Gnosticism is the essential religious idea in The Matrix, as it was in The Truman Show - the idea that day-to-day phenomenal reality is a lie and illusion perpetuated by a malicious pseudo-God, and that knowledge (Gnosis), rather than faith, was the key to liberation. It's a religious tradition that appeals to a more scientific temperment, even if its metaphysics are somewhat, let's say, complicated.
Truman show is more of a Indo-Hellenic gnosticism - Truman, by dint of his own determination and overcoming his own fears, achieves total doubt and walks away from his world of illusion. The Matrix is more of a Christian Gnosticism - there is a messiah who is chartered with liberating all of us, and it is ultimately faith, rather than doubt, which saves, although doubt is still the conduit to salvation.
I suspect that there's some historical reason for the proliferation of the idea that our day-to-day experience is a lie, that our phenomenal experience is a malicious or mercenary construct. Perhaps it has to do with the "end of history;" without the oppositional tension of Communism, the only engine of public truth is American/Western media. The apparent victory of American capitalism is so absolute, that it seems to dominate the landscape of thought itself, and the only resistance is doubt.
I can give you an example of corporate evil that makes Microsoft look like a saint: Nestle's marketing of dry infant formula to thirld-world mothers.
Throughout the third world, Nestle would give away about a month's supply of dry infant formula to new mothers, particularly in free or government-run maternity wards, which target the poorest and least educated segment of society. All sounds very altruistic, no?
Of course, after a month without breast feeding, women STOP LACTATING, which means that they HAVE to buy infant formula to feed their children.
Really makes being "trapped" in cycles of upgrades seem a little less chilling, doesn't it?
Anyway, due to intense international pressure, many of the worst of Nestle's practices have stopped, but there continue to be some problems, including very clear health dangers associated with infant formula. See The Baby Milk Action web site for more details.
The question is really this: if you expect people to listen to you about OS', do you listen to them when it comes to other products? Do you boycott McDonalds, Monsanto, Exxon and the like? Are you even a fraction as conscientious about your other consuming habits as you are about your computing ones? If not, how could you possibly expect anyone who isn't monomaniacally absorbed in computing to even listen?
How many people are frustrated by "the masses" who don't balk at a Microsoft monopoly? "The mindless sheep!" they whine, "they keep buying these inferior products and just give a monopoly to Microsoft!"
But they are doing exactly what you are doing: "picking their battles." Do you think someone whose primary concern is the environment will really give a turd about operating systems, when the OS-warriors don't seem to give a turd about anything else?
And there's just a little too much support for proprietary, closed software here if it just happens not to come from Microsoft. IBM/Lotus, Sun even Corel, aren't really allies as far as I'm concerned. It's not even a case of the enemy-of-my-enemy: last I checked, two of those companies have a substantial windows product line, and none of them operate significantly on the Free software model.
In other words, if the battle is between Open and Closed, count me in. If it's between Microsoft and Everything Else, I really couldn't care less - I suspect The Market will take care of it, and just give us another, and quite probably much worse, tyrant.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm getting a bit tired of some of the very selective hostility towards Microsoft.
Yes, I think they're monopolistic and anticompetitive, and I hope the DOJ gets them good. I think they've hurt innovation, and that they've sabotaged productivity wherever their "solutions" have been implemented.
But really, if Microsoft represented the worst that multinational capitalism had to offer, multination corporate capitalism would be a utopian fantasy and heaven on earth. Only people who are so completely tunnel-visioned as to only see this one little industry as significant could possibly paint Microsoft as an ubervillian - compare the activities of Nestle, Union Carbide, Monsanto, Exxon, Mitsubishi, General Motors, Coca Cola, Standard Oil, AT&T, ITT, Nike, Reebok, R.J. Reynolds, The Gap, United Fruit, Dole, the coffee companies, and the insurance industry, to see histories of intrigue, negligence, conspiracy, brutality, oppression, incompetance, bullying, murder, and environmental destruction that would make your blood boil. Look at the histories of Latin America, Africa and Asia for the tracks of these practices. Read "Open Veins of Latin America" by Eduardo Galeano for a good introduction to some of this history.
But to listen to the displaced focused hatred aimed at Microsoft, you'd think THEY were responsible for sweatshops, Bhopal, the massacre at El Mozote, and the like.
And to think that Sun, Oracle, Sybase, IBM or even Netscape, HP or Apple are significantly better is at best naivete. (I will grant you that their products are usually better and less buggy, but I'm talking about corporate ethics in general.) Look at the behaviour of McNeally and Ellison someday.
There's a big difference between being pro-Open/Free, and being ABM (Anything-But-Microsoft). I'm definitely the former. My attitude to a Microsoft Office for Linux suite would be the same as any major company producing a non-Free application for Linux: "Yes, that's very nice, but really, who cares?"
Oh, yes. Technology leads to stability: why, the 20th century is just FULL of examples! Why, the US is just a whole lot of people getting along nicely because they have TV and radio!
In fact, the fascist movements of the early 20th century were largely made possible by radio broadcast, and the Rwandan massacres were coordinated by radio, with on-air demagogues exhorting Hutus to rise up against Tutsis.
I'm not telling them what to do. I'm telling them what the BEST thing to do would be, the opportunity that they are screwing up. I assure you, there's a lot of money to be made in the strategy I just described.
Look,just because you make an investment doesn't mean that you have a right to a guaranteed return. I could invest millions of dollars in a device to sell oxygen, but that doesn't give me the right to make money of it by making it illegal to breathe free oxygen.
This has nothing to do with "beer/speech" freedom anyway, it has something to do with the ownership of community-created content and the fact that people believed they were contributing to a project that was less free than they thought it was.
But, if it was your business (money) what would you do in their shoes?
I would be flexible, find ways of extending my technology and resources into new markets instead of grasping at their "IP" as a would-be cash cow; that's a cowardly, static strategy. I would create a Nielson-like service that distributed special CD-players to certain people to collect playing data about CD's for market research.
That's their ticket to success - become the Nielson of CD audio data, collecting, interpreting, and selling reports on who is listening to what, when. All they need are broadcasting CD players.
Grasping too greedily has affronted the free software folks, and they may be losing their chance to build a unique market-research firm.
This who affair is an interesting object lesson on the whole "oh, who cares about licenses, it's free enough" attitude, too: sometimes, the slippery-slope suspicion is accurate.
Corruption and bribery often involve transactions between two consenting individuals - kickbacks for contracts, payoffs, and the like. No theft there!
The question is how far ownership goes. Do I own a story after I've told it to someone? Can I get royalties for jokes I've told? Can I sue you if I tell a joke at a party and you tell it later?
Recipes are not copyrightable. A chef who invents a recipe has no rights over it at all. It's simply arbitrary that you continue to "own" software even after I've bought it.
The fact that human nature is neutral to the argument is ridiculous -if human beings were tempermentally incapable of moral behaviour, just what significance would moral law have?
Libertarians can appeal to common preference by claiming that shared values mandate libertarianism and demonstrating it. They do not have to directly claim that freedom is intrinsically a moral right - they can claim that it is an emergent right, that it follows from another value. You are the one trying to limit libertarianism into yet another straw man. All a libertarianism has to claim is that political coercive force is never justified - the nature of justification can differ from one libertarian to another. A rights-based libertarian would claim that the benefits of coercion still do not justify it.
Finally, let me demonstrate how my non-Libertarianism functions in such a way that is irrelevant to determinism questions, and still allows for maneuvering room for a determinst Libertarian.
My claim is the choice is not maximized by the removal of coercion, but that choice is maximized by actively proliferating a construction of choices, and the political freedom is better described as the construction of an optimal number of choices. This is classic liberal toleration - "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations," if you will. I hold that public institutions such as public education, public transportation, and social safety nets proliferate choice by 1. reducing anxiety about basic needs, thereby advancing everyone up Maslow's heirarchy of needs, 2. reducing pressure to compromise personal liberty in the interests of survival. That the cost-to-choice of forced taxation and redistribution of goods is less than the cost-to-choice of wage slavery, lost educational opportunities, lack of mobility, and need to concern with basic survival.
Now, a determinist libertarian could authentically take issue with the above claims, on a variety of bases. However, nowhere is my objection to libertarianism predicated on an objection to free will or determinism - the hypothetical libertarian and myself could have a debate about the above claims without resorting either to simple utilitarianism or to abandoning determinism. Resort to utilitarianism would move that libertarian to the pragmatist camp, of course - that given a set of practical social goals, the absence of political coercion would be the optimal way to achieve them. However, the proliferation of choice is not itself a utilitarian value - it may even have negative utility over a span of time, but both I and the libertarian may hold that it is categorically better to maintain a proliferation of choice than, for example, diminish a cholera epidemic or increase consumer spending.
My theory of choice was a straightforward one from another post: that all that is required for free choice without metaphysical free will is the ability to mentally represent different options as available and then evaluate those options in light of their benefits, risks, etc. The evaluation process itself can be determinist, but there would still be a capacity for choice. If you want to use the word moral agency to describe this process, fine. Moral considerations are part of the evaluative process. In a neural network model, moral nodes may excite or inhibit specific action nodes.
There has been much empirical work on the nature of decision making and choice, including priming effects, framing effects, and even lesion studies - Descarte's Error, by Michaal Demassio, is a good lay description of much of the work that has been done. I myself have done research work on such models for (non-moral, quantitative/comparative) mechanisms of decision making, in which we made models of decision-nets, made predictions, and then tested them experimentally.
You have moved the grounds of debate from the question of the relationship between determinism (which need not be materialist, by the way - I offer the historical example of Calvinism) and libertarianism, to an assault on science and materialism (including a straw-man depiction of a materialist who claims a-priori that the human mind is capable of any act of knowledge, when I don't know anyone who is actually capable of mentally concieving a superstring vibrating in 10 dimensions.)
I am going to sum up the determinist libertarian's basis in a few easy sentences, so that you won't again become confused:
1. The fact of determinism does not justify political coercion.
2. The fact of determinism does not obviate the faculty of choice: the faculty of choice is the ability to concieve of a multiplicity of options, process those options in cognition, and select an option. That the processes of cognition in evaluation options is internally determined is politically irrelevant.
3. A libertarian can claim that no political authority is justified in constraining the faculty of choice. A determinist theist - e.g., a Calvinist - might even note that political attempts to constrain choice demonstrate a disrespect for divine Will. A non-theist determinist might say that constraining choice is an offense against human potential, or is uncompassionate, or use both utilitarian and deontological basis for criticising the political constraint on choice.
If God or the Universe enforces morality with punishment, then morality is entirely utilitarian - i.e., I will do good to avoid hellfire/to avoid reincarnating as a banana slug.
If universal morality is not enforced by cosmic punishment, then there's the extra-moral question of "why should we follow this moral rule?"
Ironically, the only truly moral behavior comes out of moral intuition, which I think of as emerging from the social instinct of compassion, which is part of our biological legacy. It's neither universal nor "subjective," since it relies on subconcious, rather than conscious, aspects of the psyche.
If you start actually thinking about these sort of things - or, for example, the amount of resources our species spends on advertising, or the fact that California has more than doubled the number of prisons in the past 20 years yet not built a single new public university - your head will explode.
By moving the discussion to this realm - asking me to defend Libertarian theses that I do not hold (that coercion is a priori wrong, for example) - you've essentially ceded to me the ground that such a stance is philosophically defensible. We can have a discourse about coercion and personal rights without appealing to metaphysical free will.
My own personal view is that insofar as coercion is non-compassionate, it is to be avoided where possible; it's an essentially Buddhist perspective on political right. Compassion is simply a basic component of the human psyche, and cannot be appealed to as a universal moral law. If you are looking for only universal moral law as the basis of moral behavior, then you are hamstringing yourself. Of course, if all you are claiming is that you cannot have a univeral law of right without a universal moral law, then that's nearly tautologically accurate. However, a determinist libertarian can have a rule or theory of right that does not rely on universal moral law, but instead out of a theory of human nature, or even an appeal to common preference.
Ockham's razor both historically and practically applies to all explanation; William of Ockham was a medieval scholastic who developed the maxim for theological disputes, and was developed within and for metaphysics.
If you wish to throw out science, however, there's little point in having this discussion. Perhaps God told you want to think? Shall we appeal to authority? If you want to remove empiricism from the methods of determining the nature of human choice, and wish to use only introspection, you are on your own - we wind up in solipsistic claims ("I know, because I can FEEL it.") and my originial suggestion of sophomorism will be well justified. Just what sort of validity test are you looking for?
What is present to consciousness is the facility of choice, which mechanism I've already described.
I dispute your description of the straw-man materialist. Any cognitive scientist will balk at thee idea of a proiri claiming that the laws of the universe are comprehensible to the human mind. It's those who believe in a ghost-in-the-machine who would believe that human knowledge is universalizable; since I believe that human sentience is an emergent property that optimizes survival and does a bunch of amusing things additionally.
In any case, your attempts to move the nature of the debate are noted: originally, I was defending the notion of a determinist libertarianism against the idea that libertarianism relied on a belief in free will (even though, mind you, I'm not a libertarian.) Then you moved to a debate against determinism in general. Then you moved to a discussion on coercion and totalitarianism. Now you want to pit science against religion. Would you care to isolate your claims? Or would that make them too vulnerable?
I don't quote because I'm rather busy. When *I* said analysis, I meant the social analysis of the social bodies constructing predictable consequences.
I have little difficulty describing these things as coercion, with the caveat that they are external coercions: I can, in fact, do anything I want, if I am willing to accept the consequences (social or natural). The only absolute coercion would be if I were physically manipulated into performing an action - or, perhaps, neurally manipulated.
However, that would mean that we would have to accept any significantly dissuasive consequence as coercion, as well - for example, if I would have great difficulty finding a new place to live, and my landlord demands that I join his church or face eviction, I would also describe that as coercive, although most libertarians would balk at that description.
I don't claim that it invalidates free will per se, it does provide a basis for a political discourse on freedom that doesn't rely on free will.
Finally, the claim that we do not construct consequences is patently false. Insofar as we enforce a law against bank robbery, by make it significantly and predictably more probable than chance that bank robbery will result in incarceration, we have constructed a consequence for it. Parking tickets are also a construction of a consequence. It is the relative predictability of these consequences - even more predictable than natural phenomena (i.e., swimming in shark infested waters having attack-by-shark as a consequence) that is the basis of their dissuasive force.
All you need for a political free choice is 1. lack of extrapersonal constraints, and 2. internal representation of possible options. If I go to a restaurant and can choose between cake or pie for dessert, and I have an internal representation of my options for dessert, and there are no external constraints (including consequentialist) on the choice ("if you choose the pie, we kill you") then my choice is as free as I need it to be. That a 21st century brain scientist could predict my choice means as little as the fact that my mother, who knows my preferences, could probabilistically pick my choice with comparable accuracy.
While I am defending the right of determinist libertarians to exist with a certain amount of intellectual integrity, I am certainly not one of them, so calling me a liberal or a socialist has no real sting as a personal attack.
I believe the levels of determinacy are more appropriately the descriptive levels of interaction. We do not explain the contents of a book in terms of the analysis of the physics of ink and the visual perception of it, but on the level of language and things proper to it.
Also, the claim that indeterminacy means that I can not practically predict the accuracy of a particular brain's behaviour with 100% accuracy is not a trojan horse for free will, any more than the same indeterminacy applied to weather systems is. Since we cannot predict the even more complex behaviour of weather systems with 100% accuracy, should we ascribe free will to them also?
Slashdot Mirror
If all it takes to be labeled a Communist is to value sharing and care about a community, then paint me red and point me to Moscow, Comrade.
Yes, *that's* the probably with current film and video. It's much too *cerebral* and *intellectual.* Right.
Oy, next time they ask me my choice for reincarnation, I'll pick "boll weevil."
Gnosticism is the essential religious idea in The Matrix, as it was in The Truman Show - the idea that day-to-day phenomenal reality is a lie and illusion perpetuated by a malicious pseudo-God, and that knowledge (Gnosis), rather than faith, was the key to liberation. It's a religious tradition that appeals to a more scientific temperment, even if its metaphysics are somewhat, let's say, complicated.
Truman show is more of a Indo-Hellenic gnosticism - Truman, by dint of his own determination and overcoming his own fears, achieves total doubt and walks away from his world of illusion. The Matrix is more of a Christian Gnosticism - there is a messiah who is chartered with liberating all of us, and it is ultimately faith, rather than doubt, which saves, although doubt is still the conduit to salvation.
I suspect that there's some historical reason for the proliferation of the idea that our day-to-day experience is a lie, that our phenomenal experience is a malicious or mercenary construct. Perhaps it has to do with the "end of history;" without the oppositional tension of Communism, the only engine of public truth is American/Western media. The apparent victory of American capitalism is so absolute, that it seems to dominate the landscape of thought itself, and the only resistance is doubt.
RMS has severe RSI. Typing - ergo coding - are excrutiatingly painful for him. A "lately" clause on a code-to-qualify is insensitive and wrongheaded.
wm2.
Throughout the third world, Nestle would give away about a month's supply of dry infant formula to new mothers, particularly in free or government-run maternity wards, which target the poorest and least educated segment of society. All sounds very altruistic, no?
Of course, after a month without breast feeding, women STOP LACTATING, which means that they HAVE to buy infant formula to feed their children.
Really makes being "trapped" in cycles of upgrades seem a little less chilling, doesn't it?
Anyway, due to intense international pressure, many of the worst of Nestle's practices have stopped, but there continue to be some problems, including very clear health dangers associated with infant formula. See The Baby Milk Action web site for more details.
The question is really this: if you expect people to listen to you about OS', do you listen to them when it comes to other products? Do you boycott McDonalds, Monsanto, Exxon and the like? Are you even a fraction as conscientious about your other consuming habits as you are about your computing ones? If not, how could you possibly expect anyone who isn't monomaniacally absorbed in computing to even listen?
Don't you get it?
How many people are frustrated by "the masses" who don't balk at a Microsoft monopoly? "The mindless sheep!" they whine, "they keep buying these inferior products and just give a monopoly to Microsoft!"
But they are doing exactly what you are doing: "picking their battles." Do you think someone whose primary concern is the environment will really give a turd about operating systems, when the OS-warriors don't seem to give a turd about anything else?
And there's just a little too much support for proprietary, closed software here if it just happens not to come from Microsoft. IBM/Lotus, Sun even Corel, aren't really allies as far as I'm concerned. It's not even a case of the enemy-of-my-enemy: last I checked, two of those companies have a substantial windows product line, and none of them operate significantly on the Free software model.
In other words, if the battle is between Open and Closed, count me in. If it's between Microsoft and Everything Else, I really couldn't care less - I suspect The Market will take care of it, and just give us another, and quite probably much worse, tyrant.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm getting a bit tired of some of the very selective hostility towards Microsoft.
Yes, I think they're monopolistic and anticompetitive, and I hope the DOJ gets them good. I think they've hurt innovation, and that they've sabotaged productivity wherever their "solutions" have been implemented.
But really, if Microsoft represented the worst that multinational capitalism had to offer, multination corporate capitalism would be a utopian fantasy and heaven on earth. Only people who are so completely tunnel-visioned as to only see this one little industry as significant could possibly paint Microsoft as an ubervillian - compare the activities of Nestle, Union Carbide, Monsanto, Exxon, Mitsubishi, General Motors, Coca Cola, Standard Oil, AT&T, ITT, Nike, Reebok, R.J. Reynolds, The Gap, United Fruit, Dole, the coffee companies, and the insurance industry, to see histories of intrigue, negligence, conspiracy, brutality, oppression, incompetance, bullying, murder, and environmental destruction that would make your blood boil. Look at the histories of Latin America, Africa and Asia for the tracks of these practices. Read "Open Veins of Latin America" by Eduardo Galeano for a good introduction to some of this history.
But to listen to the displaced focused hatred aimed at Microsoft, you'd think THEY were responsible for sweatshops, Bhopal, the massacre at El Mozote, and the like.
And to think that Sun, Oracle, Sybase, IBM or even Netscape, HP or Apple are significantly better is at best naivete. (I will grant you that their products are usually better and less buggy, but I'm talking about corporate ethics in general.) Look at the behaviour of McNeally and Ellison someday.
There's a big difference between being pro-Open/Free, and being ABM (Anything-But-Microsoft). I'm definitely the former. My attitude to a Microsoft Office for Linux suite would be the same as any major company producing a non-Free application for Linux: "Yes, that's very nice, but really, who cares?"
Oh, yes. Technology leads to stability: why, the 20th century is just FULL of examples! Why, the US is just a whole lot of people getting along nicely because they have TV and radio!
In fact, the fascist movements of the early 20th century were largely made possible by radio broadcast, and the Rwandan massacres were coordinated by radio, with on-air demagogues exhorting Hutus to rise up against Tutsis.
I'm not telling them what to do. I'm telling them what the BEST thing to do would be, the opportunity that they are screwing up. I assure you, there's a lot of money to be made in the strategy I just described.
Look,just because you make an investment doesn't mean that you have a right to a guaranteed return. I could invest millions of dollars in a device to sell oxygen, but that doesn't give me the right to make money of it by making it illegal to breathe free oxygen.
This has nothing to do with "beer/speech" freedom anyway, it has something to do with the ownership of community-created content and the fact that people believed they were contributing to a project that was less free than they thought it was.
I would be flexible, find ways of extending my technology and resources into new markets instead of grasping at their "IP" as a would-be cash cow; that's a cowardly, static strategy. I would create a Nielson-like service that distributed special CD-players to certain people to collect playing data about CD's for market research.
That's their ticket to success - become the Nielson of CD audio data, collecting, interpreting, and selling reports on who is listening to what, when. All they need are broadcasting CD players.
Grasping too greedily has affronted the free software folks, and they may be losing their chance to build a unique market-research firm.
This who affair is an interesting object lesson on the whole "oh, who cares about licenses, it's free enough" attitude, too: sometimes, the slippery-slope suspicion is accurate.
No, that was Buck Owens.
Corruption and bribery often involve transactions between two consenting individuals - kickbacks for contracts, payoffs, and the like. No theft there!
The question is how far ownership goes. Do I own a story after I've told it to someone? Can I get royalties for jokes I've told? Can I sue you if I tell a joke at a party and you tell it later?
Recipes are not copyrightable. A chef who invents a recipe has no rights over it at all. It's simply arbitrary that you continue to "own" software even after I've bought it.
The fact that human nature is neutral to the argument is ridiculous -if human beings were tempermentally incapable of moral behaviour, just what significance would moral law have?
Libertarians can appeal to common preference by claiming that shared values mandate libertarianism and demonstrating it. They do not have to directly claim that freedom is intrinsically a moral right - they can claim that it is an emergent right, that it follows from another value. You are the one trying to limit libertarianism into yet another straw man. All a libertarianism has to claim is that political coercive force is never justified - the nature of justification can differ from one libertarian to another. A rights-based libertarian would claim that the benefits of coercion still do not justify it.
Finally, let me demonstrate how my non-Libertarianism functions in such a way that is irrelevant to determinism questions, and still allows for maneuvering room for a determinst Libertarian.
My claim is the choice is not maximized by the removal of coercion, but that choice is maximized by actively proliferating a construction of choices, and the political freedom is better described as the construction of an optimal number of choices. This is classic liberal toleration - "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations," if you will. I hold that public institutions such as public education, public transportation, and social safety nets proliferate choice by 1. reducing anxiety about basic needs, thereby advancing everyone up Maslow's heirarchy of needs, 2. reducing pressure to compromise personal liberty in the interests of survival. That the cost-to-choice of forced taxation and redistribution of goods is less than the cost-to-choice of wage slavery, lost educational opportunities, lack of mobility, and need to concern with basic survival.
Now, a determinist libertarian could authentically take issue with the above claims, on a variety of bases. However, nowhere is my objection to libertarianism predicated on an objection to free will or determinism - the hypothetical libertarian and myself could have a debate about the above claims without resorting either to simple utilitarianism or to abandoning determinism. Resort to utilitarianism would move that libertarian to the pragmatist camp, of course - that given a set of practical social goals, the absence of political coercion would be the optimal way to achieve them. However, the proliferation of choice is not itself a utilitarian value - it may even have negative utility over a span of time, but both I and the libertarian may hold that it is categorically better to maintain a proliferation of choice than, for example, diminish a cholera epidemic or increase consumer spending.
You continue to run like butter in heat.
My theory of choice was a straightforward one from another post: that all that is required for free choice without metaphysical free will is the ability to mentally represent different options as available and then evaluate those options in light of their benefits, risks, etc. The evaluation process itself can be determinist, but there would still be a capacity for choice. If you want to use the word moral agency to describe this process, fine. Moral considerations are part of the evaluative process. In a neural network model, moral nodes may excite or inhibit specific action nodes.
There has been much empirical work on the nature of decision making and choice, including priming effects, framing effects, and even lesion studies - Descarte's Error, by Michaal Demassio, is a good lay description of much of the work that has been done. I myself have done research work on such models for (non-moral, quantitative/comparative) mechanisms of decision making, in which we made models of decision-nets, made predictions, and then tested them experimentally.
You have moved the grounds of debate from the question of the relationship between determinism (which need not be materialist, by the way - I offer the historical example of Calvinism) and libertarianism, to an assault on science and materialism (including a straw-man depiction of a materialist who claims a-priori that the human mind is capable of any act of knowledge, when I don't know anyone who is actually capable of mentally concieving a superstring vibrating in 10 dimensions.)
I am going to sum up the determinist libertarian's basis in a few easy sentences, so that you won't again become confused:
1. The fact of determinism does not justify political coercion.
2. The fact of determinism does not obviate the faculty of choice: the faculty of choice is the ability to concieve of a multiplicity of options, process those options in cognition, and select an option. That the processes of cognition in evaluation options is internally determined is politically irrelevant.
3. A libertarian can claim that no political authority is justified in constraining the faculty of choice. A determinist theist - e.g., a Calvinist - might even note that political attempts to constrain choice demonstrate a disrespect for divine Will. A non-theist determinist might say that constraining choice is an offense against human potential, or is uncompassionate, or use both utilitarian and deontological basis for criticising the political constraint on choice.
Clear enough?
If God or the Universe enforces morality with punishment, then morality is entirely utilitarian - i.e., I will do good to avoid hellfire/to avoid reincarnating as a banana slug.
If universal morality is not enforced by cosmic punishment, then there's the extra-moral question of "why should we follow this moral rule?"
Ironically, the only truly moral behavior comes out of moral intuition, which I think of as emerging from the social instinct of compassion, which is part of our biological legacy. It's neither universal nor "subjective," since it relies on subconcious, rather than conscious, aspects of the psyche.
If you start actually thinking about these sort of things - or, for example, the amount of resources our species spends on advertising, or the fact that California has more than doubled the number of prisons in the past 20 years yet not built a single new public university - your head will explode.
Just look at the pretty blinking lights.
By moving the discussion to this realm - asking me to defend Libertarian theses that I do not hold (that coercion is a priori wrong, for example) - you've essentially ceded to me the ground that such a stance is philosophically defensible. We can have a discourse about coercion and personal rights without appealing to metaphysical free will.
My own personal view is that insofar as coercion is non-compassionate, it is to be avoided where possible; it's an essentially Buddhist perspective on political right. Compassion is simply a basic component of the human psyche, and cannot be appealed to as a universal moral law. If you are looking for only universal moral law as the basis of moral behavior, then you are hamstringing yourself. Of course, if all you are claiming is that you cannot have a univeral law of right without a universal moral law, then that's nearly tautologically accurate. However, a determinist libertarian can have a rule or theory of right that does not rely on universal moral law, but instead out of a theory of human nature, or even an appeal to common preference.
Ockham's razor both historically and practically applies to all explanation; William of Ockham was a medieval scholastic who developed the maxim for theological disputes, and was developed within and for metaphysics.
If you wish to throw out science, however, there's little point in having this discussion. Perhaps God told you want to think? Shall we appeal to authority? If you want to remove empiricism from the methods of determining the nature of human choice, and wish to use only introspection, you are on your own - we wind up in solipsistic claims ("I know, because I can FEEL it.") and my originial suggestion of sophomorism will be well justified. Just what sort of validity test are you looking for?
What is present to consciousness is the facility of choice, which mechanism I've already described.
I dispute your description of the straw-man materialist. Any cognitive scientist will balk at thee idea of a proiri claiming that the laws of the universe are comprehensible to the human mind. It's those who believe in a ghost-in-the-machine who would believe that human knowledge is universalizable; since I believe that human sentience is an emergent property that optimizes survival and does a bunch of amusing things additionally.
In any case, your attempts to move the nature of the debate are noted: originally, I was defending the notion of a determinist libertarianism against the idea that libertarianism relied on a belief in free will (even though, mind you, I'm not a libertarian.) Then you moved to a debate against determinism in general. Then you moved to a discussion on coercion and totalitarianism. Now you want to pit science against religion. Would you care to isolate your claims? Or would that make them too vulnerable?
I don't quote because I'm rather busy. When *I* said analysis, I meant the social analysis of the social bodies constructing predictable consequences.
I have little difficulty describing these things as coercion, with the caveat that they are external coercions: I can, in fact, do anything I want, if I am willing to accept the consequences (social or natural). The only absolute coercion would be if I were physically manipulated into performing an action - or, perhaps, neurally manipulated.
However, that would mean that we would have to accept any significantly dissuasive consequence as coercion, as well - for example, if I would have great difficulty finding a new place to live, and my landlord demands that I join his church or face eviction, I would also describe that as coercive, although most libertarians would balk at that description.
I don't claim that it invalidates free will per se, it does provide a basis for a political discourse on freedom that doesn't rely on free will.
Continuing again ...
Finally, the claim that we do not construct consequences is patently false. Insofar as we enforce a law against bank robbery, by make it significantly and predictably more probable than chance that bank robbery will result in incarceration, we have constructed a consequence for it. Parking tickets are also a construction of a consequence. It is the relative predictability of these consequences - even more predictable than natural phenomena (i.e., swimming in shark infested waters having attack-by-shark as a consequence) that is the basis of their dissuasive force.
Continuing...
All you need for a political free choice is 1. lack of extrapersonal constraints, and 2. internal representation of possible options. If I go to a restaurant and can choose between cake or pie for dessert, and I have an internal representation of my options for dessert, and there are no external constraints (including consequentialist) on the choice ("if you choose the pie, we kill you") then my choice is as free as I need it to be. That a 21st century brain scientist could predict my choice means as little as the fact that my mother, who knows my preferences, could probabilistically pick my choice with comparable accuracy.
While I am defending the right of determinist libertarians to exist with a certain amount of intellectual integrity, I am certainly not one of them, so calling me a liberal or a socialist has no real sting as a personal attack.
I believe the levels of determinacy are more appropriately the descriptive levels of interaction. We do not explain the contents of a book in terms of the analysis of the physics of ink and the visual perception of it, but on the level of language and things proper to it.
Also, the claim that indeterminacy means that I can not practically predict the accuracy of a particular brain's behaviour with 100% accuracy is not a trojan horse for free will, any more than the same indeterminacy applied to weather systems is. Since we cannot predict the even more complex behaviour of weather systems with 100% accuracy, should we ascribe free will to them also?
They're being polite.