But this is an assertion only. You've just said this would be so, you haven't shown it to be so.
If you're saying you can't comprehend how physical processes could produce thoughts and judgments, that's entirely reasonable; even many naturalistic philosophers say they have no answer to the "how." (If you're claiming it's impossible in principle, that's a stronger claim, which you would have to justify. If that claim is based on the principle that "no effect can possess any properties not possessed by its cause," then I think that's a false principle, for reasons I've already given.)
You say that naturalism fails here, because it posits a cause for mental activity which is different from "the non-physical laws of logic"; but you're not proposing any alternative cause which would be similar enough to those laws in order to make things work. "It's not physical!" is not an alternative cause. Unless you're suggesting a kind of "spirit of logic" as an active cause of our thinking, I don't know what kind of cause would "operate according to non-physical laws of logic."
Calculators and computers are programmed and designed to convert questions to on/off switches which are physical entities. Brains are not.
Hot and cold and solid and liquid are still PHYSICAL states, true and false are not physical states.
Through the non-physical mind operating according to the non-physical laws of logic.
Why does the origin matter for whether a purely physical entity can do calculations? You said,
That statement has nothing to do with the origin of the physical state. You are saying that, no matter how it comes about, a physical state does not logically imply another, and yet computers have no minds, and are purely physical, but can do mathematical operations.
You're apparently agreeing that there is such a thing as an emergent property which possesses properties which are absent from its ultimate cause, but that there's a limit to how far emergence can go: it can't cross the line from physical to non-physical. I'd say the existence of this line isn't obvious or self-evident.
I was asking what was the cause of the mind's logical operations. "Something not physical" is not an account of the cause. Are you saying the mind's logical operations are not caused?
Because He is the creator of the physical realm, while we are inhabitants of it and part of it.
Doesn't answer the question.
How can an arrangement of physical items produce logical conclusions? Analysis of premises is what produces logical conclusions. I dont deny that emergence of some properties can occur, but heat is still a physical property, logic is not.
I meant that they dont have any physical causal powers and cause and effect relations are predetermined, logical inference is not.
So why do you waste your time debating with people when you know that everything is predetermined no matter what you say? Also, if we have no free will then why do you think it is ok to punish people for crimes when they are not responsible? Without free will there is no such thing as morality, crimes, or science. So why keep talking about such things?
We feel like we have free will. While that feeling doesnt prove we have free will it is evidence for free will.
Because then our thoughts and conclusions are not predetermined by chemical reactions in our brains.
They may very well be. But at least they are not predetermined by fixed physical laws. Because we know that at least 99.9% of the time physical entities operate according to the laws of physics. There may be supernatural laws but they may not be as limiting.
Because I have no choice?.
See above.
I agree.
Nope; it is not evidence either way because "only people with free will would think they have free will" is not demonstrably true.
What if they are predetermined by something non-physical?
Lots of "may"s in here...
Then you believe that logical laws do have causal powers, just not physical causal powers? If so, what kinds of events or entities can logical laws cause? Physical force can cause massive bodies to accelerate in a particular direction; valid syllogisms can cause _____ to _____?
What you are essentially asking is, how do we reason to produce logical conclusions. What we know is that it looks very much like our brains give rise to our ability to reason, because we know what areas of the brain are responsible for particular tasks. In part we know this because if part of the brain is damaged, the corresponding part of the mind is damaged too. We don't understand how the brain produces consciousness and the ability to reason, but because of what I've already said, we know that it does.
Only if naturalism is true.
Because you would be wasting your time debating with people when you know that everything is predetermined no matter what you say. Also, if we have no free will then why do you think it is ok to punish people for crimes when they are not responsible? Without free will there is no such thing as morality, crimes, or science. So why keep talking about such things?
Yes, that's the point. You can never know it isn't according to you.
There's a difference between determinism and fatalism. Fatalism says that no matter what we do, it won't affect the future, which is predetermined; determinism says that what we do causes things to happen in the future, which wouldn't have happened otherwise, though what we do happens because of a chain of causes which too place before we acted. Fatalism says that Oedipus was going to kill his father, no matter what he tried to do to avoid it; determinism says that Oedipus's meeting with his father was caused by previous events (including those in his mind), but that if he had traveled elsewhere, he never would have met his father.
The claim of naturalism/materialism/physicalism is that thoughts are a very particular kind of result of a very particular set of non-rational causes, namely those that take place in brains; that those causes have combined to generate (in ways we do not understand) the capacity for thought. And with the capacity for thought -- at least, with the capacity present in us humans -- the capacity for rational thought inevitably follows. If I'm capable of thinking about numbers, I'm capable of knowing what the right answers are to arithmetic questions. If I'm capable of thinking about what walls are, then I'm capable of knowing that I can't pass through them.