Why does anyone pay attention to P.Z. Myers?

P.Z. Myers has a characteristically incoherent post on free will. I've included my comments:

I was compelled to post this

December 6, 2011 at 2:04 pm PZ Myers

I said I didn’t want to say anything about free will, and I still don’t, but Massimo Pigliucci weighed in, and Jerry Coyne responded, and so did Sean Carroll, and of course I created a free will thread for everyone else to talk about it, so I guess there’s a fair bit of momentum behind it all.

I don’t understand why free will was getting all tangled up in indeterminacy vs. determinism, since that seems to be a completely independent issue.

There are philosophers who believe that free will and determinism are not incompatible. I think they're wrong.

Free will and determinism are linked. If all human acts are determined-- i.e. completely in accordance with past events and the laws of physics-- then there is no room for libertarian free will. Human will can change neither the past nor physical laws.

Myers:

I’ll sum up my opinion by agreeing with Jerry Coyne:

[Coyne] Of course, whether the laws of physics are deterministic or probabilistic is, to me, irrelevant to whether there’s free will, which in my take means that we can override the laws of physics with some intangible “will” that allows us to make different decisions given identical configurations of the molecules of the universe. That kind of dualism is palpable nonsense, of course, which is why I think the commonsense notion of free will is wrong.

Absolute gibberish. Coyne's idiotic view that we have no genuine libertarian free will entails three consequences:

 1) Our acts are determined by agency (history and physics) over which we have no control. We bear no responsibility for our acts.

2) Our acts are determined by agency (history and physics) which have no reference to truth. A neurochemical reaction isn't "true" or "false". It just is. If our acts and thoughts are neurochemical, and we have no genuine choice in our opinions, then our opinions can be neither true nor false, anymore than  mixing chemicals in a beaker can be true or false.

If determinism and lack of libertarian free will are true, we can't meaningfully argue that they are true.

3) If the past and physical law fully determine our future, then what happens to us has nothing to do with our "choices". Just history and physics. What happens, happens. The future is set- only one outcome is possible, and we can't choose it.

So why bother to do anything? Why does Myers bother to post on his blog? What shows up on his blog is determined by the history of the universe and the laws of physics. He can change neither. Why do anything?

Myers:

My mind is a product of the physical properties of my brain; it is not above them or beyond them or somehow independent of them.

If Myers' mind is a product of his brain, it is by definition something other than his brain. What is it?

... birds chirping...

And how is it that a physical object (Myers' brain) has reference to something external to itself? This is the classical problem of intentionality. Myers brain doesn't mean anything. It's just a few pounds of meat. But Myers means things. He writes about them daily.

Where does the meaning come from?

Myers:

It doesn’t even make sense to talk about “me”, which is ultimately simply yet another emergent property of the substrate of the brain, modifying the how the brain acts. It is how the brain acts.

Perhaps Myers can inform the payroll department at the university that his "me" doesn't really exist. They can stop cutting paychecks to emergent properties of brain substrates.

I think consciousness is a product of self-referential modeling of how decisions are made in the brain in the absence of any specific information about the mechanisms of decision-making — it’s an illusion generated by a high-level ‘theory of mind’ module that generates highly simplified, highly derived models of how brains work that also happens to be applied to our own brain.

Let's take it one bit of gibberish at a time:

I think consciousness is a product of self-referential modeling of how decisions are made in the brain...

A self-referential model presupposes a self. Decisions presuppose a decider. Myers' explanation for self presupposes self. Back to the drawing board.

...in the absence of any specific information about the mechanisms of decision-making —...

Myers has no clue about how any of this works. None. Zippo. But he's sure it's materialistic, and people who disagree with him are fools who believe things on faith.

...it’s an illusion generated by a high-level ‘theory of mind’ module...

A delusion presupposes a self which is deluded. Thus the delusion cannot create the self.

[... it’s an illusion generated by a high-level ‘theory of mind’ module] that generates highly simplified, highly derived models of how brains work that also happens to be applied to our own brain. 

Myers is saying that consciousness doesn't exist in the absence of a 'high-level theory of mind module'. So module-less people who don't contemplate theories of the mind-- children, disinterested or uneducated adults-- aren't, by Myers theory, conscious.

Myers is a fool. Why anyone-- me included-- pays any attention to this idiot is a mystery. One of the unresolved questions of science...