. The belief in preordination and predeterminism is caused by a belief in perception and physical "law". Apropos of nothing in particular you'll never see anyone who believes there is no free will lie down in front of a train to prove his point.

The schools have failed due to lack of responsibility and lack of standards. This means many individuals are less capable of understanding or recognizing real science. This even applies to scientists to greater or lesser extent depending on the specific individual. Far worse is that specialization occurs earlier and earlier so those individuals who become journalists (entertainers) often can't tell real science from the latest fad among the educated. They often don't care if something is actual science or something that will generate ad revenue so "soup of the day science" was born. It is called "science" to give it a mystique among their uneducated readers but it is no more real science than most of the other Look and See Science that is derived from opinion and the belief in the correctness of expert opinion. I don't believe the real threat here is ignorance and belief in silly science. The real threat is most of these people would have had a religion to provide some sort of moral compass a century ago. Now they are adrift believing in any nonsense that comes down the pike and ripe for some leader who might use them for his own ends. Real science won every battle and lost the war.

Theory can only be overruled or disproven by experiment. There is always ample evidence against theory to question it but it requires experiment to show it is wrong. For instance a stone rolling down a hill doesn't fall straight down as theory predicts. An experiment showing something doesn't fall straight to the center of gravity without intervening forces or objects would disprove our theory of gravity. Of course such a thing has never been never observed under controlled conditions.

Could natural selection tell us the purpose of our motivations and instincts? Far more likely is motivations and instincts could tell us the purpose of evolution.

Metaphysics is expressed in words and models. Anything beyond metaphysics necessarily must consider these words and models as well as their meanings and perspectives.

How can words be off topic in a discussion about meta metaphysics? I suppose to the degree words affect actions in other people they are "real". Words are deconstructed. Ideas are not... ...at least until they are communicated in words.

Eise referred to "vague ideas" and I know no other words to describe the subject than i am using. If anyone has other ideas about metaphysics and metametaphysics then I'm all ears. I believe we must assume NOTHING in reality is "magical" or we would get bogged down in lines of research that are dead-ends or not reproducible. This even applies to all things for which we lack even a working definition like "consciousness" and our ability to communicate ideas through language. We tend to assume others take our meaning on all things but this is never the case. Every sentence is deconstructed differently by every individual.

Yes. Exactly. Words and abstractions have no real existence. They are to help us think and communicate. But I would maintain that "ideas" are a product of the brain that are "real". Ideas are a product of consciousness which can underlie the invention of hypothesis, experiment formation, and invention. They can be made manifest in the concrete world while mere words can be immaterial and irrelevant to all of reality. You can say the sun goes down art 4:22 today but the world will still be turning just before and just after it "does". Definitions and axioms are reasonably well defined in science so "metaphysics" isn't so much an issue. But we do tend to forget that there is some individual variation in understanding these terms and much more variation in model formation. We believe there is a tendency for those who build the most realistic models to be more likely to devise good hypothesis and experiment but this is hardly a certainty in the last half century. I simply believe this might no longer be true because we've reached a point that our models are overly dependent on perspective. It is this perspective which is a product of language (the way we think and communicate) that is meta metaphysics. Rather than seeing reality our models are increasingly dependent on the perspective of the "builder". The model is the perspective of the builder. There are numerous ways to deal with this but it requires a recognition of the problem to even begin. I should have used the word "idea". I meant words in the sense of a "thought". All life uses ideas to maintain its existence. Whether it is fleeing a predator or looking for a place to build a nest an individual can invent an idea that will save its life or assure the continuation of its genes in its offspring. I'd certainly agree most scientists are in reasonably close agreement. I don't think this applies well to laymen.

You believe some abstraction lies at the root of metaphysics but this can't be true because we each have different ideas and even different definitions for words. "Abstractions" don't exist in the real world and even numbers are abstractions. We know what "metaphysics" is. So what is beyond "metaphysics? Someone can claim it is some abstraction like "consciousness" or "God" but the only thing that is real and palpable that lies beyond metaphysics are the very words we each must use to understand, think about, or communicate ideas about metaphysics. It is the words we use to define what it is and how even these words have slightly different meanings to every thinker, speaker, and listener. If we hardly agree on why science works or on the means by which the process of science works then what is the meaning of science at all? Perhaps the problem here is as often the case that we are talking about different definitions for "metaphysics". There is no "magic" and no abstraction that makes science work. It is a mere tool that works because the real world, that which is palpable, discloses itself in well crafted experiment. Experiment certainly isn't magic either. We must use words to speak of this tool and why it works. Somebody needed words to invent the tool. Before that somebody invented the words.

Metaphysics is the basis of science. It is the meaning of science and every experiment. Meta-metaphysics is simply language. Science is founded in metaphysics and metaphysics in language. Since we each think, learn, understand, and communicate with language it is foundational to science. Until we understand this the concept of consciousness will always elude us. The knowledge and meaning of science will elude us. And if I am right, a unified field theory will elude us.

I believe this "problem" disappears when the existence of reality is axiomatic.

While the peers have not even seen the data it is apparent that the powers that be are investigating the void discovered 160' south of the NE corner of the Great Pyramid. In the center right of this picture (click twice on the picture and scroll to center) can be seen what is most probably an endoscope guide they used to discover the void they never publicly admitted was causing the heat anomaly and which led to the proposal to insert a drone balloon. One of the Egyptologists even announced there was a natural fissure in live rock behind here yet no such observation can be made exterior to the pyramid. So there is a stalemate where even peers aren't allowed the data. I suppose next we'll have loyalty oaths and non-disclosure agreements. Peerhood will be stripped from those who dare to cite facts and evidence. These are dangerous times largely because of the perpetuation of "scientific" beliefs that date to the 19th century. The only way to fix "peer review" is to eliminate it. If anyone wants to know whether some scientist is real in the eyes of his peers then he can just google it. Or the same conferences and meeting can be used to rate the peers instead of their studies or experiments. Obviously experts in every field are the individuals we need to seek for opinions about interpretation of experiment, experiment quality, and the meaning of experiment. I would propose that peer review be scrapped and a new step added; "Metaphysical Implications".

The problems with "peer review" are even more obvious in current day Egyptology. They claim to be science despite their lack of systematic application of modern knowledge and science to the study of pyramids. They normally just refuse testing and have even chided scientists in the last couple of years for proposing testing (one offered to fly a balloon drone into the pyramid to see what lay beyond). Across the board there is testing and measurements they refuse to gather. Believe it or not strategraphic archaeology nor forensic testing has ever been performed in any pyramid! But now there is a far worse problem that shows the utter failure of peer review and this applies to every discipline. Infrared data was finally gathered starting in October of 2015 and this information has NEVER been supplied to peers. They are withholding from the public because it apparently does not agree with what Egyptologists believe (the powers that be have said no data that disagree with the paradigm will ever be released). There is no mechanism for distributing it to peers so their review of the data is impossible. If they did distribute the data to all the Egyptologists whom they could identify, the information would almost immediately hit the internet. "Peer review" is an irrelevancy. Reality is seen principally in experiment and the opinion of fools and scholars alike has no effect on experiment and no causation of reality. This is likely the cause of the failure in education and the cause of soup of the day science which is training the general public to ignore sound and flaky science as well. We are rushing headlong into a dangerous future where the roadsigns are determined not by the road ahead but by peers describing the road behind. We are in serious trouble but it is not well seen.

Probably. But I don't have a clue to what other method might word to provide an answer consistent with reality (or laws of nature if you prefer).

I believe the philosophical question is how you can ask such a question. I believe the answer to the question is that you can't prove it any more than you can prove there is, was, always has been, or will be a conscious Creator of all things. I believe there are only two options for answering the question; first you can establish definitions and protocols to define a logical means to study your environment which factors out beliefs and perspectives. Or second you can take your existence and the existence of all things that are apparent as being axiomatic pending establishment through theory derived from observation and logic. I believe the first option is what we call "science" and the second is the way animals thrive, live, and progress.

We don't even know what consciousness is and the simplest brains are orders of magnitude more complex than a computer or the internet. Nevermind we can't really even define intelligence either, how are we going to create AI? It would be about akin to teaching a stone to fly. If we ever have machine intelligence there will be nothing "artificial" about it.

...And it would have been more restrictive to have said "no" to a first cookie and a second cookie.

Well, ya' could start inventing a cardinal mathematics where the first of six oranges and the second of six oranges ... and the 6th of 6 oranges plus the first of six apples ... and the sixth of six apples equals(?) 12 servings of fruit. The world is complex but mathematics only needs to be logical so long as we remember while we apply it to the real world. "Proper" mathematics can be as complex as the real world.

Philosophy Philosophy (from Greek φιλοσοφία, philosophia, literally "love of wisdom")[1][2][3][4] is the study of general and fundamental concerns such as existence, knowledge, matter, values, reason, mind, and language.[5][6] We model the real world in abstractions and call it "philosophy" or "epistemology" but it's still the real world. If philosophy were not representative of reality it would have no value. Additionally, philosophy underpins our beliefs and understanding of reality. Whether we see 4 + 8 = 6 + 6 as true or not is fundamental to both the questions posed here and philosophy.

"I glad to see that some have now caught my drift that just because 6+6 has the same sum as 8+4 it does not mean that 6+6 is the same as 8+4. Unfortunately some are offering this type of reasoning as a valid argument." People here almost invariably miss my point so much that they believe I'm not even on topic! What you're getting toward here is an entirely different way to see math and its reality. Of course 4 + 8 are never really equivalent to 6 + 6 in the real world. There are many many different types, sizes, and compositions of bolts and nuts that have been made in the history of man and they are not always interchangeable with each other and nut and bolts themselves are never interchangeable. There are an infinite possible types of either nuts or bolts possible with our definitions. Numbers are necessarily abstractions and as such 4 + 8 = 6 + 6. But this isn't magic or the nature of reality it's because of definitions. Rather it is because reality itself is logical and so long as operations on its quantification are logical than these abstractions are numerically logical. In the real world though we must add 4 apples and 8 apples or 6 apples and 6 apples and we'll always get 12 apples. But in the real world every set of four ,six, eight, or twelve apples is different. Every apple in the real world is different so there's no such thing as "two apples". It is an abstraction. You can't really put "a" nut on 'a" bolt and must put the nut on the bolt. In the real world it's not that uncommon for a nut to not fit a bolt but to fit the next "identical" bolt. There are probably "work arounds" for everything including math that doesn't always fit.

"It is always necessary to define terms in Mathematics. Sadly I fear the rest of your posting entirely misses the OP which is about Philosophy, not Mathematics." I wasn't referring to defining mathematical terms so much as units. Math is so restrictive largely because we are trying to impose abstractions (numbers and their operations) on concrete reality. The nature of math has always been considered a philosophical issue but, like with most things, I tend to disagree.