People have common misunderstandings about mind/matter duality. Mind is different than lifeless matter, unless one was to stipulate with Leibnitz that 1-dimensional monads form the core of subatomic material existence and they are made of spirit.
I wonder if people would argue against the ability of A.I. to generate questions or sub-routines for-itself and to make 'free-will' choices with its new constructs? Free will might be modeled within an initially deterministic A.I. paradigm. To controvert Prof Bloom's defense of reason and free will in his article, one might also want to controvert the capacity for A.I. to write its own code and act on its self-written new code. The biomechanics of the A.I. programming might be said to be in the initial program written by a human programmer.
Spirit as the foundation of matter-as if zero-dimensional points and one-dimensional strings of M-Theory, embedded in a meta-field phenomenal existence like decohered virtual particles were criterion problems, is challenging to appreciate. Humans regard mass and energy from the inside as it were; like fish made of water swimming in an ocean of water wondering reflectively if their thoughts are made of something besides water or if thought is a different substance than water. So one might arrive at the questions; can water think for itself without sentient being as fish-for-themselves? Can a knower know without existing (perhaps relying on the sentient ocean to think-for-others and for-oneself?
I believe one might distill the question of how and where sentience exists within or without the water-column and find the answer to be within structure. Structure gives rise to sentience. Form of mass and energy is qualitatively different that the components of elements. That is easy to see at the molecular level in relation to atoms and in the assembly of complex machines from kits with and without instruction pamphlets.
A Nobel prize winner; Robert Laughlin, wrote a good book on materials physics titled Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down https://www.amazon.com/Different-Universe-Reinventing-Physics-Bottom/dp/0465038298 the book relates some of the ideas about qualitative states of matter and form comprising significant differences.
I should point out here to the fallacy regarding God that His existence is contingent being, contingent upon severability of mind from matter. There are numerous problems with that idea not the least of which is ideas about what matter or energy is or are. Besides, a soul in my opinion is the information God has about what a human is; a record of his life, and address of each particle comprising the form of beings etc. God can recreate that soul from dust if He prefers to. The soul might be said to be information. God hasn't data-loss issues.
In my opinion God would have a far more subtle math (actually foreknowing all answers to any equation making calculations superfluous) regarding data mapping a soul than phase space maps of Hilbert Space information. Wiki has an article on phase space- "Expectation values in phase-space quantization are obtained isomorphically to tracing operator observables with the density matrix in Hilbert space: they are obtained by phase-space integrals of observables, with the Wigner quasi-probability distribution effectively serving as a measure."
Matter is a condition of flux from a primordial field. There is information available about photons as carriers of electro-magnetic field, and how there actually are two kinds of photons; those that do not interact and those that do at short range breaking into virtual particles, electrons etc. Photons are emergent characteristics of a form of energy and the entire field behavior of photons is a metaphor for gravity and gravitons perhaps including dark energy.
Max Tegmark of M.I.T. has described a Universe or Multiverse with a foundation of pure mathematics; literally. The quanta or point has form that becomes the Universe as a context of relations. Yet the entire Multiverse complexity from the shape or form of Multi-dimensional matrices is itself a field perhaps in spirit. Sprit (of God) generating a Universe in some mysterious way was described by a neo-Platonist philosopher named Plotinus in 54 little tractates known as The Enneads.
I wanted to note that healthy minds have free will. Use reductio ad absurdam and contemplate that no one has free will to make choices and getting to work, stopping at Starbucks or not, making decisions concerning work etc and are all done automatically without free will. It gets rather silly to consider. Not all humans are healthy of course; all prisoners or people being put on felony trial should have free Magnetic Resonance brains cans and blood tests (if they aren't harmful) to inform courts of the health of the accused. Impaired free will may allow elements of determinism to enter. It is not an either/or.
Determinism would occur where a finite, Newtonian mechanical system could account for all of the behavioral conditions of matter within a given environment. Experimentalists as is well known are a meta-factor corrupting the finite experimental condition, yet one may use thought experiments such as with mathematics and do so without corruption; maybe. There are always the problems of uncertainty and experimentalist bias existing even within thought experiments regarding math that influence results. That is easily demonstrated on math exams.
With Bishop Berkeley one might develop a bias toward the opinion that everything is idea and that mind determines matter; even if it is the mind of God, and that mass and energy are made at the smallest level of spirit; a field spirit, that allows relationships and differentiated forms to arise that have the quality of solid being in a steady state field decohered from the realm of quantum uncertainty whereat all possible positions of particles exist simultaneously as if they were in a great spiritual field calculating engine that a spirit-actuator set to utility.
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