Do humans have free will?

Great Debates
161

That’s not really the usual account of determinism. Take the definition of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

[QUOTE=SEP]
Determinism: The world is governed by (or is under the sway of) determinism if and only if, given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law.
[/QUOTE]

One might quibble about what, exactly, ‘fixed’ is supposed to mean here. That’s clarified by the introductory sentence:


[QUOTE=SEP]
Causal determinism is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature.
[/QUOTE]

This suggests that for ‘fixed’, we should read ‘necessitated’. This states a logical implication from the state of the universe at a given time to whatever happens ‘thereafter’, if combined with the laws of nature. If there is such an implication, then ‘the distance in between’ is irrelevant: it does not add anything. Such and implication, however, is false on my view: for at least some alternatives, whether A or B occurs is not fixed by the state of the universe at time t and the laws of physics.

In any case, it’s clear that the universe could have been such that one need not consider all the stuff ‘in between’: if it’s simple enough (and doesn’t allow for universal computation), then one indeed would have needed only the initial conditions & laws to infer every outcome (just as with my example of the stone thrown in a gravitational field). If most determinists are savvy enough to know that this isn’t the case for our universe (which would be miraculous, since most determinists lived before the required concepts even existed, and most determinists today are hardly aware of them), then they’re awfully cagey about pointing this out, and indeed, apparently will oppose those who do. So I think one could be forgiven about thinking otherwise.

That strikes me as a bit odd, since you have just claimed that compatibilists have held to the notion that one has to “carry out all that “irreducible*” stuff that [noparse]*[/noparse] consider an integral part of free will” all along…

Well, if he really abhors them to the degree that in every situation, it’s completely certain that he won’t eat them, then he’s not really free to eat them—after all, such a desire is, if naturalism is true, just some particular patterns of neurons firing, and if that firing reliably prohibits him from eating cherries, then it’s as much a (physical) constraint on him as a pair of shackles would be.

But in reality, that’s rarely the case—I don’t like tomatoes, but if I get served a burger with some on it, I might, or might not, pick them off, or send the burger back.

162

However that “most significant” concept is not denied by anyone, even us determinists, so I don’t see why you need to continue to use the Free Will label.

And I think you are redefining it. I acknowledge that “free will” has two definitions. One is the libertarian concept of free will, where our actions are not just the result of the laws of physics but involve some other spooky realm. The other definition is what people are referring to when they say “no, he didn’t force me to walk into that door, I did it of my own free will.”

The problem is that you’re having a conversation about the former, and say you believe we have free will, but you’re talking about in the sense of the latter definition. Maybe you’re not redefining it - what you’re doing is equivocating.

I don’t have a problem if you want to refer to it like that, as long as you clearly acknowledge that you’re using the other definition of free will and are up front that you’re still rejecting the spooky definition.

163

It’s denied by all incompatibilists, whether they believe in free will or not, which, while not a majority, is I think at least a sizable minority. And indeed, it’s really only since Frankfurt’s famous counterexamples some time in the 60s that the idea that moral responsibility doesn’t require genuine options has gained much traction in philosophy.

Well, there’s really quite a few more notions of free will—enough that the Stanford Encyclopedia article on compatibilism features a caveat stating that “it would be misleading to specify a strict definition of free will since in the philosophical work devoted to this notion there is probably no single concept of it”.

On the other hand, however, in the article on free will, the SEP states that “most philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very closely connected to the concept of moral responsibility”, and furthermore, that “acting with free will, on such views, is just to satisfy the metaphysical requirement on being responsible for one’s action”.

So, this is my starting point, and it is indeed this notion that is central to my concept. There’s no equivocation; I simply deny that, on traditional determinist/compatibilist views, there is any real responsibility in this sense, as the question of why a given event occurred can always be answered via referring to the universal boundary conditions and the laws of the universe—hence, one need not refer to the agent at all in answering it. On my view, however, the agent, and their choice, are a necessary element of this answer—without that, the question simply cannot be answered.

Thus, there is a clear and unambiguous sense in which the agent’s choice is responsible for a given outcome; a sense which does not exist on ordinary determinism. Consequently, there is a freedom here that directly corresponds to the notion of freedom as stated above.

164

How? How is the universe managing to fail to be a series of physical reactions that have predictable results? What is the mechanism for this?

As I understand it, events in this universe are triggered in one of two ways: They’re either A) the deterministic result of the circumstances immediately prior, or B) they’re not. And if they’re not, then they must be B1) random events with no prior determinant cause, or B2) non-random events deliberately caused (deterministically) by some agent outside of the universe.

I’m not interested in case B2 - it can easily be rebutted by expanding the set of events under discussion to include the external agent and its realm. Which leaves us with A and B1 as possible triggers for events. All events are caused by some combination of deterministic causes (which I’ll call ‘physics’), and random variation.

We’ve already agreed that random events are not a meaningful source of free will. But as far as I can tell they’re quite literally the only possible method by which you can make your view work. This seems to be a problem for your view of reality, as best I can tell. If it’s not, can you explain what I’m missing?

165

Here’s the thing, though - even under the fully deterministic view of the world, people still exist. They’re still physical meat-sacks that strut around based on the instructions ordered by the physical matter resting between their ears. And it’s pretty easy, and quite natural, to draw a distinction between the portion of the physical universe that is the person, and the remainder of the universe that isn’t the person.

This is why I was focusing on the identification of the agent earlier; every reasonable definition of free will I’ve seen is predicated upon the idea that there is an agent whose thoughts and actions are under discussion. And even if it was inevitable based on prior events that the current agent come about, the agent still exists, has thoughts, and does actions. It’s possible to draw a distinction between the inevitable thoughts in their head, and inevitable forces outside the agent’s mind. To draw a distinction between preferences and shackles.

The definition of choice is super-okay with the thoughts in a person’s head being inevitable based on their current knowledge and preferences; in fact it’s basically required by the definition. Choice, by definition, is fully compatible with a deterministic human. And what is free will but the ability to choose autonomously - based only on whatever is inside the brain at the time? Regardless of how that brain got there.

166

I’m not saying that what occurs is not the result of prior causes; I’m merely saying that the set of prior causes necessarily includes an agent’s choice, such that without that choice, which out of two options A and B occurs is not determined, in the sense that it does not logically follow.

The mechanism for this is logical independence: unlike on the traditional view of determinism, where there is a theoretical possibility of a Laplacian demon taking the state of the universe at a given time and inferring from it every thing that’s ever going to happen, once one takes into account the phenomena of logical independence, it becomes clear that such a thing isn’t possible—the state of the universe at that time (plus the laws of physics) don’t suffice to deduce which out of A and B occurs. Given only those data, whether A or B happens is undecidable.

Consequently, under determinism of the usual kind, a complete and exhaustive answer to ‘why A?’ is ‘the state of the universe at time t (say, the big bang), plus the laws of physics’. But, taking into account the lessons of logical independence, this is no longer a complete answer to the question of why A occurred. In other words, on Laplacian determinism, given the state of the universe and the laws of physics, there is no question regarding the proposition ‘A occurs’: it is necessarily true (or necessarily false, as the case may be). But actually, that’s not how things are: given those same pieces of data, the proposition ‘A occurs’ may either be true or false—it cannot be decided. It’s only the addition of further data—the choice of an agent, say—that allows to decide its truth value, that allows to answer the question of why A occurred.

So I am not arguing for another way that things may happen; I am, rather, arguing that the usual deterministic way of accounting for an event’s causes is in general incomplete, and needs to be amended.

To be sure, there are also cases where the ‘usual’ way is perfectly satisfactory and complete: see my example of the ball being thrown, or pretty much anything that has a mathematical closed-form solution. But in general, such a solution does not exist, and thus, additional information is needed, and supplied by taking into account an agent’s actions.

You might object that, once the universe is set up a certain way, it can’t help but evolve, step by step, in a single way (barring random events), and that thus, the agent’s actions don’t really add new information. The first part of this is true, but the second part, while intuitive, is not: even though the agent’s actions were, in a certain sense, unavoidable, they still add something in precisely the sense above—namely, that only with them the outcome becomes definite.

Compare this to Gödelian incompleteness. A (sufficiently strong) formal system F contains a statement G, such that G cannot be derived from the axioms of F. The truth value of G is thus, given the axioms (which one could view as analogous to the universe’s state at some point in time), not decidable, as is the choice between A and B.

Yet, given that F is consistent, we can readily see that G must be true, because G can be interpreted to claim ‘G is not derivable within F’. Thus, the consistency of F is additional information that allows us to decide the truth value of G. However, this information is not available within F—by Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, F cannot prove its own consistency. Yet, given the axioms of F, they either are consistent, or fail to be—one might say that the information is ‘implicit’ within the axioms of F, but not manifest.

In the same sense, the information about whether A or B occurs is made manifest by the actions of the agent. And without this ‘manifestation’, whether A or B occurs would be as undetermined as whether G is true (within F), or not. Hence, there is a responsibility for A’s occurrence that lies within the actions of the agent that is absent on a more narrowly determinist view.

167

One can spin the analogy somewhat further (though I should stress that an analogy is all that it is, Gödel’s theorems applying to formal systems and not universes): given such an undecidable sentence G, there will be models of F—concrete mathematical structures obeying all its axioms, like the natural numbers are a model of the Peano axioms—in which G is true, and models in which it is false.

These are then analogous to possible futures of the universe, or more accurately possible histories of the universe, in which either A or B occurs; with only the agent’s choice deciding which history becomes actual. But still, you might say, the agent’s choice is ‘fixed’ in the same sense that F’s axioms either are consistent, or fail to be. But that actually assumes that, in a way, the universe itself is ‘consistent’: if, for instance, the laws of physics suddenly changed, the agent might make a different choice; and as per Hume, we can never rationally claim that they will not. Thus, we can’t, in fact, rationally claim that the agent’s choice was fixed.

168

As I’ve previously pointed out, Logical Independence is logically incompatible with choice by definition. You have not yet explained how this is incorrect.

And I’ve read enough about Gödelian incompleteness to know that it doesn’t apply here. Gödel constructed his argument specifically to blow away the idea that you can make a mathematical system that can solve every lexicographically correct equation, and he did this by basically pointing at the statement “This statement is not true” and grinning. He translated the problematic statement into mathematical symbology and thereby made his contemporaries go bananas, which was awesome. But that’s all his incompleteness theorem did.

He certainly didn’t prove that deterministic events must someday produce an aberrant result. And he certainly didn’t do anything that makes “possible histories” in any way relevant to anything, assuming it’s even a coherent concept. Also, did you just imply that your view on free will/reality assumes that the laws of physics are randomly changing on a regular basis? I think this attempt at analogy is doing you more harm than good.

169

But one need not consider them: one need only consider the state of the universe just after the big bang in order to fix the outcome of any choice. They don’t enter into the equation, so to speak.

Mereologists will certainly be delighted to hear this. After all, they’ve been quibbling for centuries about what makes an object (much less an agent), what makes its parts its parts, and what even constitutes the identity of an object with itself. But it turns out to be easy and natural!

Under this conception, there is then no free will in determinism—since the agent simply need not enter at all.

As elaborated above in my reply to CurtC, I think it’s better to clarify free will using the notion of responsibility for one’s actions; but on your brand of determinism, responsibility always lies beyond the agent—in the photons that strike their retinas, the surfaces that reflected them, and so on, up right to the beginning of it all.

I presume you mean this part:

[QUOTE=begbert2]
Logical Independence: As described, I believe you’re saying that you require the universe including the inside of the head of the agent to be super cool with all outcomes. This of course flies in the face of the term “choice” - the definition requires the choice to be made based on preferences. Preferences are part of the agent themselves and by definition determine the outcome. Thus, Logical Independence is logically incompatible with choice by definition.
[/QUOTE]

First of all, you appear to contradict yourself here—earlier in that post, you claim that “the mere presence of multiple options being selected from is sufficient for a choice to occur”—this is what logical independence yields (as opposed to your brand of determinism, where we never have multiple options). Second, there is nothing at all about preferences that even implies determinism—I might prefer option A 60% of the time, and option B 40%, or what have you (i.e. draw my choice from a probability distribution). Such a preference does not determine the outcome. Third, even if preferences were to completely determine the outcome, that wouldn’t be in conflict with logical independence—compare again the many-body system with the undecidable spectral gap: that gap, whether it is present or not, uniquely determines the outcome of the appropriate measurement; yet the question of whether there is such a gap (and thus, what the measurement outcome will be) is logically independent. Fourth, clinging to definitions slavishly is to commit the Socratic fallacy—dictionary definitions are made for quick reference in everyday life, not to settle philosophical debates. So there is no reason to accept such a definition as the end-all and be-all.

In the end, logical independence makes choice possible, by introducing alternatives to choose between; and if it were actually the case that there would be no choice if the outcome of a choice were logically independent, then on your kind of determinism, in general, nobody would make a choice, since virtually all such ‘choices’ contain logically undecidable alternatives.

Yes, that’s why I explicitly stated that. However, undecidability and logical independence do have very important consequences in the real world, and are phenomena that fall at least within the same family as Gödel’s result.

While you can indeed phrase Gödel’s proof in terms of solutions of (Diophantine) equations, it’s not their solubility that is in question, but rather, whether they have finitely or infinitely many solutions. The more usual formulation is in terms of the derivation of theorems (or formulas) from a set of axioms.

That’s a common misconception, but Gödel’s results aren’t about truth, but rather, about provability (in fact, a closely related result due to Alfred Tarski implies that they couldn’t have been about truth, because truth cannot be defined within the formal theory it applies to). However, the predicate ‘is provable’ can be defined in this way (which was just one of the great insights Gödel needed for his proof); thus, the Gödel sentence doesn’t make an assertion about its own truth, but about its own provability.

No. (I would make an effort to make more of an argument to disabuse you of this notion, but honestly, I don’t even know where you got it from.)

170

Whoa whoa whoa, stop right there. You can’t do this, because we’re talking about free will - which is defined based on the idea that people exist and are thinking agents that may or may not have it. You can’t say “people don’t have free will because of this argument I’m making which utterly and completely and totally relies on pretending people don’t exist at all.”

Okay, yes, you can say it, but it’s fallacious rhetorical argument. It’s moving the goalposts so hard you’re ripping them right out of the field and pretending they never existed.

If you want to make any kind of argument about people having free will, you have to concede that people exist. And if your position is that my position is that people don’t exist, then I guess it’s up to me to correct you - ALL conceptions of the idea that our universe is deterministic universe explicitly allow and include the idea that people exist.

All that determinism adds to the table is that determinists think that causality is a real thing and that random events don’t happen.
(For the record, I personally don’t care whether random events happen, so I’m not technically a determinist. I am however a compatiblist, because I’m certain that even if the universe is deterministic, it won’t effect whether people have free will, because I believe that randomity isn’t a significant factor in human cognition and decision making.)

171

Well yes, exactly, that’s my point: there’s no free will—not even a question of free will—on your determinism, where you can forget about the people and agents and whatnot, and the reasons for anything that happens can be stated without ever referring to agents and so on, while there is free will on my proposal, where agents and people and whatnot are an integral part of why things happen.

This is simply wrong. ‘Unicorns have a single horn’ is a true proposition, even though no unicorns exist.

And anyway, I’m not saying that people don’t exist—I’m saying they’re not relevant. And even that’s just on your view, not on mine.

172

So what you’re saying is, you’re telling me that I don’t believe people exist, and that when I talk about free will I’m not talking about people. That or you’re telling me that if I believed in determinism, I wouldn’t be able to believe people exist that when I talked about free will I wouldn’t be talking about people.

NO.

This argument is transparently bad. It’s like arguing that republicans are evil because they murder and eat everyone they meet. Despite the fact that, you know, they don’t. Even if republicans are bad, it’s not because of that, and the argument is garbage.

You either have a fundamental incomprehension of how determinists understand reality to work, or are feigning such an incomprehension in order to create a strawman that you can topple to make room for your still-not-clear replacement view. I have no reason to think you’re arguing disingenously, so I will take it as given that you really are just grossly confused about the deterministic view of the world, and will try to simply and clearly explain it here.

  1. The universe came up with some sort of starting state from somewhere.
  2. With each successive instant, the state of the universe naturally and inexorably led to a successive, slightly different state. This new state was an inevitable outcome of the prior state.
  3. Millenia passed.
  4. Humans evolved.
  5. With the introduction of humans and other thinking creatures, areas of the universe have developed (naturally and inexorably) into self-contained calculation machines with the ability to observe and react to the world around them.
  6. These thinking machines have preferences, desires, and motivations, as part of their physical and mental makeup, which they are capable of acting on. These preferences, desires, and motivations are a characteristic and defining quality of “will”.
  7. Being self contained, these calculation machines are “free” from outside interference into their calculations/cognition. This outside interference is defined as the rest of the universe outside of the thinking entity’s cognition. It’s not necessary for the entities to be free from their own past or their own preferences to count as them being ‘free’; the term refers to outside interference only.
  8. As these people have “wills” that are “free”, they have “free will”.

Note that the discussion about free will only starts when thinking entities show up. They are integral to the discussion.

173

It is. It also bears no relation to anything I’ve written above. If that is honestly what you understood from what I wrote, then I’m afraid I don’t possess the necessary skills or patience to make myself any more clear to you. And I’m certainly not going to defend myself against silly strawmen.

Whether you like it or not, the fact is as follows: on your view, the data given by the state of the universe at some point in time, plus the laws of the universe, suffices to logically derive the outcome of every ‘choice’ ever made. That’s all I’ve ever said, and all my argument needs.

174

It’s all your argument needs to accomplish what?

I mean, it’s nowhere near sufficient to demonstrate that under the deterministic model the eventually-made choices you refer to aren’t made by agents with self-contained minds that have inbuilt preferences that are used by the calculations within the self-contained minds to make choices and decisions without interference from forces outside the self-contained minds in question.

Also it’s perhaps worth noting that the method you’d have to implement to “logically derive” these outcomes would be to set the universe running and watch it happen. You could do it in simulation, true, or in two adjacent universes simultaneously, but it would remain the case that in each instance of the universe the agents within would come into being and make the choices based on their own preferences. They would just do it in synch, making similar choices because they like the same things and have the same knowledge and opinions.

But lets put all that aside for the moment - how does ‘disproving’ compatiblistic free will help you, assuming you were to successfully do so? It being false doesn’t make your still-not-clear alternate view any less self-contradictory. And it’s not like compatiblists know that the universe is deterministic; even if compatiblism is possible it doesn’t mean that your view isn’t the true one. (The unclarity and self-contradiction, on the other hand…)

175

To highlight that, in order to determine what you’ll have for breakfast, the data from the universe a couple of billions of years ago is sufficient, and hence, your choice not necessary (as that choice itself is logically necessitated by the data).

That is true if there is computational irreducibility. If not, then all you need is the data at one point in time, and you can immediately spit out the state of the universe at some other point in time—as with the ball thrown in a gravitational field. I don’t just include these examples for fun, you know.

It doesn’t, and it’s not what I’m trying to do; all I’m doing at the moment is to try and explain to you the difference between my view and standard compatibilism. Not terribly successfully, it appears.

So my view isn’t clear to you, but still, you know it’s self-contradictory. Fancy that!

176

All choices are logically necessitated by data - the data about what your preferences are. This is by definition. If choices exist in your model, then they are similarly logically necessitated and your model is no better. By definition.

I do not believe it’s even remotely possible that the ‘computations’ to emulate the entire universe from big bang to my dad disliking cherries could be simplified to such a degree that my dad (or cherries, for that matter) would disappear from the equation. I’m not saying some simplification couldn’t be done, but seriously.

The universe is big, history is long, molecules are small, and the degree of precision your model would have to have to predict the ‘landing’ of the ‘ball’ here is staggering. So much so that your thrown ball model wouldn’t be accurate enough; it fails to account for air resistance, at the bouncing-off-individual-air-molecules level.

You’re right! So far you have not made any headway whatsoever in showing that your model differs from one of the following two:

  1. The universe is deterministic.
  2. The universe is deterministic except for random events and perturbations.

It’s not helping you that as best I can tell, these two models are the only possible two models, logically speaking.

Logical Independence is incompatible with human cognition - particularly if you exclude random events. Preferences are not weighted coin flips; humans do not draw their choices from a probability distribution, choosing one thing 60% of the time and the other 40% of the time based on sheer random chance. They choose the thing 60% of the time for reasons, weighing factors based on knowledge and preference and circumstance and mood. And based on these factors you make your decisions, determining them completely. The fast shifting of circumstance and the slow shifting of personal state explain the variants in outcomes, not some magical ‘logical independence’ mechanism.

That’s the self-contradiction; you are leaning on this logical independence thing when it’s inherently antithetical to the idea of reasoned human choice.

The unclarity bit is the parts where you try to explain how your model is neither of the two above models for how the mechanics of the universe can possibly run. Making poor and factually dubious analogies to Gödel doesn’t help.

177

Half Man Half Wit I applaud your efforts. I am inclined to regard the question itself as us simple Humans trying to comprehend stuff way above our pay grade, with no practical conclusions to draw.

I started this thread about it a bit ago: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=813828

Bottom line: Humans engage the world around them from a place that feels like free will. Now what?

Arguing for Determinism is a fun parlor game that does nothing to help you figure out how to live your life. Acknowledging that Free Will is an evolutionary artifact that we feel because our brains evolved to generate that sensation doesn’t change the fact that we feel that sense of free will.

I’d rather deal with what I am feeling that argue that it isn’t real and end up with nothing I can use to help me live a better life on my terms.

178

I really don’t know what to say anymore. I mean, is this some kind of post-Trumpian debate you’re attempting here? Just keep on repeating stuff as facts, without any regard as to whether it’s, you know, true? Ignore all points made by others in the hopes that they’ll just go away through exhaustion?

Because I’ve several times now given you a simple, physical model of how exactly what you deem is impossible actually happens. I’ll do it one final time, and if it doesn’t stick now, I’ll be off to greener pastures.

So here it is. It’s known that for certain many-body systems, whether there is a finite energy gap between their ground state and the first excited state is an undecidable question. However, it’s possible to measure this quantity, and thus, find out whether there is, in fact, such a gap. The existence of the gap determines the outcome of the measurement.

Now, undecidability here means that there is no way to use data prior to the measurement to derive what the outcome of the measurement will be. You can’t do it; a supercomputer can’t do it; a Laplacian demon can’t do it; god can’t do it (if he’s limited to finitary operations). There is no logical implication from that data to the measurement outcome, no (finite) sequence of steps to derive it from the data, just as there is none in the case of deriving the Gödel sentence from the axioms of a formal system. Logically, the data simply does not suffice to fix the measurement outcome.

Yet, what we can do is make a measurement, and read off the outcome: now, we trivially have data that suffices to fix the outcome, but it’s only due to additionally taking the measurement into consideration. Only then do we get a set of data such that it is sufficient to derive the outcome.

Now, we can think of the spectral gap as a preference, and the measurement outcome as a decision made due to that preference. Then, it is true that the decision was completely determined by this preference, and that the decision was not logically fixed in advance, i.e. for instance at the big bang; despite your claiming that this is a ‘contradiction’.

I’m just going to concentrate on this bit for the time being, because we won’t be able to move on to anything of substance before this isn’t clear.

Thank you, much appreciated.

Yes, that’s pretty much my jumping-off point, because ultimately, if the usual kind of determinism is true, then it would be vanishingly unlikely that we should have any such belief—since for one, beliefs are not the causes of our actions, and two, evolution can only act on the causes of our actions.

Natural selection cannot differentiate between the pre-hominid running away from a tiger while believing, ‘aah! A Tiger! Run!’, or while believing ‘look! A Tiger! I’d better go and hug it!’, so if it is true that the content of our beliefs is causally inert, we should not expect that this content in any way matches up, or correlates, with the world outside. I.e. everybody thinking that is in fact committed to the position that with overwhelming likelihood, nothing that they do think bears at all a relation to reality, if they’re unwilling to give up on naturalism (of course, you can always argue that ‘god did it’).

179

I would say the most sensible approach to this is to conclude the concept of ‘free will’ is relative in that there will always be some causal link to the way people behave and think and it is often very complex and convoluted to work out why a person did this or that.

At least if we* think* we have free will and are able to act in a manner that allows us to* feel* free then I would say that is good enough. :slight_smile:

180

Great discussion by all !
I think that these topics are always fo such interest to people because we all have various forms of the “chooser module” to deal with, on a daily basis.

Sometimes tho, after watching people wade in the weeds for awhile, it seems that the discussion of what is the self, or the agent as you folks have labeled it, should come first. I know thats kinda obvious…and at this point seemingly unsolvable.

The questions of personal responsibility, diminished capacity, and just what is “being aware” or “making a decision” I think are very important questions that have some real world consequences.

Thanks again for everyones hard thinking.