Earlier quoted context omitted.
A good argument is enough. I'm a mathematician and I have not read any of the original papers of Euler, Gauss, etc. but understand and accept their results fully. To me, philosophical and theological reasoning are not fundamental as they may be to you, because I have accepted they are an outcome of a particular brain architecture with its own tendencies and biases, itself an outcome of a more general process. This ar…
"Understanding our reasoning capacities as the outcome of a natural physical process leads to my agreement with Dawkins's claim that any philosophical result prior to 1859 can be disregarded." I'm sorry my friend, but... no . I'm open to a lot of ideas and directions that a discussion may take but this is just a non-starter, a laughable example of exactly the sort of benighted, willful ignorance that dooms fruitful d…
As an addendum, the reason why philosophy has been unsuccessful at producing answers is because it assumes human thought or language or existence as something fundamental. As Eliezer points out, rather than ask "do we have free will?", the productive perspective is to ask "what sort of algorithm does our brain run which makes it believe such a question is meaningful or answerable?" Have you read the Less Wrong series on rationality? It's a good exposition of the thinking process of someone like me.
Certainly the attempts prior to 1859 were brave, but it was quackery. Much like Erdos's comments on the collatz conjecture, we are not yet ready for such questions (although neuroscience will get us close in the next century).