A simple explanation of free will.

[Juma]

Then why cant you discuss your claim honestly? Why do you ndver try to really question your claim?

Your job is to question my claim. I have answered my own doubts; that is why I am on here trying to support it.

Then why did you say you wasnt sure on your claim?

And no, that is not how an honest intellectual discussion works. Such a discussion is a colaboration between all parts trying to find the truth. You are describing a political campaign.

 

[ryan]

Your job is to question my claim. I have answered my own doubts; that is why I am on here trying to support it.

Then why did you say you wasnt sure on your claim?

I know that my doubts are probably not going to be all of the doubts. I don't know how I would ever know that there are no more doubts left. Thus, I am never certain.

 

[Juma]

Then why did you say you wasnt sure on your claim?

I know that my doubts are probably not going to be all of the doubts. I don't know how I would ever know that there are no more doubts left. Thus, I am never certain.

So be honest and display those dubts. I never see theese discussions as contests, they should be colaborations. That is why get so pissed with your posts. You dont do your part of the work.

 

[DBT]

Then why cant you discuss your claim honestly? Why do you ndver try to really question your claim?

Your job is to question my claim. I have answered my own doubts; that is why I am on here trying to support it.

If you have 'answered your own doubts' you are no longer questioning your assumptions...you have your certainty. You are certain that your assumptions are true and accurate and nobody can convince you that your assumptions are not supported by logic or evidence but what you desire to be true and accurate.

 

[fromderinside]

Been off for a bit.

Now there's a list.

Not a meaningful list, but, a list nevertheless.

There could be, but it raises a host of questions:
1) Why is this consciousness generated? why have we evolved something that consumes energy but serves no useful purpose?
2) Having evolved it, why don't we use it?
3) Having evolved it, and given that it consumes energy, yet doesn't do anything, why isn't it selected against?
4) Why do we stop acting when the areas of the brain associated with consciousness fall silent? (i.e. unconsciousness)
5) why do we start acting again when the areas of the brain associated with consciousness, but not with action, are directly stimulated?
6) How is this consciousness kept in strict parallel with our actual actions, speech, and thoughts?
7) Why can we successfully predict the actions of ourselves based on conscious experience?
8) Why can we successfully predict the actions of ourselves based on assuming we will act according to our conscious experience?
9) Why can we successfully predict the actions of others based on assuming they are acting based on their conscious experience?
10) Why is conscious attention associated with different task performance from unattended tasks?
11) When we ask someone to consciously undertake certain activities, such as repeating numbers in their head or holding a particular image in their mind, without asking for any particular output from them, what is going on, neurologically speaking?
etc. etc.

It's a nice idea, but it's pretty impractical to build into any model of how the brain works, or how people actually behave. That's why it's a theory that's popular with those who don't study human behaviour, and largely ignored as wishful thinking by those who do.

Consciousness. If nothing is created there is nothing to explain except why the individual who believes there is a consciousness so believes.

This answer requires some expansion.

One would expect consciousness if one created mind in a species that It considered meaningful. No? It's just evolution? Right. No problem then. Let evolution work as it seems to do, opportunistically going from one working iteration to another, using the same basic package. From such a process one wouldn't expect some design concept or even some design. Rather one would expect a bunch of solutions that might be cobbled together into a, perhaps several, functioning entities. This is what cognitive neuroscientists are consistently reporting.

Instead of a visual system, a thinking system, etc. we have iterations, replications, of successful templates applied to provide different solutions. Even some of these iterations have iterations. Since it appears many of these resources do intersect there should be several, perhaps many integrator, director, arbitrator functions for these systems leading to some reconciler(s) where one has access to some set of awarenesses from which to select combinations that seem to get the job done.

Having such does not imply mind nor consciousness underlying, it just implies there are demands for coherency with respect to something. Several have argued that since we are social beings, depend upon and defend against those around us, and since we do articulate, that one or several of these awareness mechanisms serve as filters for articulation both self reporting and outside communicating. Obviously its not necessary that these two functions be strongly coupled or there would be greater correspondence between what we believe and what we overtly do.

A complex solution. Youbetcha. Okham a problem? Nope. Our generator (evolutionary process) is opportunistic and temporally more or less independent because how grouping and physical changes over time and place among aspects of our evolving genome. What we see are a collage of results more or less structurally coupled by the past, but, wildly different in more recent developments. One would expect multiple solutions ascendingly structured, yet wildly varying in functionality and capability, in extant products.

There is no basic fix way down the rudimentary brain where where mind is born. There are means to discriminate this from that in sense systems, in mobility systems, in forms of living, some more coupled than others which is the sense of what comparative physiology and contemporary evolutionary biology findings show us.

Finally. It is not legitimate to presume consciousness from attended since attended is known to be various and disparate simultaneously. That is they are attendings first where one of several attends is selected at articulation as social demand products - note the plural here - based on some deciding processor or another for different useful ends.

One can the same about memory and various other processes that have evolved opportunistically at various times and environments as we evolved to be the things we are now.

For the the above arguments one shouldn't, IMHO, presume mind.

 

[OLDMAN]

All creatures are conscious, some are only aware of light....but you can see the big survival advantage to being more conscious. Self-consciousness isn't always an necessity for survival of a species, but you can see where it is an advantage for the individual inside of a species. It is easy to think that because we see the big picture, (from birth to death) that there must be a reason or deeper meaning in that ability, but it is really just a greater level of consciousness.

 

[ryan]

I know that my doubts are probably not going to be all of the doubts. I don't know how I would ever know that there are no more doubts left. Thus, I am never certain.

So be honest and display those dubts. I never see theese discussions as contests, they should be colaborations. That is why get so pissed with your posts. You dont do your part of the work.

I said that I already addressed them; why would I bring up an issue that I found a solution for?

And I have even mentioned to DBT that I have to make some assumptions just to get to my overall assumption. I am far from certain as I mentioned many times.

 

[ryan]

Your job is to question my claim. I have answered my own doubts; that is why I am on here trying to support it.

If you have 'answered your own doubts' you are no longer questioning your assumptions...you have your certainty.

So here is where we differ. No matter how much I know about something, I assume that there might be more to know, and this has always been the case. What I don't know could effect any overall certain assertions I make. So I avoid certainty - especially in philosophy.

You are certain that your assumptions are true and accurate and nobody can convince you that your assumptions are not supported by logic or evidence but what you desire to be true and accurate.

My assumptions are certain and true??? This doesn't make sense. It is implied in the definition of assumption that it is not certain and not necessarily true.

Maybe "assumption" has the wrong connotations for how I am using it. Think of my "assumptions" as conditions or postulates.

 

[DBT]

If you have 'answered your own doubts' you are no longer questioning your assumptions...you have your certainty.

So here is where we differ. No matter how much I know about something, I assume that there might be more to know, and this has always been the case. What I don't know could effect any overall certain assertions I make. So I avoid certainty - especially in philosophy.

You are making assumptions about my position that are not warranted. I did nothing more than point out the logical errors of your claim based on what is fairly well understood, pointing out that randomness is not a component of free will, or even will, be it rational or irrational will.

As have several other posters.

My assumptions are certain and true??? This doesn't make sense. It is implied in the definition of assumption that it is not certain and not necessarily true.

If you read more carefully you would see that I actually said - ''you are certain that your assumptions are true and accurate'' - the emphasis being on 'you' and 'your' certainty....which you have displayed to the point of undeniability. You are certain of your assumptions in relation to quantum randomness and free will.

Maybe "assumption" has the wrong connotations for how I am using it. Think of my "assumptions" as conditions or postulates.

 

[ryan]

So here is where we differ. No matter how much I know about something, I assume that there might be more to know, and this has always been the case. What I don't know could effect any overall certain assertions I make. So I avoid certainty - especially in philosophy.

You are making assumptions about my position that are not warranted. I did nothing more than point out the logical errors of your claim based on what is fairly well understood, pointing out that randomness is not a component of free will, or even will, be it rational or irrational will.

It wouldn't be so bad if you only critiqued my argument, but you also flat say that we do not have free will.

As have several other posters.

It concerns me that you think this has any substance against my argument. This is not going to help your case against me, at least not from my perspective.

My assumptions are certain and true??? This doesn't make sense. It is implied in the definition of assumption that it is not certain and not necessarily true.

If you read more carefully you would see that I actually said - ''you are certain that your assumptions are true and accurate'' - the emphasis being on 'you' and 'your' certainty....which you have displayed to the point of undeniability. You are certain of your assumptions in relation to quantum randomness and free will.

Are you saying that I am trying to deceive you when I tell you that I need to make some assumptions/conditions for my argument?

 

[DBT]

You are making assumptions about my position that are not warranted. I did nothing more than point out the logical errors of your claim based on what is fairly well understood, pointing out that randomness is not a component of free will, or even will, be it rational or irrational will.

It wouldn't be so bad if you only critiqued my argument, but you also flat say that we do not have free will.

I am pointing out that term 'free will' is so poorly defined that it is useless. It describes nothing in terms of thought, deliberation, personality, character, behaviour, etc, it predicts nothing, it explains nothing.

Rational and irrational will being better aand more useful....rational will representing adaptive sets of behaviours and irrational will representing maladaptive decisions.

'Free will' representing a kind of religious ideology.

Are you saying that I am trying to deceive you when I tell you that I need to make some assumptions/conditions for my argument?

I said that you believe that you are right, that you are convinced that your assumptions are correct...and that is what you are arguing.

 

[ryan]

It wouldn't be so bad if you only critiqued my argument, but you also flat say that we do not have free will.

I am pointing out that term 'free will' is so poorly defined that it is useless. It describes nothing in terms of thought, deliberation, personality, character, behaviour, etc, it predicts nothing, it explains nothing.

Rational and irrational will being better aand more useful....rational will representing adaptive sets of behaviours and irrational will representing maladaptive decisions.

'Free will' representing a kind of religious ideology.

It doesn't matter what you think free will means or whether you think it's a religious ideology; it only matters what the common definitions for it are. You could also say that free will is a unicorn. But nobody will care because somebody already defined it.

Are you saying that I am trying to deceive you when I tell you that I need to make some assumptions/conditions for my argument?

I said that you believe that you are right, that you are convinced that your assumptions are correct...and that is what you are arguing.

I don't think you understand what I mean when I say that I need to make some assumptions conditions for me to have a reasonable argument (I will use conditions instead of assumptions for now on). For example, it is perfectly fine to say that there might a fairy in my bedroom with the condition that 100 fairies exist in my neighborhood and that they could be anywhere. Once the condition is made, we don't have to worry about it anymore, and it does not mean that it is actually true.

The fact that I tell you that I need these conditions to be true in my favor should make it seem obvious that I am not certain about my argument.

 

[DBT]

I am pointing out that term 'free will' is so poorly defined that it is useless. It describes nothing in terms of thought, deliberation, personality, character, behaviour, etc, it predicts nothing, it explains nothing.

Rational and irrational will being better aand more useful....rational will representing adaptive sets of behaviours and irrational will representing maladaptive decisions.

'Free will' representing a kind of religious ideology.

It doesn't matter what you think free will means or whether you think it's a religious ideology; it only matters what the common definitions for it are. You could also say that free will is a unicorn. But nobody will care because somebody already defined it.

To which I pointed out: definitions without relationship to actual things and processes do not mean much. God is love, love exists, God exists, etc, etc.
Definitions that are useless, and therefore ultimately meaningless. Semantic game playing.

I don't think you understand what I mean when I say that I need to make some assumptions conditions for me to have a reasonable argument (I will use conditions instead of assumptions for now on). For example, it is perfectly fine to say that there might a fairy in my bedroom with the condition that 100 fairies exist in my neighborhood and that they could be anywhere. Once the condition is made, we don't have to worry about it anymore, and it does not mean that it is actually true.
The fact that I tell you that I need these conditions to be true in my favor should make it seem obvious that I am not certain about my argument.

Several posters have carefully and patiently (some not so patiently) pointed out precisely why your assumptions are most probable wrong. Yet you still persisted in asserting your assumptions regardless of the difficulties, which had been pointed out to you.

So if you really are not certain about your argument, this has not been made evident over the course of several threads and probably hundreds of pages.

That is the problem.

 

[fromderinside]

All creatures are conscious, some are only aware of light....but you can see the big survival advantage to being more conscious. Self-consciousness isn't always an necessity for survival of a species, but you can see where it is an advantage for the individual inside of a species. It is easy to think that because we see the big picture, (from birth to death) that there must be a reason or deeper meaning in that ability, but it is really just a greater level of consciousness.

OM

 

[ryan]

It doesn't matter what you think free will means or whether you think it's a religious ideology; it only matters what the common definitions for it are. You could also say that free will is a unicorn. But nobody will care because somebody already defined it.

To which I pointed out: definitions without relationship to actual things and processes do not mean much. God is love, love exists, God exists, etc, etc.
Definitions that are useless, and therefore ultimately meaningless. Semantic game playing.

I told you many times what definitions I was using. You could have stopped me there and said that you had in mind a definition that doesn't make sense.

I don't think you understand what I mean when I say that I need to make some assumptions conditions for me to have a reasonable argument (I will use conditions instead of assumptions for now on). For example, it is perfectly fine to say that there might a fairy in my bedroom with the condition that 100 fairies exist in my neighborhood and that they could be anywhere. Once the condition is made, we don't have to worry about it anymore, and it does not mean that it is actually true.
The fact that I tell you that I need these conditions to be true in my favor should make it seem obvious that I am not certain about my argument.

Several posters have carefully and patiently (some not so patiently) pointed out precisely why your assumptions are most probable wrong. Yet you still persisted in asserting your assumptions regardless of the difficulties, which had been pointed out to you.

So if you really are not certain about your argument, this has not been made evident over the course of several threads and probably hundreds of pages.

That is the problem.

Are kidding me? I said that I needed to make assumptions throughout that entire discussion; the argument is only as good as its assumptions. But if the assumptions hold, my argument is true.

 

[fromderinside]

Several posters have carefully and patiently (some not so patiently) pointed out precisely why your assumptions are most probable wrong. Yet you still persisted in asserting your assumptions regardless of the difficulties, which had been pointed out to you.

So if you really are not certain about your argument, this has not been made evident over the course of several threads and probably hundreds of pages.

That is the problem.

Are kidding me? I said that I needed to make assumptions throughout that entire discussion; the argument is only as good as its assumptions. But if the assumptions hold, my argument is true.

I'll be more blunt. DBT politely said your assumptions are shit, that they have have been demonstrated as shit over and over. Yet you persist in repeating them as if mere repetition of them somehow makes them pure.

You are not making argument sir. You are repeatedly spreading shit to the point that now its become whining.

 

[ryan]

Are kidding me? I said that I needed to make assumptions throughout that entire discussion; the argument is only as good as its assumptions. But if the assumptions hold, my argument is true.

I'll be more blunt. DBT politely said your assumptions are shit, that they have have been demonstrated as shit over and over. Yet you persist in repeating them as if mere repetition of them somehow makes them pure.

You are not making argument sir. You are repeatedly spreading shit to the point that now its become whining.

I have not read anything yet that makes me question my argument if given certain assumptions/conditions. I have overcome all objections that I have encountered with possible solutions. When I read something that gives me reasonable doubt, I will make sure to post it on this thread. But nothing has come up yet.

 

[Juma]

I'll be more blunt. DBT politely said your assumptions are shit, that they have have been demonstrated as shit over and over. Yet you persist in repeating them as if mere repetition of them somehow makes them pure.

You are not making argument sir. You are repeatedly spreading shit to the point that now its become whining.

I have not read anything yet that makes me question my argument if given certain assumptions/conditions. I have overcome all objections that I have encountered with possible solutions. When I read something that gives me reasonable doubt, I will make sure to post it on this thread. But nothing has come up yet.

Which says as a lot. About you.

 

[Togo]

I have not read anything yet that makes me question my argument if given certain assumptions/conditions. I have overcome all objections that I have encountered with possible solutions. When I read something that gives me reasonable doubt, I will make sure to post it on this thread. But nothing has come up yet.

Which says as a lot. About you.

Nah, he's right. Bluntly saying something is shit isn't an argument. Saying that something is obvious isn't an argument, saying that you've already demonstrated something, while being unable to cite or link to that demonstration, isn't an argument. Saying lots of people disagree with you isn't an argument.

If people had spent even half the time addressing the actual issues that they have trying to rubbish or intimidate ryan, the discussion would have gotten a lot further.

 

[Togo]

There could be, but it raises a host of questions:
1) Why is this consciousness generated? why have we evolved something that consumes energy but serves no useful purpose?
2) Having evolved it, why don't we use it?
3) Having evolved it, and given that it consumes energy, yet doesn't do anything, why isn't it selected against?
4) Why do we stop acting when the areas of the brain associated with consciousness fall silent? (i.e. unconsciousness)
5) why do we start acting again when the areas of the brain associated with consciousness, but not with action, are directly stimulated?
6) How is this consciousness kept in strict parallel with our actual actions, speech, and thoughts?
7) Why can we successfully predict the actions of ourselves based on conscious experience?
8) Why can we successfully predict the actions of ourselves based on assuming we will act according to our conscious experience?
9) Why can we successfully predict the actions of others based on assuming they are acting based on their conscious experience?
10) Why is conscious attention associated with different task performance from unattended tasks?
11) When we ask someone to consciously undertake certain activities, such as repeating numbers in their head or holding a particular image in their mind, without asking for any particular output from them, what is going on, neurologically speaking?
etc. etc.

It's a nice idea, but it's pretty impractical to build into any model of how the brain works, or how people actually behave. That's why it's a theory that's popular with those who don't study human behaviour, and largely ignored as wishful thinking by those who do.

Consciousness. If nothing is created there is nothing to explain except why the individual who believes there is a consciousness so believes.

This answer requires some expansion.

Not really. If you make the claim that consciousness doesn't exist, then you don't need to create anything. Eliminativism always seems attractive in that way. The problem comes with trying to pretend that nothing on the list actually exists. You need some fairly aggressive criteria to justify it. I'm not seeing those criteria here.

One would expect consciousness if one created mind in a species that It considered meaningful. No? It's just evolution? Right. No problem then. Let evolution work as it seems to do, opportunistically going from one working iteration to another, using the same basic package. From such a process one wouldn't expect some design concept or even some design. Rather one would expect a bunch of solutions that might be cobbled together into a, perhaps several, functioning entities. This is what cognitive neuroscientists are consistently reporting.

Yes and no. What they report are several very well coordinated functioning entites. To the extent that in some cases the coordination is all that makes the subsystem useful. For example, the visual system doesn't assemble a collection of edges and surfaces and then try and use memory to try and match that to a known scene - it refernces memory very early on, in deciding what the basic shapes are. Yes, it's still a specialised subsystem, but it's an integrated specialised subsystem.

Having such does not imply mind nor consciousness underlying,

Not in and of itself, no. But then that's not being claimed. The point is that if you don't want to have a mind, or a functional consciousness, then you still need all the coherance and cross checking and processing that we appear to do in the mind. If you want to argue that consciousness is an illusion, then you need to work out how all this is being done. If your explanation is simply that physical systems do everything that our consciousness would do, then you're not eliminating consciousness at all, you're just claiming it's physical. To claim it's illusory, is to claim that there is a different process, that works differently, and yet still produces a picture coherant with out mental experience. That's a lot of coordination between the mechanism and the consciousness, none of which is strictly necessary to explain what's going on.

Basically, the further you get from a theory of mind, the more you need to explain deviations from it, and the more difficult the apparent cooridination between mind and action becomes.

Finally. It is not legitimate to presume consciousness from attended since attended is known to be various and disparate simultaneously.

So is consciousness. What of it?

That is they are attendings first where one of several attends is selected at articulation as social demand products

No, you can have pre-articulation attention. And attention can retard performance as well as boost it, so the question still remains why it is necessary at all? Why does it exist, why is it unitary, why is it more closely related to mental experience than other forms of processing?

For the the above arguments one shouldn't, IMHO, presume mind.

No one is. That's not a list of reasons to presume mind, but rather a list of problems to resolve if you wish to remove mind.

It wouldn't be so bad if you only critiqued my argument, but you also flat say that we do not have free will.

I am pointing out that term 'free will' is so poorly defined that it is useless. It describes nothing in terms of thought, deliberation, personality, character, behaviour, etc, it predicts nothing, it explains nothing.

Several people have suggested definitions that work for the concepts they are describing. Is there anything wrong with those?

Rational and irrational will being better aand more useful....rational will representing adaptive sets of behaviours and irrational will representing maladaptive decisions.

What happens if the topic isn't adapative and maladaptive behaviours, but something else? Do people have to stop talking about that and address an entirely different question?