What is this free will I keep hearing about?

[AHunter3]

A reasonable question to ask; and one that should more often be asked before debating whether or not “it” exists.

I know what I mean when I use the term; I consider it interchangeable with “volition”. Ultimately I mean that my consciousness is non-illusory; that (self-referentially) what appears to my consciousness to be my consciousness is indeed actively choosing what mental paths to pursue. What that “ME” actually is may be another question entirely, but leaving that aside for the moment, “free will” means that the sensation and experience of making choices, being actively engaged in deciding (whether for a clear reason, a murky reason, or just arbitrarily) various things is a valid, as opposed to an illusory sense.

To say that “free will” exists is to say that choices are made by an active and conscious agency. To say that “free will” does not exist is to say that no conscious agency exists, anywhere, period, end of story. In my opinion if no conscious agency exists, no consciousness exists, although if someone wishes to explain what it would mean to be conscious without agency, and to try to differentiate that state of hypothetical affairs from the complete absence of consciousness, by all means have at it.
Free will is perhaps best defined inversely as what it is not; and what it is not is radical determinism, whereby radical determinism is a belief or philosophical position that denies that anything occurs for a reason except in the sense that “reason” refers to the inertia of prior matter and energy playing itself out, sort of like a giant windup clockwork. (That had no means of “getting here” except as the outcome of some prior windup clockwork that mechanically and mindlessly produced it, so there’s a bit of a “first cause” problem with the model).

Determinism of the radical variety has arisen as a perspective in several disciplines and each has given it a slightly different emphasis —

• Sociology in its mainstream incarnation is at least semi-radical in its determinism, treating the entirety of “what makes a person” as the outcome of “enculturation”; the logical location of culture, including its values and even the terms and concepts embedded in its language, prior to the conscious individual, makes each person a blank slate (“tabula rasa”) onto which the surrounding culture writes; nothing is considered to be innately “of the person” in an individual or biological or psychological sense, but rather the entirety of who the person is is socially determined by the person’s location in time and social strata and etc.

• Biology in its essentialist incarnation is also at least semi-radical, asserting that either at the individual level (a person’s specific biology) or at the species level (the biology that we all share) every single aspect of human behavior is entirely explained including the possible library of every possible concept in every possible language, every bit of it hardwired along with all of our behaviors.

• Poststructuralist / semiotics theories of the Lacanian/Derridean/Foucauldian type are thoroughly radical determinisms, asserting even more strongly than sociology that every sliver of a conscious thought is created in a discourse of power struggle and is “always already overdetermined” by social context; that not only do individuals lack any means of transcending any of that to get at objective meanings, no objective meanings exist and there is no subject or consciousness in any real sense anyhow; only the discursive process exists, conscousness does not.

• Physical science reductionism arrives as determinism by way of seeing all of reality as physics (human thought and behavior reduced to neurochemistry which in turn reduces to atoms and molecules and charges behaving according to rules that govern them), and physics and the physical world it describes as a massive mechanically interactive process of particles in motion, with no volition anywhere, just inertia, a clockwork of some 15 billion years in age and unknown but ultimately finite size with an unknown but ultimately finite amount of energy all running down until everything disperses into a grey effuse null-state, the heat death of the universe.

[begbert2]

@Mangetout

Points all taken - all I was trying to do was describe what it would have to be - even if that creates new logical problems. In order to be free, it would pretty much have to be supernatural, and not accessible or pertaining to inquiry or examination, except by its large scale effects.

Another way to look at it is as a challenge to your definition of “free”, which was “making its own decisions independently or in spite of any variables trying to influence it”. Some people allow for a definition of “free will” that does not require your decisions to be made independently of your own knowledge, preferences, moods, and memories. We draw a little line around all that stuff, label it “Me”, and then say that the stuff outside of that line is what we’re free of.

Which is to say, an autonomous robot would have “free will” (if extremely little cognition or liberty), but a marionette would not, unless it cut its strings like Pinocchio. Obviously, from the robot example, this doesn’t require any kind of ineffable spirituality.

@Mangetout

Not sure. I’m talking about emergent properties - maybe our thoughts can be explained by all the little mechanical things that comprise them, but we can also think about ourselves, think about our thoughts, etc - the meta-stuff influencing the detail.

I guess… but I’m not sure - maybe there is some way for the emergent property to become the driving phenomenon. I’m not going to try to assert anything like that thought, because I have no particular dog in this fight - I’m just an interested observer.

Well, I’m a computer programmer, who has programmed in both low and high-level languages, so my perspective on this is from that basis. To me, every high-level object simply is low-level objects - the distinction is one of organization and convenience, not of a fundamental difference in what it is. So, everything a high-level object does influences the detail, because when it changes its own state, when it thinks something different, when it remembers or learns somehing or becomes happier or angrier, it is doing this by changing and rearranging the low-level objects that make it up.

Given that, it’s hard for me to see anything relevetory about the high-level feeding back to and changing the low level, because that happens literally all the time. It’s like, you’re made of atoms, right? Lots of atoms. If you found a way to shoot a single atom at your foot, that would be spiffy if you did it in some novel way, but not merely because you made an atom move. It’s not like that’s the only time you move atoms around, after all - every move you make is moving atoms. So, what’s the big deal, right?

[Carmady]

Some people seem to want free will to even be free of their own will. That is what doesn’t make sense.

First you define “yourself”. Now, are your actions determined by “yourself” or something outside “yourself”?

If the former, free will. If the latter, not free will.

In particular, if you include your own brain as part of “yourself” then you probably have free will. If you define “yourself” to be an abstract entity that doesn’t include your physical brain, you don’t have free will.

This might seem too simple, but the trick is in defining “yourself”.

[yelimS]

@Mosier

What better definition of free will do you have? I think the problem is nobody here can agree on what free will even means. I think I provided an acceptable definition, which is “not deterministic,” so at this point all we’re doing is arguing semantics.

It’s largely been tackled, but I’ll provide an answer, just to be clear (I’ll also venture off into a bit of a rant, I’m afraid, but I’m a bit tipsy and this is a favourite subject of mine, so bear with me). The answer is this - I refuse to define free will, understood as a “free” in the way that you’d be truly personally responsible for your actions, because to me, the notion is as patently absurd as it could be. It ranks up there with denial of evolution, in my view. (Disclaimer: I still hold people responsible for their actions, but not because they’re freely willed, but either because a) it’s an automated psychological response on my part, or 2) because I take it to be the best utilitarian approach to act as though people are responsible, ie. I don’t really blame a killer for what he did, but it probably serves society best to lock him up anyhow)
Anyhow, even though I believe a true definition would be an absurd endeavour, you can say that “free will” is what is required for some solutions to the problem of evil, ie. God wouldn’t have just cause to judge you, unless your actions were profoundly “your own”, and not caused by anything external to you. If your actions were random, as perhaps your reference to quantom physics was meant to imply, then this randomness should be considered still as something external to you, as the essence of “you” certainly is something different from said randomness (I invite you to demonstrate otherwise, however).

I think Hobbes states the necessity of determinism most eloquently:

@Thomas Hobbes

" I hold that to be a sufficient cause, to which
nothing is wanting that is needful to the producing of
the effect. The same is also a necessary cause : for, if
it be possible that a sufficient cause shall not bring forth
the effect, then there wanteth somewhat, which was
needful to the producing of it ; and so the cause was not
sufficient. But if it be impossible that a sufficient cause
should not produce the effect ; then is a sufficient cause a
necessary cause. Hence it is manifest, that whatever is
produced, is produced necessarily. For whatsoever is
produced has had a sufficient cause to produce it, or else
it had not been : and therefore also voluntary actions are
necessitated."

Incidentally, a point that has been mentioned several times already, but without being attributed, is Spinoza’s definition of freedom. Now, Spinoza was as rigid a determinist as anyone, but he simply chose to use the phrase in his own way: to him, that action was free that was caused not by forces external to the agent, but internal. This, I think, is a very good definition, although it is very much at odds, at least in a determinist view, with the classical notion of free will. Someone acting determinately might still be “free” on this view, as long as they acted on “their own” impulses (which of course can be traced at some point to an externality), rather than being coerced, tempted, &c. Nevertheless, a righteous God shouldn’t judge such a person: all his actions would ultimately have been caused.

Now. I’ve briefly mentioned utilitarianism before, and I think it is relevant to this debate. Not being concerned with blame, utilitarianism is very much compatible with determinism - to the point where, even if the world weren’t, in fact, deterministic, and people did actually have some sort of magic “free will”, as long as you agreed with the tenets of utilitarianism (everything for the greater good), it would make perfect sense to treat everything as if it was deterministic. Furthermore, Einstein, I think, made a very good point on determinism:

@Albert Einstein

In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying, that “a man can do as he will, but not will as he will,” has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others’. This feeling mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralyzing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humor, above all, has its due place.

As you will find, this view has it’s use whether or not determinism is really real.
My conclusion, finally, will thus be that determinism is very probable fact of life that, even if it should be false, is very advantageous to believe in.
(I hope I’ve been reasonably coherent!)

[Mangetout]

@begbert2

Given that, it’s hard for me to see anything relevetory about the high-level feeding back to and changing the low level, because that happens literally all the time. It’s like, you’re made of atoms, right? Lots of atoms. If you found a way to shoot a single atom at your foot, that would be spiffy if you did it in some novel way, but not merely because you made an atom move. It’s not like that’s the only time you move atoms around, after all - every move you make is moving atoms. So, what’s the big deal, right?

I get what you’re saying - in fact we should probably just stop now because we’ll just end up saying the same things over and over, past each other. I don’t know if there could concievably be some kind of bulk emergent effect that is able to become more than the product of its components - but that’s the concept I’m referring to - I expect you to say there couldn’t be such a thing, and I will not attempt to argue that there could.

[begbert2]

@Mangetout

I get what you’re saying - in fact we should probably just stop now because we’ll just end up saying the same things over and over, past each other. I don’t know if there could concievably be some kind of bulk emergent effect that is able to become more than the product of its components - but that’s the concept I’m referring to - I expect you to say there couldn’t be such a thing, and I will not attempt to argue that there could.

I will meet your expectations - emergent means “the product of its components”, for all intents and purposes. It would be fairly difficult for something to have emergent behaviors in excess of its emergent behaviors.

It’s fairly simple and easily demonstrable that little bitty things can have emergent properties when properly arranged and interacting - a mechanical clock is ‘more’ than a pile of disassembled gears and parts. And I don’t see any reason to assume that the complexity of the human brain state is insufficient to explain the behavior we see from it, so I see no reason to invent and invoke some other source to supply “additional” emergent behavior. (Though I can’t really fault ancienct civilizations for looking at the wrinkly gey lump and for looking for the mind elsewhere. The time for that has passed, though.)

[Mangetout]

OK, for ‘emergent’, read ‘gestalt’

(You can’t just pick out one word and run with it - the context was “bulk emergent effect that is able to become more than the product of its components” - which is pretty much the definition of ‘gestalt’ - the whole is greater than the sum of the parts)

[Mojo_Pin]

Sorry to be late back into the thread. I know long posts tend to just be ignored, but I had a lot of catching up to do.

@Mangetout

In naturalistic terms, I think it’s possibly important to wonder if there can be top-down operation of the human mind, as well as bottom-up - that is, our thoughts and actions being the result of a huge superposition of elecrochemical operations, but also that our thoughts and actions, as composite objects, exerting influence upon their underlying low-level operations - not just as a big complex feedback system, but also as communication between distinctly different layers or levels of operation.

I think our ‘top’ process, thoughts and actions, are just a different kind of ‘bottom’ process. Say a complex chain of neurons activate in a certain order in Half Man Half Wit’s brain, beginning with photons reflected off a beer bottle that hit his retina. Now this chain of synaptic connections has a determined end, and after running a few loops in HMHW’s head it results in synapses in HMHW’s various muscles, salivatory glands activated, whatever else. I could call this the actual “calculation” process, even though it really isn’t a calculation with a goal or any entity performing it, it’s what does the actual deliberating and decision making. What I think the ‘top’ processes are, is a different kind of neural circuit that is fed by the ‘calculation’ circuit at certain points, and it runs its course, which results in our conscious experience of thinking a thought. So in my theory the mind works not in a bottom-up way, but in a bottom-bottom way with some of those bottoms being circuits that result in a conscious experience. This brings up the question of why consciousness is necessary when the ‘calculation’ circuits can do the job by themselves, and I think this is where your question comes in. Those consciousness circuits must have some kind of effect on other circuits, and serve some kind of purpose. I don’t know what, though.

@ITR Champion

You answer your own question. Let’s look at the white vs. rye decision. According to you, the decision that you make is determined by “likes and dislikes, mood, subliminal thought processes, et cetera”. But what is et cetera? And what are these subliminal thought processes are influencing your decision? And aren’t “mood” and “likes and dislikes” merely broad descriptors of your mind? So aren’t you really saying that your mind determines what decision you make, or in other words that you have free will?

I agree with begbert2 and others, it’s like you (also Blut Aus Nord) are thinking on an entirely more simple and ignorant level.

@Mosier

Even the science types have mostly abandoned the idea of determinism in the face of the randomness of quantum mechanics. I’d be surprised if anyone actually believes human behavior is deterministic in reality. It’s fun to consider, like when SentientMeat graces us with his presence, but at the end of the day, nobody can even begin to develop a vague, basic philosophy of how to understand and study behavioral determinism.

Neuroscience is far from vague or philosophic. Perhaps this sentiment of yours stems from ignorance, but I don’t feel up to the task of fighting it in its entirety right now. I’ll just say you might want to look at some of the amazing achievements and discoveries of neuroscientists in recent years.

@begbert2

Myself, I think it’s a certainty that if randomity is introduced into the system it is corrected for by the cognition process, the same way that computer circutry largely ignores tiny fluctuations in voltage. If this was not happening, we’d be twitching randomly all over the place, as the randomity expressed itself in our motor functions, and we’d all be prone to cognitive (and verbal) tourettes’s syndrome. No, all human unpredictably aside, our behavior is largely devoid of cognitive white noise. Our ‘unpredictability’ is focused and directed.

You are correct. Joseph LeDoux describes in a book I am reading now a very basic type of neural circuit called Elicited (feed forward) Inhibitory circuits. Put simply, neuron A activates neuron B and neuron C at the same time, and while neuron B passes the activity on normally, neuron C sends an inhibitory chemical like GABA into neuron B, acting as a gate. I quote: “Inhibition is a very useful device in neural circuits. It adds tremendously to the specificity of information processing, filtering out random excitatory inputs, preventing them from triggering activity.” These kinds of circuits are all over the place in our brains, and it takes a concerted effort from different neurons simultaneously to activate another neuron. There is also a whole group of chemicals called modulators that modulate our neurons’ sensitivity to activation. These include everything from opiates to serotonin to epinephrine. Certainly none of the quantum randomness Mosier touts as having trumped determinism is to be found in the brain.

@AHunter3

I know what I mean when I use the term; I consider it interchangeable with “volition”. Ultimately I mean that my consciousness is non-illusory; that (self-referentially) what appears to my consciousness to be my consciousness is indeed actively choosing what mental paths to pursue. What that “ME” actually is may be another question entirely, but leaving that aside for the moment, “free will” means that the sensation and experience of making choices, being actively engaged in deciding (whether for a clear reason, a murky reason, or just arbitrarily) various things is a valid, as opposed to an illusory sense.

Good definition. Makes more sense than Mosier’s I think. But is your consciousness really “choosing what mental paths to pursue”? Others have already posted on the impossibility of willing one’s will (HMHW put it well I think). How do you reconcile that with your belief that your consciousness can choose what to think? In other words, is you definition of free will really as incompatible with determinism as you thought.

@AHunter3

To say that “free will” exists is to say that choices are made by an active and conscious agency. To say that “free will” does not exist is to say that no conscious agency exists, anywhere, period, end of story. In my opinion if no conscious agency exists, no consciousness exists, although if someone wishes to explain what it would mean to be conscious without agency, and to try to differentiate that state of hypothetical affairs from the complete absence of consciousness, by all means have at it.

I did write up a somewhat fitting hypothesis as a response to Mangetout. To reiterate, I think that consciousness is a sensory experience, like sight and smell, but it is a sensory experience of our complex neural “calculations” which are actually deterministic. Our thoughts are a window into the neural domino show in our brains, but really we have no agency, only observation privileges. I’d put money on this hypothesis being “proven” right within my lifetime, if only I had any way of collecting my winnings :p.

@AHunter3

Free will is perhaps best defined inversely as what it is not; and what it is not is radical determinism, whereby radical determinism is a belief or philosophical position that denies that anything occurs for a reason except in the sense that “reason” refers to the inertia of prior matter and energy playing itself out, sort of like a giant windup clockwork. (That had no means of “getting here” except as the outcome of some prior windup clockwork that mechanically and mindlessly produced it, so there’s a bit of a “first cause” problem with the model).

Forget the first cause problem, as it isn’t unique to determinism. What you say here isn’t exactly with what you say in the beginning of your post. There you define free will as meaning that your conscious agency is non-illusory. I have advanced a model of consciousness that separates it from agency and still makes sense, but I accept that your first definition may be true. However, there is nothing to indicate that conscious, active decision making presupposes determinism. Consciousness can be totally separated from physical processes, it will still be constrained by logical determinism. Well there’s randomness, but that’s no “reason” either.

[AHunter3]

Good definition. Makes more sense than Mosier’s I think. But is your consciousness really “choosing what mental paths to pursue”? Others have already posted on the impossibility of willing one’s will (HMHW put it well I think). How do you reconcile that with your belief that your consciousness can choose what to think? In other words, is you definition of free will really as incompatible with determinism as you thought

The reason “I” cannot “will my will” is because I am my will. The “I” that I am is, specifically, my volition. No volition, no experience, period. While it is possible to be conscious of fretting in frustration at being unable to make certain choices or being unable to move one’s body the slightest inch except through some external control or even being unable to focus one’s mind on what one would like to focus on instead of what some magical hypnotist is forcing one’s mind to, one must at least have something —the experience of making the attempt to resist, however unsuccessful —in order to be conscious. If I have no will, I am not conscious. If I have a will but you (or someone) wishes to argue that the will I have “is not mine but is determined by something else”, then it is still free will and what I am calling “ME” is the locus OF IT and we are no longer arguing whether there is free will but rather where or who is this “ME” who is the locus of the free will.

[Mojo_Pin]

First of all, this: “my consciousness is indeed actively choosing what mental paths to pursue” is quite different from this: “The reason “I” cannot “will my will” is because I am my will.”. The first statement is logically impossible, the second seems to be your correction. you can’t hold both views simultaneously, so which is it?

The “I” that I am is, specifically, my volition. No volition, no experience, period. While it is possible to be conscious of fretting in frustration at being unable to make certain choices or being unable to move one’s body the slightest inch except through some external control or even being unable to focus one’s mind on what one would like to focus on instead of what some magical hypnotist is forcing one’s mind to, one must at least have something —the experience of making the attempt to resist, however unsuccessful —in order to be conscious. If I have no will, I am not conscious. If I have a will but you (or someone) wishes to argue that the will I have “is not mine but is determined by something else”, then it is still free will and what I am calling “ME” is the locus OF IT and we are no longer arguing whether there is free will but rather where or who is this “ME” who is the locus of the free will.

Hm, here you went from arguing for the existence of a will, to free will. Your contention that consciousness=will is certainly worth a ponder, but still I say that it isn’t incompatible with determinism. How you go from that to “free” will is beyond me. What in the world makes it free?

[AHunter3]

If will is not free, it isn’t will.

There’s no such thing as “unfree will”.

I see your point on the first item though. The second edition is a more accurate reflection of what I’m trying to say: it is not so much that my consciousness is actively choosing what mental paths to pursue, but more that my consciousness resides in the choice itself; that my consciiousness is my will.

Consciousness is intentionality. Volition. Will. Different words, same underlying meaning.

[DSeid]

@AHunter3

Consciousness is intentionality. Volition. Will. Different words, same underlying meaning.

Exactly right.

Free will is exactly as illusory and as real as are our conscious selves; they exist in concert.

[AHunter3]

YOUR consciousness may be an illusion (to me), but mine is most definitely not an illusion to me. That would be an irreconcilable paradox. In order for anything to be an illusion to me there has to be a conscious “me” for it to be an illusion to.

[DSeid]

Our selves are irreconcilable paradoxes, as articulated so well by Hofstadter, we are like the Escher drawing of the hand that draws itself. I for one accept that paradox as critical for the miracle that is selfness.

But in any case, if you are, because you think, and by thinking you experience intention and free will, then both you and your free will are equally real.

[AHunter3]

Over here on the left, a hypothetically real individual thinks it has free will. Over here on the right, a hypothetically nonexistent individual does not think it has free will, nor does it think that it does NOT have free will; it thinks not, nor does it exist. (Even within the terms of the hypothetical).

[kanicbird]

@Mojo_Pin

So I repeat myself: WTF is free will?

[IMHO] Free will is very limited. It may be so limited that when we get our very first decision to follow God’s way or another path and we chose that other path free will ends and since we are no longer following God, we are ‘sinning’ and we are a slave to that sin. As such free will no longer exists but we follow our master ‘Sin’.[/IMHO]

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@AHunter3

To say that “free will” exists is to say that choices are made by an active and conscious agency. To say that “free will” does not exist is to say that no conscious agency exists, anywhere, period, end of story.

That seems rather bizarre to me; conscious agency could easily exist in an illusory fashion only. And there’s some good neurological evidence in favour of this view – it could easily be the case that a decision is made subconsciously (by a die-roll or the execution of some form of decision algorithm), which is then upon being perceived by the conscious mind imbued with the gloss of volition.

More generally, a self is just a pattern perceived by a self, to paraphrase Hofstadter. In order to have a consciousness, one needs only be able to represent things, including oneself, to oneself. Conscious experience is then the representation of these representations, possibly separated by stunningly many recursive levels of representation. I can’t see volition playing any necessary role at all, and, in the face of what I see as compelling arguments against the freedom of the will (particularly the aforementioned impossibility of willing one’s will), I must question its existence.

While it’s true that all mental processes have about them an intentionality of a sort, to equate this intentionality with will, and especially with free will, constitutes a rather large, and in my opinion unjustified, leap of logic. The motion of ants, for example, certainly shows intentionality; does that mean the ant has will, or conscious experience?

The intentionality of the processes within the mind is merely directed towards that which is represented, and that purely by virtue of them being representations.

The problem with the freedom of the will is one of sufficient cause: if sufficient cause for an action exists, then the will is not free; if sufficient cause for an action does not exist, then how could it conceivably occur? Exercising one’s ‘volition’ is no answer; it is at best question-begging: does sufficient cause for your volition exist? Then, sufficient cause for the action exists (some of it is just lumped in under the term ‘volition’), and the will is not free. Does no sufficient cause for your volition exist? Then, how could it…?

It’s also possible to ponder this issue from a physical perspective – the question of the freedom of the will seems to be tied to whether or not the future is ‘set in stone’. Surely, if we merely followed a set path, ‘free will’ would lack any meaning. But then, consider the Rietdijk-Putnam argument: since each frame of reference has its own present (its own hyperplane of simultaneity), what lies in the future of one observer may well lie in the past of another; in the example, to one observer, the Andromedans deliberate whether or not to invade Earth, and to the other, they’re already well on their way. How can the Andromedans then be free in their decision?

[Der_Trihs]

@AHunter3

To say that “free will” exists is to say that choices are made by an active and conscious agency. To say that “free will” does not exist is to say that no conscious agency exists, anywhere, period, end of story.

I don’t buy it. Consciousness doesn’t imply free will, or even more plausible versions of choice; people suffering from compulsions are conscious and have no “free will” in what they do. I see no reason to assume that a “conscious agency” couldn’t be a total automaton, with no choice or even the illusion of choice. Consciousness is just a type of awareness.

Consciousness as I see it just isn’t as functionally important as most people are making it out to be. It is not the center of what we are or the source of our decisions; it is simply part of a much larger system. There IS no center; we are a system, not some little homunculus. That’s why experiments that examine consciousness show it to be so much less than we think it is; we mistake our consciousness, the part of what we are that we can perceive as the whole, so we attribute much more to it than it is. It’s as if we were invisible save for our hands, and when we realized how simple they are we decide that WE are simple; because never having seen the rest of our bodies we attributed all the capacity of a body to a pair of hands. Just as when we look at consciousness and discover that it isn’t really the source of our decisions or the majority of our mind, we tend to find that a blow to our self image since we tend to think of our consciousness as being “us”, and not as the tip of an iceberg.

The more we look closely at ourselves, the more we will see simple processes that don’t look like a mind, because that’s what the components of a mind are going to be. Something less than a mind. And that includes consciousness; consciousness isn’t mind, it’s just a piece of one.

[begbert2]

@Mangetout

OK, for ‘emergent’, read ‘gestalt’

(You can’t just pick out one word and run with it - the context was “bulk emergent effect that is able to become more than the product of its components” - which is pretty much the definition of ‘gestalt’ - the whole is greater than the sum of the parts)

Emergent, gestalt, whichever functional synonyms you wish to use I don’t care. I’m thinking of this in terms of concepts, not word games. And unless I’m completely misunderstanding you, which I can never rule out, the concepts we are talking about the difference between a pile of gears, and a clock. I am saying that clock - pile of gears = nothing; I am also saying that if there is a “separate” set of little gears in the clock that is triggered only on leap days that changes the functionality of the clock for a little while to gain/lose the hour*, then those extra gears are not something magic or special; they’re really just part of the clock, and in fact they’re not really even separate; they’re just some more of the regular pile of gears that happen to encode a lesser-used functionality.

You may, or may not, disagree with any of this. Heck if I know.

• I have some clocks like this, though they may or may not be purely mechanical. Either way, they are wild to watch at the appointed times - they spin forward 11 hours to go back 1, and for the duration of that time (easily 20 minutes), they’re useless as clocks!

[ITR_champion]

@SentientMeat

To misquote a great mind: Do, or do not. There is no choose.

There is choice, regardless of what any vomit-colored muppet says about it. I know this because I make choices every day. Any six-year-old child knows that he or she makes choices every day. The existence of choices is bountifully obvious to almost everyone. Generally those who deny it are those who have chosen to bury themselves in piles of philosophical mumbo-jumbo while carefully steering around good common sense.