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There’s nothing American about free will. And most people find it a wonderful topic when they are in grade school, about the time they go around saying “It’s hard to imagine the infinite but it’s harder to imagine the universe is not infinite.” As the older kids nod their heads and think “Been there, done that.”
OK, I can bite into this. When someone says my consciousness itself may be an illusion, all I can do is stare at them and say “How odd that the language you speak and the language I speak share so many phonemes”. THAT one does not seem arguable to me, but so self-evident that I claim it as a reasonable postulate, in no need of any type of defense. But I did say folks were welcome to argue that consciousness could exist without free will and you took a poke at it…
If they are conscious, they either ARE or they ARE NOT conscious of being compelled, of wishing to do otherwise but being thwarted in those wishes by the compulsion. If they are not conscious of that, such that their wishes as well as their behavior is subject to the compulsion, then (taking it one more level) they either DO or they DO NOT feel some type of emotional distress or disconcertion due to the discontinuity between what they unconsciously want and their conscious (yet compelled) wishes and associated (compelled) behavior, then AT LEAST WITH REGARDS TO SELECTING THIS PARTICULAR BEHAVIOR they are not conscious. They are not steering, they are not feeling, they are not having any experience of it. Obviously they could experience the occurrence of the actual behavior (the sensations of it, the observable moment-to-moment chronology of the behavior’s taking place) IF the compulsion is limited to being forced TO BEHAVE in that fashion. And bouncing back a half-paragraph, if they are compelled to engage in the behavior but not compelled to wish to do so, they can experience being compelled, of trying to behave in one fashion but being forced to behave in another. All of those experienced are the experiences of a mind that is free to feel (at a minimum) and to interpret those feelings and render them as conscious thoughts, and thus while compulsion exists, free will coexists along with it, and consciousness depends on the latter.
If we posit someone whose entire lifetime of behavior including the “mental behavior” of what they feel and wha they think is fully compelled, there is no consciousness, unless the consciousness resides in the compelling party (compelling force, compelling agency, whatever). In which case free will still exists, albeit it is not resident in the person doing the behaving, or not as we would normally define that “person”. (My legs may walk me to the coffee machine. I could consider myself to be an integrated whole who HAS legs and say that “I” walked to the coffee machine, or I could say that my mind, which is the seat of consciousness, compelled my unconscious legs to take me over there. I have no reason to think my legs are conscious but powerlessly in thrall to my controlling mind, resenting me the entire way over and back from the coffee corner, but if they are, silly as it sounds, then yes they are conscious and have free will as well — it’s just a thwarted free will. But as long as they don’t have any opinions or emotions pertaining to such matters they have neither).
I do not locate my free will in a specific spot. I point to neither my legs, my mind, my brain, or my “soul” and say “Aha, right there, THERE is the ‘me’ that is conscious and free”. Who “I” am may not be who I tend to think I am. (And, in honest truth, I really do think of my Self as existing on multiple planes including individual self AHunter3, collective plural self “We who communicate and share thought”, i.e., my species my community my culture etc, and beyond that as the entirety of “that which is”, the mono-happening that was and still is the Big Bang, of which absolutely everything is a subset. And this is NOT a digression, really). For the argument immediately at hand, that’s somewhat peripheral; WHEREVER it is located, I’m experiencing it. There is perpetual tension — zillions of little ways in which it is “thwarted” or blocked from instantaneous expression of desire or intent to totally satisfied conclusion — and the ongoing experience is the experience of that dynamic interaction, some of it ultimately generating considerably more satisfaction and sense of successful expression than other portions thereof.
You’re still talking about function as the sum of parts, and no more.
Nor do I, but the point is that ‘more than the sum of its parts’ exists as a concept (i.e. I didn’t make it up just now), even if nowhere in reality - and that’s the concept I was trying to talk about, not the one about something being exactly the sum of its parts.
I’m not saying that the existence of this concept means there must be a matching reality (after all, we have concepts such as ‘elf’ and ‘gryphon’ too) - but try to imagine a system where the top level function could bud away from its underlying processes and function and develop independently of them. These are just words, of course - and I’m pretty sure the idea can’t be entertained without including metaphysical entities.
Suppose that every day I make myself a sandwich with either rye bread or white bread. Every day I am confronted with the same choice. On some days I choose white bread, while on other days I choose rye bread. Why? Obviously not because of changes in their taste, since they taste the same every day. Obviously not because their health value changes, because that also stays the same. In fact, nothing relating to the two breads or my attitude towards them changes from day to day. The only thing that changes is that on some days I choose white and on some days I choose rye.
Put simply, free will can override any such concern. It is entirely possible to make a food choice and choose the option that I believe tastes worse and is less healthy at the same time. It is possible to make a choice that I believe is worse for myself in every possible way. To say, as Mojo Pin does, “I am only able to do what I like” is flatly false, and any human being can experiment with his or her own will in order to prove it false.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but this seems to me an obvious contradiction in terms. Making a decision and being conscious of making the decision are one and the same. I cannot make make a decision without being consciously aware of making a decision. Or let’s go back to the bread decision. I approach a table on which one slice of each is available. I think about my choice. At this point in time, both the white possibility and the rye possibility are open; either of them may happen in the future. Then, at some point, I make the choice. That is to say, my mind determines which slice of bread I will eat. That is the moment of decision. By definition, there could not be any decision before that moment.
Yes. In The Spiritual Brain there’s a discussion of a doctor who successfully treated obsessive-compulsive disorder with free will. The regimen was quite simple. The patient who had an obsessive-compulsive behavior was simply told to will themselves to think differently about it. They would spend fifteen minutes a day powerfully and directly telling themselves over and over that they should want their behavior to stop. It worked. It worked in clinical trials and the process is now becoming more widespread.
So if people with OCD can will their will, surely the rest of us can do so as well. I’ve done it. My family and friends and most people I know have done it at various times. To cite just one easy example, most people I know went through a phase of eating mainly junk food while young. In adulthood, however, they consciously chose to develop more sophisticated culinary tastes. In short, they decided to stop liking certain things and start liking other things. Similarly, people can choose to change their tastes in music or books or anything else. Of course, this is no guarantee that every person does so. Some people may simply decide to accept whatever tastes, preferences, habits, and belief come easily to them, in which case they may have some reason for arguing against free will in their particular case. But if you ask around, you’ll surely find that most people do choose to control their mind rather than let it be controlled.
I don’t see how that follows at all – you will something, you act accordingly; you can be conscious of that regardless of whether your will is causally determined or in some weird way indetermined, yet determinate (which I don’t believe is logically possible). To follow your argumentation: I am not conscious of being compelled, because that would require a ‘true will’ to act in cross purpose with whatever compels me; I therefore feel no emotional distress, because there is no discord between what I ‘truly want’ and what I end up doing; I am conscious of my will, because it is something I can represent to myself; I am conscious of my actions, because they are something I can represent to myself. Whether or not my will is free or externally determined does not enter into the question. If your arguments bore out, then you wouldn’t be conscious if your will were free, either, since consciousness then arises only out of discord – of experiencing a divergence between expectations (or intentions) and occurrences, as in wishing to do something and ending up doing something else. However, this presupposes that the mind has expectations and intentions to start with, which is circular (since it needs an act of the mind to determine those expectations and intentions).
With this argumentation, somebody who was entirely free would not be conscious, either – but then, how could they have volition and will at all? This doesn’t seem consistent. Besides, I contest the notion that somebody who is fully compelled necessarily isn’t conscious – even if it is the case that consciousness only arises out of discord, for such a discord to exist it wouldn’t be relevant whether the content of the will is externally determined or ‘free’. You could easily have the will to hover, without being able to, whether or not the will somehow willed itself.
Well, that zipped right past the point I was trying to make. If you decide whether or not to think A or B, you first have to know – have to think – A or B, else, there would be no way for you to decide (since you wouldn’t have options between which to decide). Now, do you decide whether or not to think A or B beforehand? There’s that infinite regress that makes the self-willing will impossible again. The OCD person willing their will presupposes that their decision to fight against their disease was free, and concludes from there that decisions are free; I’m sure I won’t have to point out the fallacious nature of that. The same goes for deciding to eat more veggies or whatever: this paints the previous habit as being unfree, and the decision against it as free, and claims that this is then evidence of freedom.
But, to somewhat immodestly quote myself and again point out my so-far uncontested main argument:
In order to distinguish “will” from such chimera as “invisible pink unicorns” and “auras” and whatnot, can you expound a bit on how “will” (absent the formulation “FREE will”) adds anything whatsoever to our understanding of what is happening here?
a) you “will something”, you act “accordingly”…whether your will is causally determined [or otherwise]
b) you act; your action is causally determined
?
There’s no fundamental difference between both cases, but there may be one in my mental content: In the first, I could, for example, have a thought to the effect of undertaking a certain action; in the second, there couldn’t be such a thought. For instance, I could think: “I am going to jump off this bridge now”, and then do it, or I could be swept off the bridge by a sudden gust of wind. This I can do whether or not my will, and thereby my ability to think a thought expressing an intent beforehand, is just as causally determined as my being swept from the bridge.
As I’ve already expounded, most of our actions are of a kind where there is no express will, no decision made before undertaking it; just now, I did not elaborate on whether or not to scratch my nose, I did not make a conscious decision to do so, but still, I just kinda did. Thoughts, ideas, dreams, likes, dislikes – all of those just occur to us without us deciding on them beforehand. Nevertheless, we are conscious of a thought, despite there not being any wilful decision to think it – there couldn’t have been, since then, we would have to think it before we could think it, else, there would be nothing for a decision process to act upon. ‘Shall I think thought A or not’ only makes sense if you already know what ‘thought A’ is, if you had already thought it in some way, thus, a thought is unwilled, yet we are conscious of it, providing what seems to me to be a manifest counterexample to your assertion that conciousness necessitates (free) will. The same goes for all other mental processes.
I hold that if the thought, underlying/associated feelings, and the act are all causally determined there is no “will”. And no “consciousness”. The latter are both meaningless terms in the absense of will as a causal determinant.
I’ll go further: radical determinism is a solipsism. You cannot argue to me that the cause of all that you and I feel, think and do is causally determined by and that we have no free will. (Well, obvously you can DO so but not viably). If you are right, there is no meaningful “you” to BE right nor is there a relevant “ME” to hear what you are saying so as to act upon it in any meaningful fashion.
YES you can argue something to the effect of “Well, if I am so arguing I do so not of free will but because I have no choice but to do so, and I also have no way to think and behave except by behaving AS IF there were free will, since otherwise I lack a framework for considering and deciding upon actions, nor for conceptualizing you, who are reading what I write, as anything other than someone who can be convinced to think along other lines, but I nevertheless ‘believe’ that the everyday basis of all of my thoughts and behaviors is unfounded and untrue”.
But by the same token you could argue “Solipsism is the true model of reality! You are not here! And everything I perceive to be true is illusory. And I am saying this to you even though there is no ‘YOU’ to say it to because I have no other basis of behavior, I can’t get out of the matrix even though I know none of this is really happening!”
In both cases you cannot be proven wrong, but there is nowhere to go, no meaningful way of incorporating your thesis as a model of reality and living one’s life from that standpoint. In both cases to attempt to internalize it and act from that point onward with the assumption that this IS indeed true would immobilize you, suspend you from any connection to meaning, outcome, the capacity to prioritize, etc etc etc; at best you can claim it as a notion to which you give intellectual allegiance and then partition that notion off from the set of everyday beliefs and understandings and attitudes with which you pursue your day to day life.
And in both cases you cannot be proven RIGHT either. They are formulations that are of interest as intellectual exercises of the sophomoric class but not much more than that.
But that’s not something you have shown, just something you keep asserting. I hold that there very well can be consciousness in the absence of free will, since to be conscious of something is merely to represent something to oneself; and a self, again, is merely a pattern perceived by a self. There’s no will involved at all.
Further, I have given what I think is a counterexample – thinking a thought is not determined through will (and can’t be), yet, we are conscious of our thoughts.
Even more, I have given an argument as to why it seems to me that willing one’s will necessarily leads into infinite regress, which I’d need to have debunked before even being able to entertain the notion of something that is somehow meant to not be determined by prior causality, and yet be in a determinate state.
I think maybe you’ve just fallen victim to some tempting equivocation between intentionality as it is used in regard to mental content, and intention as goal-directed volition. However, the two are quite different – mental intentionality is perhaps better called a certain ‘aboutness’ that all processes within the mind need to have, or, in my terms, a certain representative quality. Every thought is a thought about or direct towards something – every thought has to have some content, something it refers to, or represents. Without this ‘intentionality’, I agree, consciousness would not exist. However, it’s not to be confused with some sort of teleological goal-directedness, some agency, or volition. That, I can’t see a need for in conscious experience.
To sum my argument up once more: if an action is sufficiently determined by prior cause, it is not free. If it is not sufficiently determined, there would seem to be no way through which this particular action occurs, and only this one. Implicating the will as a means to tip the scales is simply question-begging: either, that will is itself determined by prior causation – but then, the whole thing is, and the will is not free. Or it is not – but then, how could it have a definite value, as opposed to any other? Invoking the will to fill in the gap leads just to a new, identical gap that presumably the will would have to fill; but then, another gap opens up, and so on, making a determination of the action to undertake impossible.
In order for something to be determinate, it needs to be determined; if it is underdetermined, it can’t be uniquely specified. If you want a free will, you want something that is determinate while also underdetermined; that’s as impossible as wanting a unique solution for one single equation with two (or more) variables.
I concede that I have not shown, proven, or demonstrated it to be true. (It seems self-evident to me, which makes it difficult to devise a sequence of arguments that would be necessarily composed, in some fashion, of EVEN MORE self-evident assertions).
Well, it evidently doesn’t seem self-evident to me. 
(And in a sense, you’re then just saying that we have free will because it seems like we do to you.)
Why don’t you just show me how you, how your particular brand of free will, would be able to choose between rye and white bread, when both choices are causally underdetermined? Perhaps on this route we could reach common ground.
I come to the table that contains the two loaves as an individual who exists in both time and space; I draw upon my history, which is part of who I am, my memories, my model of reality (what Pirsig called an “analogue of reality”); those impressions were formed NOT by external reality NOR by me “arbitrarily” or “at random” but by me in relationship to external reality. In addition to the memories (which may contain a sort of “default attitude” towards the question of “rye versus white”, the kind of answer I’d pop out if someone started a MPSIMS poll on the subject), I have a current mood and a spur-of-the-moment “gut level” emotional response upon considering each as a possibility.
The consideration thereof draws in very large part from my memories of what each of them tastes like and is also colored by other things which may range from cultural associations, advertising jingles, peculiar connections my mind makes (I like the letter “y” in rye) but the consideration is not, in and of itself, the emotional response, it merely informs it; the emotional response also takes in sensory input (what they look like right now, what they smell like right now) and takes into account ME, how I feel in general, and assesses whether there is a greater resonance overall for one choice over and above the other, or not. (There may NOT be. Indecision is certainly a possibility of the moment).
It’s kind of recursive (the process continues even in mid-reach) but that’s the gist of it.
Note that
a) My past history and memories thereof can’t be cited as deterministic CAUSES juxtaposed against what I DO of FREE WILL insofar as they are part of me and therefore are already part of the “free will” side of the equation. I am not an instantaneity. As I said, I extend through space and time.
b) The externalia (sensory impressions, advertising jingles, cultural meanings attached to white bread and rye bread) can’t be cited as deterministic CAUSES either, as I do not experience THEM but rather experience MYSELF IN RELATIONSHIP TO them. I’m sure you’ve occasionally encountered the irritating assertion that we project so much onto “things” that our experiences of “them” is entirely caused by what’s in our heads; this is not one of those silly assertions, but it IS a rejection of the antithesis, the notion that the self brings nothing to the interaction.
c) The externalia (all of it, not just the two loaves of bread in the current moment but the entire world external to me as it has existed through the entirety of my own existence) is also not isolated from me; the effect that I have had on IT might seem logically to be “swamped” by the sheer enormity of all of it compared to the limited scope of “me”, but it nevertheless cannot be dismissed; it is NOT the same “it” that it would have been had I not been around to affect the world around me even as it affects me in turn, and this, too, is recursive. I am thoroughly, if thinly, stirred into the entire process with which I am interacting.
Am I the only person here who actually usually feel a lack of free will? Maybe I am just crazy, but most of my decisions seem automatic and happen by themselves. Perhaps I need to see a psychologist… 
Well, if your decisions are automatic and happen by themselves, you need not concern yourself overly much about whether or not you should…
So, your model of reality is not actually determined by reality? How’s it then a model of reality rather than, say, of smurfville? ‘Me in relationship to external reality’ is just an obfuscating phrase, and while it may serve as a coarse description of how such a model is built, the fact that the model, in order to be one of reality, depends wholly on reality remains.
All of which are causal influences, and causally influenced themselves, and are therefore not sufficient to decide the question.
This also fails to demonstrate that any of the concepts (advertising jingles, for instance, are clearly external influences; I don’t see why anything on the list shouldn’t be) are anything but links in a long causal chain.
So you just redefine all your causal influences to be part of you. Fine by me, but at some point, you either have to draw a boundary (outside of which will be some things that causally influenced you, otherwise you’d encompasses the whole universe), or loose all meaning of the concept of ‘self’. Also, things making up your past memories and influencing your history could conceivably have gotten rolling before you were born or conceived – were they then part of you? What if your parents (utilising their free will!) had decided to split before you were born – would these parts of you still be parts of you, or do they only retroactively become such parts when you actually are born? Are other people part of you, seeing as they certainly are part of your memories and history? But then, ‘you’ depend on their free decisions, so how are you you rather than them? Does a ‘you’ defined this fuzzily actually have any utility anymore?
In order for which you must first experience them. They determine your experience of ‘yourself in relationship to them’, so how would they not be causative forces – of your experience, and thereby of your ‘state’ at a given moment?
While the self certainly has an influence, I don’t see how this implies that the externalia don’t. In fact, the self may be wholly determined itself by a certain set of externalia, so there’s really no way to separate them out.
All very well possible, and all possible without removing the need of causal determination in order to get an effect to happen.
I’m sorry, but from where I stand, it seems you’ve merely succeeded in drawing up a really fuzzy and ill-defined concept of your self, and convincing yourself that somehow, somewhere in this big, tangled mess, something magical happens that makes it possible for something causally underdetermined to become determinate. I’m not sure it’s really viable to go down that road any further lest we get lost in the jungle.
If we are to make any progress in this, we need to get back down to basics, it seems to me, or risk talking perpetually past each other. You claim that it’s self-evident that consciousness necessitates free will, and that this self-evidence makes it hard to substantiate. However, that shouldn’t be so: any self-evident proposition should, upon being denied, lead to absurdity immediately – like denying your own existence: who’s that doing the denying again? However, if I deny your proposition, all I get is that it’s possible for consciousness to exist without free will, something that seems very much to depend on how consciousness works, which is anything but self-evident.
With this being not all that self-evident anymore, we can look into whether or not it’s actually true. And I still maintain that the example of thoughts not being thought due to an act of will shows it not to be true; even more striking, the feeling of pain upon getting parts of you sliced off doesn’t seem anything we decide on feeling, yet we are very much conscious of it. So, apparently, we can be conscious of things that are externally caused, that we are compelled to experience. So why, exactly, can’t all mental content be of that kind?
And then there’s still the case of causal underdetermination, which, to me, is the real clincher. There’s no way to uniquely specify an effect (except, perhaps, randomly if there is some measure of indeterminism) if it is causally underdetermined, not anymore than it is possible to find a unique solution to an equation system that is underdetermined – some people may confuse themselves using lots of math on a complex system whose underdetermination is not immediately obvious and come to the belief that in certain cases, it can be done, but it is enough to look at the very simplest example to see that that’s not so.
Let’s start at the core…
I do not see how or why I lose all meaning of the concept of ‘self’ if I encompass the whole universe. “I” may, in fact, encompass the entire universe and I do, in fact, strongly suspect that a good portion of what I experience as “self” IS IN FACT the entire universe.
From post #41, upstream:
The local individual self who on an everyday basis thinks of himself as the entirety of AHunter3 [del]may[/del]…IS deterministically caused to some fairly large extent (we can cycle back to “entirely” versus “less than entirely” later) by:
•social cultural community etc milieu, in which that individual self is a participant; language and communication, the rich body of concepts and understandings that are shared and expected to be shared, the societal gestalt;
• the larger context of ecosystem, planet, universe, laws of physics chemistry biology, and so forth
… but that is tangential. There EXISTS the consciousness, and the exercise of free will. Precisely WHO or WHAT the real Self is that is the true locus of that consciousness and the possessor of that free will is not material to the question of whether it itself exists. WHETHER ANYTHING ANYWHERE EVER HAPPENS ON PURPOSE as opposed to happening as a consequence of a causal determinant.
To be conscious IS to harbor intentions, formulate opinions, possess a will. If it is not free it is not a will, it harbors NO intentions but merely executes programming, it formulates NO opinions but merely renders a result from formulae, and that is not consciousness. My computer may be conscious but if it is, its conscousness does not inhere in its ability to execute the binary code that constitutes its operating system and its various programs — the latter do not meaningfully distinguish it from a rock as far as consciousness goes.
AHunter you fall into the same place as did Descartes. He could doubt all things but “I think, I am” was something about which he could have no doubt and no proof of. It was axiomatic.
I agree that I am because I think, axiomatically. But thinking iis the experiencing of the sensation of agency. And that agency may very well be illusory in that nothing is outside of prior causation, at least until you get to the big bang (and first cause I won’t get into). Therefore that Descartian intuition which you share, and I cannot help but also intuit, may be worthy of doubting itself after all.
That said, to the degree that “I” am, I am responsible for my choices and experience the process of choosing.
You lost me here - if consciousness is purely a property of the functions of a physical brain, then it’s just a very complex machine. In what way is this machine different from a computer executing instructions? Computers make decisions after all.