If I remember correctly Graham Preston is a Christian nutter. As such he hasnt even begun to understand the paradoxical nature of the quantum universe in which we are all essentially unconsciously entangled. Or the nature of the pattern patterning that patterns everything that happens at both the individual and collective level.

We are essentially sleep-walkers completely oblivious to almost everything.

Put in another way, our normal "waking" state is akin to that of a tiny stick figure running around on the tip of a gigantic iceberg pretending that the tiny fragment that he/she can see is the totality of existence. Whereas there is an enormous immensity below the surface. THAT immensity is what "controls" or patterns everything.

Again, our normal "waking" state is like that of Humpty Dumpty's broken shell. We "view" the immensity of existence from the point-of-view of a tiny fragment of Humpty's broken shell, and thus pretend that we have accounted for everything. But of course all the king's horses and all the king's men can never ever put Humpty back together again (or even begin to account for the totality of the quantum universe)

Cobber the Hound - just because we may not have complete control of our minds does not mean that we have no control. The very fact that we can carry on a reasonably intelligent discussion should be very good evidence that we are actually controlling our thoughts.

If however as Harris says, “unconscious neural events determine our thoughts and actions and are themselves determined by prior causes of which we are subjectively unaware,” (p. 16), then we cannot possibly have any control over our minds.

It is an incredible claim to make that we have no control over our minds and has massive implications. For a start, should it be true then all such discussions as this are completely pointless, as would be everything else.

JP, you haven't thought this through, but I'll agree that your repetition of the same thing is pointless UNLESS the universe is entirely deterministic. Now, it's up to you whether you want to have a think about that...

You still haven't had a go at my question. Was it a bit tough for your free will to get itself around? Here it is again: what is meaning?

Rhrosty, I wasn't aware of the Aboriginal belief in consensus reality that you describe, do you have any references where I might find out more?

Craig – “meaning” in the context of this discussion is something that is transmitted that contains comprehensible information. An avalanche transmits something by sound but the sound is just noise and has no meaning. Even if the noise sounds like, Kill Jack, we know the sound is meaningless because there is nothing controlling the sound. (I presume you would not think the mountain/avalanche was talking to you if you heard a noise that sounded just like, Kill Jack?)

The SETI researchers hear plenty of noise coming from space but they recognise that everything they have heard so far is uncontrolled noise and so they believe that it does not contain information – it is meaningless. Thus they do not believe they have found any evidence yet of intelligent life beyond earth.

In contrast, our communication with each other is not just noise or just marks on the screen. The marks we read on the screen do contain information and thus have meaning for the reader. The difference to the noise of volcanoes or letters formed in the clouds is that we are largely in control of our minds and can deliberately choose what marks appear on the screen. We are transmitting meaningful information

Nice work, JP, but it doesn't really go far enough, which is not surprising, it's a far from intuitive idea. Your own intuitive response is what most people would give as their reasoned opinion.

You claimed that determinism means that there can be no "meaning", but that is not at all true.

"Meaning" is a property of organised information. It defines whether or not the information encodes data which can interact with the system or other information to create some new form of information that did not exist before the interaction took place.

Therefore, an entirely deterministic model may still have "meaning" encoded within some forms of organised information. What we refer to as the world of things is self-organised information systems, in which simple particles have interacted to form more complex forms, from quarks all the way up to planets and biological systems. Including us.

The concept of self-organisation is critical to understanding how every aspect of the physical world operates and it is becoming increasingly obvious that the same is true for consciousness.

In your definition of meaning, you are assigning to consciousness a role in organising information. Have a think about the implications of that, especially in the context of Rhrosty's comment about the Aboriginal view of consensual reality (or Hameroff's and Penrose's view of quantum consciousness).

Where it gets really, really freaky is when you start to try to think about the nature of time.

Since when has the Universe been deterministic, between cusps, quantum and that damned butterfly I would suggest exactly the opposite.