If you refer to my position in the latter clause then I object. I use illusion as an argument against the argument that it must be true because I perceptually experience it to be true; I do not claim that we are trapped behind a veil of illusion. But we are indeed limited by the fact that we experience a world through filters, filters selected by eons of evolution for their adaptive value but adaptive value does not always mean “truth”, and what was adaptive for eons may not be adaptive as we move into other environs and ponder other salient questions than that of avoiding predators, catching prey, and attracting mates. Cognitive illusions can result and we should be on guard for them, willing to use our minds to conclude something different than what we perceive on the surface view. If you find* that* assertion “mindless”, fine, I will live with that.
No, not at all. A formulation that reads like “Getting at truth is a process fraught with difficulty, and we can only get an incomplete approximation of it, bound always by various limitations” I am on board with. That’s different from “completely and perpetually unknowable”, and also different from “there IS no truth there are only the axiomatically shared whatever-the-buzzword is that we TREAT AS truth”.
Are you the entire universe, or am I, too? Are we, then, one and the same? How could we then both have free, and conceivably opposing, wills? If you are the universe, then you were there before you, the self-experiencing, reflective entity that writes these here posts, came into existence. Does that mean that your parents’ decision to, I don’t know, work through some minor relationship problems and stay together, enabling you to be conceived and born, was not free? Or could you then have been somebody else? That’s how I mean such hyperbolic holism looses the meaning of ‘self’ – in proposing a kind of essential one-ness where in reality a plurality of individual self-experiences exists. To deny these experiences is essentially just to propose some sort of strange second-order solipsism, where there is really only one being that experiences itself as multiple individuals. There’s no good sense in which you or me are the same, or ‘one’, beyond some vague new-age handwaving, if our minds do not share the same content – so in what way are we both the universe? Or is that just you, and I’m a figment of your imagination?
There exists consciousness, alright, and it experiences itself as a localized individual entity (just as an aside, antenna-models of the consciousness, or, in fact, anything greatly dualistic flat out doesn’t work – it’s inconsistent with, for example, split-brain phenomenology, where the corpus callosum, the nerve ‘bridge’ between both hemispheres, has been separated, and things like alien hand syndrome, where one of the patient’s hands is no longer under their conscious control, yet is able to execute purposeful actions, often against the patient’s will – in the ‘antenna’ model, this would be tantamount to damaging the receptor, and, instead of artefacts and noise, getting a brand new show). And there exists the experience of exercising free will. It doesn’t follow that therefore, there exists the exercise of free will.
That would be what you’d have to show. To me, to be conscious is to have conscious experience, to represent things to the self, and to represent that representation itself, and so on. There is nothing intentional about it other than in the sense I cited earlier, which is more accurately described as ‘aboutness’ or object-directedness of mental content, and from which volition and will only follows by equivocation.
I’d still really like to hear your take on my main arguments, by the way.
Not anymore than one could use pure math to conclude that there must be a first human (which isn’t an ape anymore), or that mountains are anything bigger than 1000 feet, while hills are anything smaller than that. Pure math is very OK with gradualism, at least on a sufficiently high-level description.
Indeed – there’s no more ‘first thought’ than there is a first chicken; that every chicken is a chicken’s child does not imply that there must have been infinitely many chicken before it, or else a first one that magically sprung into existence. Nor would ‘pure math’ have you think that.
If there is an underlying causal process (like gradualistic change), then no, there is no need for an infinite chain. It is only when one makes insensible assumptions – like the existence of free will – that such pathological cases arise.
If free will itself arose via such a gradual process, then, while it might be ‘free’ in some sense – i.e. not determined by prior causation, random, etc. – it’s difficult to see how it could justifiably be called ‘will’, since there wouldn’t be any goal-direction in such a process, or the process would be superfluous (in that its end would be determined before it began). That’s precisely the contradiction my argument attempted to uncover.
That’s one way to do it – if your analysis does not agree with your preconceived notions, toss out the analysis, and be contented. However, if you’re prepared to go down that route, there is no need to ever start any analysis, of course, as you’re not really interested in actually finding anything out; so, if you are, what you typically would have to do is either find fault with the analysis, or re-examine your preconceptions.
That’s just the question – how do you become the cause of it? If you do, you must be in a state such that you cause some event to occur. But what, in turn, caused you to be in that state? These paradoxes all disappear when one drops the assumption of free will; if one keeps it, they are irreconcilable.
Umm, once we are speaking of being one and the same, the word “both” ceases to have any meaning in this context. “That which we both are” becomes the understood seat of free will. As a collectivity we exercise it. The “I” that I experience myself as being, and the “I” that you experience yourself as being, in this formulation, are one and the same, and that entity thinks and behaves and exercises free will. In this formulation that may mean that I the individual and you the individual do not possess free will, but that means the thoughts in our respective heads are actually the thoughts of “we the collectivity”, made manifest locally, and it is the plural entity that it in possession of the volition.
And if that collectivity entity (let’s call it “the species human” for now) is held to be deterministically caused and controlled by the larger context, then we do indeed drop back to the larger context whereby “I”, the “I” that I experience myself as being, is indeed the universe (and so are you) and again we are one and the same, yes; and that entity, the entire universe, thinks and behaves and exercises free will. In this formulation (to reiterate) that may mean that I the individual and you the individual do not possess free will; and (to expand) may mean that we the species human do not collectively possess free will either; but that means the thoughts in our respective and collective heads are actually the thoughts of the universe, the originator thereof, made manifest locally, and it is the whole freaking works that is in possession of the volition.
You can’t experience anything consciously without a modicum of freedom to consider, to think about, to react as “independent of”. I think I understand what you are saying: you are claiming that consciousness can just inher in a strictly controlled process, one wherein nary a single thought is anything other than caused by exterior/prior stimuli. And I am saying “no it can’t”. The reason my computer’s programmed routines do not constitute artificial intelligence is explicitly those routines’ inability to determine behaviors as opposed to behaving according to predetermined rules. As long as the behavior of the computer is governed by the logic of the programming it is not “thinking for itself”, and neither is it conscious.
Why did you ask this? 
But you’re begging the question - you’re defining consciousness has having some poorly-defined thing called “free will,” and not behaving in a deterministic way, then you declare that anything that behaves deterministically can’t be conscious.
I have consciousness, however I think that my brain is a machine that can produce only one result for a given set of inputs (well, there can be the occasional quantum randomness that has a macro effect). You are saying that these two ideas are incompatible, but I don’t see the connection. Can you explain?
If my free will resides within ‘the universe’, as does yours, and ‘I the individual’ may indeed lack free will, then how can it be necessary for my (undoubtedly local) conscious experience? And what do you suddenly mean by ‘independent of’ – aren’t we all the universe? What’s independent of that, then?
You can’t really have it both ways – on the one hand, squirrelling away your notion of free will into whatever dark gaps and recesses of the universe we haven’t looked at yet, and on the other hand claim that it underlies conscious experience, which is, in a way, the only thing we can truly look at.
Yes, you are indeed quite vigorously asserting that. Specifically, your argument appears to be: we couldn’t be conscious without free will, we are conscious, therefore, we have free will; which rests on a premise you have yet to substantiate.
So, asked as bluntly as possible, why couldn’t I be conscious of things not subject to free will, and how is it then that I am indeed conscious of such things? How could I be surprised at a sight or a sound if its perception were an act of will? How do I decide whether or not to think a thought, to have an idea, without being aware of the options beforehand?
What do you take to be the feature of conscious experience that necessitates free will?
Simple interest – I have repeated my arguments over and over, one being the preceding proposed counter-example to your assertion that will is needed to be conscious of anything, and the other main one being the problem of causal underdetermination, which I don’t recall you even acknowledging so far.
I maintain that consciousness isn’t incompatible with determinism; that awareness and self-awareness are merely resulting from a system recursing and reflecting back upon itself, in ultimately a manner not so different from (and certainly not any more mysterious than) the corresponding concepts in mathematics and computer science. Of course, inherent in the troubles of sharply defining consciousness and describing how it works is the problem of substantiating this assertion. Since I couldn’t hope to give a thorough analysis of consciousness just here and now, I instead must look at free will itself, and what it would entail – namely, the determination of an underdetermined effect. The assumption of the existence of free will thus leads to absurdity: if effect A is underdetermined, then so are effects B, C, D, etc. That one should occur rather than the others, without either additional causation or a random determination, is, quite simply, nonsensical.
And the will itself is not exempt from this argumentation – you, who or whatever ‘you’ are, from a pattern of firing neurons to a oneness in being with universe and god, must be in some certain state to have a certain will; I trust I’ll be granted that (otherwise, how could the will have any content – how could you will anything?). Then, either you are causally determined to be in that state, or your will is underdetermined, and the problem just recurses into infinity.
Forgot to add: another point I raised was the Rietdijk-Putnam argument: Two people’s hyperplane of simultaneity (i.e. those events in space-time they consider to be their ‘present’) may vary considerably, depending on their relative motion. If one observer’s ‘present’ then contains ‘you, now’, and another’s contains ‘you, five minutes from now’, can anything you do between now and five minutes from now really be considered ‘free’?
No, I don’t mean “How would you answer that question if you thought the way I do”, I mean why DID you ask this? Your real understanding thereof.
Your answer as given makes reference to your “interest” and you speak of “arguments” that you have repeated. Can you elaborate on what it means “to argue” when the phrase is used from your context? I know what I mean when I say that I am “making an argument” (repeatedly or otherwise) but that would not seem applicable to your situation as you understand it (or as I understand you to understand it???)…
The experience’s “recorded-from” location, to coin an awkward phrase, may be local but the experience’s “experience-at” location is wherever the conscious and free will that is consciously experiencing it is located. If it is located at the universe at large (not “within” but simply “in”), then that, and not the lacking-in-free-will indiivdual, is where the experience is experienced.
Much like me listening to sound piped from another room. It’s not the microphone that does the hearing; I do.
I’ve miscommunicated. When I say “consciousness inheres in the universe” I do not mean “in some specific place that we haven’t looked yet”, I mean all of it. The Big Bang, in all its 12-15 billion year old, sprawling hugeness of self, every single quark thereof, as an entirety. Context of all of its components etc. When I act, conscious purpose exists somewhere. If the sense that it is I, the individual, who is so acting, is an illusory sense, then it is an illusion experienced by a volitional consciousness somewhere, and yes, perhaps that consciousness inheres in the universe itself. Not in some tiny “consciousness repository” (if that were so, the most likely consciousness repositlory would be me, the local individual!) WITHIN the universe but rather that the consciousness that is “experiencing me” inheres in the universe as a property of it somehow.
I had good cause to. Why didn’t you answer?
How come my will and your will can be at odds if it’s all one, in the end?
It is entirely possible that I don’t understand the question(s). (They do seem to be the same question).
One can either parse the situation as one in which my consciouness / free will is located in me, the individual person, OR one can parse the situation as one in which my consciousness / free will is not located there but somewhere else which “has me, the individual, as an experience”. But it doesn’t make sense to switch modes in midsentence.
I have not claimed THAT YES my consciousness / free will inheres in me, the individual (although it does seem that way) nor have I claimed THAT YES my consciousness actually inheres in the plurality of the species human (or western culture or whatever, the social milieu) or the universe as a whole. I have said it inheres SOMEWHERE and for purposes of this discussion I am not asserting anywhere in particular, merely that if not one place then one of the others. Or something else entirely for all I know. Maybe I and my life am a dream being dreamt by the ghost of Lizzie Borden’s mama. If so, that ghost is conscious and has free will and I am an aspect OF it.
If “I the individual” am the locus of my conscious experience, then the things around me, not being me, not being part of me, are not under my conscious control; I experience my free will in a context, one in which my will, my intentions, my plans, my consciousness, etc, are impinged upon by other things; indeed, THWARTED by a great many of them, even while others form the foreground and background against which they can operate. They (the entirety of them, taken as a whole) do not exist as they are in isolation; they have been influenced, touched, modified, DETERMINED you could say, by me, and by the same token they influence, modify, touch, and determine me and my actions and whatnot, all in a co-reactive dance of interactivity. I am not their dependent variable. Perhaps we collectively “cause each other” but my context is not the cause of me insofar as I am interwoven into all of it in such a way that there is no “it” that is entirely separable from “me” to posit as the independent variable.
If, on the other hand, “I the individual” am an illusion experienced by something, all we know for sure is that the illusion has to be experienced BY a consciousness, and the “surprise” etc would necessarily be part of the illusion, as real but possibly no more real than the illusion of my individual self and the accuracy of the sense that my consciousness resides there. I have dreams myself from time to time, in which things that are not actually happening seem to be happening, and awarenesses normally accessible to me are nullified or blunted. (I assume this is consistent with most folks’ experience of dreaming, yes?) When I wake up, I have access to the normal repository of awarenesses but may also remember my dreams, as they are AMONG my experiences at that point. It would seem to me that if “I the individual” am an illusion being experienced by something other than “mere individual me”, that something probably has access to other experiences and is not limited to the experience I think of as “I the individual”.
What distinguishes “good” cause from cause that would not necessarily be “good”? Does the word “good” serve a function in this formulation and, if so, could you elaborate on how the explanation “I had good cause to” differs from “I had cause to”, as explication for why you posted what you did?
Please, AH3, will some sense into yourself. **HMHW **(and others) have brought up many enlightening points, and some how none of them seem to have registered. Keep in mind the original intent of the thread was to see if there was any definition of “free will” that made very much sense, and so far, it doesn’t seem likely there is. I can hardly tell from your increasingly tangled and obfuscatory posts what in the world you’re thinking of when you say free will.
Seriously, lets cut the crap about the universal consciousness. Put all that to the side for the moment, and can we start by settling this one point at least?: Nothing is free from causality. You may act of your own volition, but that volition did not arise in a vacuum. Do you agree?
No.
No “causality” is any more free of having been (reciprocally) caused by me even insofar as it “causes” me. We’re all part of the same matrix of interrelated interactions.
‘Good cause’, in the first sense, is here equivalent to ‘sufficient cause’. I also had sufficient cause to add a pun in the wording, playing on the meaning of ‘having good cause’ as ‘being justified in my actions’.
Now, why don’t you simply answer any of my points for a change?
didn’t i?
If you did, point me to where.
I’m curious, Half Man Half Wit, have you read any Dan Dennett? I ask because in Freedon Evolves he uses arguments much like those in your first quoted post to rebut those in your second post. I think I might see where the disconnect is, and it’s one that trips a lot of people up: causation and determination are two extremely different things.
But, maybe you agree with that statement, and I’m not seeing your argument for what it is.
Sorry, I was referring to post #110. That didn’t address your previously-overlooked question?
I haven’t read Freedom Evolves, and I’m only familiar with Dennett piecewise; however, I would in general agree with the statement that causation and determination are two different things, as indeed I don’t think that causation even implies any deterministic necessity.
But still, a freedom that comes to be in such a gradual way would, to me, seem to preclude the idea of intention, necessitating an impossible teleology – that, while the result of the process of gradual change was not fixed in its beginnings (necessitated by freedom), there nevertheless exists some unambiguous directedness (necessary for it to constitute ‘will’). Essentially, what I said at the point where your quote of the first of my posts ends.
If Dennett has some arguments against this position, I’d be eager to hear them!
If it did, I fail to see how. How does the will decide between equally-underdetermined, equally-probable effects A, B, C, etc., without itself being something in need of determination? How do the Andromedans still have free will in their decision to attack Earth, when in the present of a person just crossing you in the street their fleet is already on their way? How am I conscious of things not subject to will, if will is needed to be conscious of things?
And let’s leave the universe out of this – it opens only more, even worse, questions. How am I I and not you? How can you will what I will not? If you are the universe, then why are there possible universes (where your parents never met) without you? How could the universe sidestep the problem of underdetermination? Is, if the universe’s only free decision was whether to bang or not (or other things on that scale), my decision to eat wheat or rye bread for breakfast free? If it isn’t, in what sense do I have free will – I mean, I couldn’t really decide retroactively not to bang, could I?
Huh? Effect? What?
You’ve lost me…
Each individual word is recognizably an English word, and one I am familiar with, at that… 
How are you (or I), conscious of things not “subject to will” (huh?)… if will is needed (by you or I, right? not by the ‘things’ ?) to be conscious… what??
Start over? Should I go get another cup of coffee? Would coffee help? Or something stronger perhaps?
Let’s sidestep… I think in a generic sort of way (not necessarily in your most immediate post) perhaps you are trying to go the same place that Sophistry and Illusion did awhile back and he said it quite elegantly — would you agree with the point he is making here, and is this more or less what you are trying to say?:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9540228&postcount=24
I’m sorry but between the space aliens from Andromeda and the pedestrians giving me presents in mid-intersection I’m a bit bewildered at the moment and although I think you are tring to argue that either a conscious decision can be attributed to an exterior “reason” which is its determinant or else it has no “reason” (meaning) at all, I’m simply not sure.