As to free will, the first paper that comes to mind is David Hodgson's A Plain Person's Free Will.

I have not researched the issue in any great depth, but I'm sure there's plenty out there worth reading--and a true libertarian account of free will hardly seems impossible, though it may be implausible.

Here's a list from David Chalmers's online collection of mind papers.

Silas,

Thank you. That's a weak argument though. Eliezer could assert that the technology to beat the CAPTCHAs exists and is understood--it's just too expensive for spammers to afford.

Silas,

You reveal your agreement when you use CAPTCHAs to keep out spammers and those CAPTCHAs work.

I'd appreciate if you explained what you mean here (starting with defining CAPTCHAs, a term I don't know).

Eliezer,

I agree that what you attack is a common anti-reductionist argument, but--as you admit--not a particularly mysterian one (except so far as the part of belief being addressed is the conscious aspect of belief). So changing your terms in the original post fixes the problem.

My complaint about you being off-topic was premature, and I apologize for it.

In my experience, mysterians merely object to reductionism applied to consciousness. Characterizing them as being opposed to reductive explanation of rainbows seems to misrepresent them. Of course, I may not know the contours of the group as well as Eliezer does.

Nowadays, this blog seems less a forum for discussing bias than an arena for Eliezer to propound his materialist take on the world and criticize its naysayers. Nothing wrong with that, but posts are touching less and less on the blog title.

Apparently I left a tag open. The first paragraph is yours, whereas the second is my question.

Sam Harris came closer when he put the accusing finger on faith. If you don't place an appropriate burden of proof on each and every additional nice claim, the affective resonance gets started very easily.

How does one determine the appropriate burden of proof?

And "Thou art God" comes from Stranger in a Strange Land.

I normally only read Robin's posts, but if watching Eliezer get so thoroughly told (Go Barkley!) can be assured to happen again with some frequency, I may have to change my policy.