What is the actual free will humans have?

[Subsymbolic]

You are shifting the focus from what is understood to what is not understood. Nobody is claiming that everything is understood, only that something is understood....in contrast to your claim that nothing is understood, a misleading and false claim.

Is the ability to have a conscious experience an electrical effect of brain activity or is it a quantum effect of brain activity?

If this cannot be answered then consciousness cannot be studied objectively at all. You cannot study something until you know what it is.

All that can be studied are the subjective effects associated with consciousness. The subjective experience of having one.

It's just an unhelpful false dilemma. So, as I said before, MU.

 

[untermensche]

You are shifting the focus from what is understood to what is not understood. Nobody is claiming that everything is understood, only that something is understood....in contrast to your claim that nothing is understood, a misleading and false claim.

Is the ability to have a conscious experience an electrical effect of brain activity or is it a quantum effect of brain activity?

If this cannot be answered then consciousness cannot be studied objectively at all. You cannot study something until you know what it is.

All that can be studied are the subjective effects associated with consciousness. The subjective experience of having one.

It's just an unhelpful false dilemma. So, as I said before, MU.

False?

It is a question.

Trying to evade the meaning behind the question may be false, but the question is not.

To know what consciousness is you actually have to know what it is.

Pretending to know is not enough.

 

[DBT]

You are shifting the focus from what is understood to what is not understood. Nobody is claiming that everything is understood, only that something is understood....in contrast to your claim that nothing is understood, a misleading and false claim.

Is the ability to have a conscious experience an electrical effect of brain activity or is it a quantum effect of brain activity?

If this cannot be answered then consciousness cannot be studied objectively at all. You cannot study something until you know what it is.

All that can be studied are the subjective effects associated with consciousness. The subjective experience of having one.

It doesn't matter whether consciousness is an electrical effect or a quantum effect or a combination of both, the brain utilizing quantum effects for cognition. The point is that the evidence supports brain agency, brain condition, brain architecture, brain connectivity, etc, but not independent, autonomous consciousness making decisions and ordering the brain. Chemical and structural changes within the brain effecting changes in consciousness and not vice versa, and so on....

 

[untermensche]

You are shifting the focus from what is understood to what is not understood. Nobody is claiming that everything is understood, only that something is understood....in contrast to your claim that nothing is understood, a misleading and false claim.

Is the ability to have a conscious experience an electrical effect of brain activity or is it a quantum effect of brain activity?

If this cannot be answered then consciousness cannot be studied objectively at all. You cannot study something until you know what it is.

All that can be studied are the subjective effects associated with consciousness. The subjective experience of having one.

It doesn't matter whether consciousness is an electrical effect or a quantum effect or a combination of both, the brain utilizing quantum effects for cognition. The point is that the evidence supports brain agency, brain condition, brain architecture, brain connectivity, etc, but not independent, autonomous consciousness making decisions and ordering the brain. Chemical and structural changes within the brain effecting changes in consciousness and not vice versa, and so on....

You can't say anything objective about consciousness, you can't even objectively study it, until you know what it is.

Your claims that it is possible expose your religious nature here.

 

[DBT]

It doesn't matter whether consciousness is an electrical effect or a quantum effect or a combination of both, the brain utilizing quantum effects for cognition. The point is that the evidence supports brain agency, brain condition, brain architecture, brain connectivity, etc, but not independent, autonomous consciousness making decisions and ordering the brain. Chemical and structural changes within the brain effecting changes in consciousness and not vice versa, and so on....

You can't say anything objective about consciousness, you can't even objectively study it, until you know what it is.

Your claims that it is possible expose your religious nature here.

There you go, it doesn't take long before you resort to ad homs and insults, just a bit of pressure does it every time.

I am able to describe the attributes of consciousness all day long....the ability to see, hear, smell, touch, taste, think, feel, think and act in the form of perceived and experienced images and sensations. Which according to the evidence is the role of a functional brain, used as a form of mental/virtual map of the world and self enabling navigation and interaction and rapid response.

 

[Subsymbolic]

It's just an unhelpful false dilemma. So, as I said before, MU.

False?

It is a question.

Trying to evade the meaning behind the question may be false, but the question is not.

To know what consciousness is you actually have to know what it is.

Pretending to know is not enough.

Perhaps googling what the technical term 'false dilemma' means:

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/94/False-Dilemma

Asking:

Is the ability to have a conscious experience an electrical effect of brain activity or is it a quantum effect of brain activity?

Is clearly a false dilemma.

 

[untermensche]

Perhaps googling what the technical term 'false dilemma' means:

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/94/False-Dilemma

Asking:

Is the ability to have a conscious experience an electrical effect of brain activity or is it a quantum effect of brain activity?

Is clearly a false dilemma.

It is not a dilemma of any kind.

It is asking about the state of understanding. Something I guess you think is irrational.

Has the state of understanding reached a point where we can say what consciousness is objectively?

It might be some electrical effect. There is electrical activity in the brain.

It might be a quantum effect. There are quantum effects associated with matter, and they need not conform to our understandings. They can be counter-intuitive.

It might be some other kind of effect.

But it exists. It is some kind of effect of some kind of activity.

The point is consciousness is not understood objectively.

It cannot be studied objectively in any way. You cannot objectively study something until you at least know what it is.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Perhaps googling what the technical term 'false dilemma' means:

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/94/False-Dilemma

Asking:

Is the ability to have a conscious experience an electrical effect of brain activity or is it a quantum effect of brain activity?

Is clearly a false dilemma.

It is not a dilemma of any kind.

It is asking about the state of understanding. Something I guess you think is irrational.

Has the state of understanding reached a point where we can say what consciousness is objectively?

It might be some electrical effect. There is electrical activity in the brain.

It might be a quantum effect. There are quantum effects associated with matter, and they need not conform to our understandings. They can be counter-intuitive.

It might be some other kind of effect.

But it exists. It is some kind of effect of some kind of activity.

The point is consciousness is not understood objectively.

It cannot be studied objectively in any way. You cannot objectively study something until you at least know what it is.

It's helpful that you have reformulated your words, but now I'd like to know how you can sustain the twin claims that consciousness exists and that we can't objectively know anything about it. Because it seems to me that, minimally, knowing something exists is to know something about it: that it exists.

 

[untermensche]

We know about consciousness subjectively.

We know the subjective experience of having the ability to experience.

But we know nothing about it objectively. We do not even know what consciousness is objectively.

 

[Subsymbolic]

We know about consciousness subjectively.

We know the subjective experience of having the ability to experience.

But we know nothing about it objectively. We do not even know what consciousness is objectively.

That's possibly the smartest thing you've said so far. However, you still need to refine it considerably. If you are disallowing all the afferent and efferent sources of evidence, you are going to have to explain quite why you think that your user illusion is any more than an illusion. How do you disallow ideas like the idea that you simply remember having conscious experiences without actually having the experience that you remember so vividly or perhaps Dennett is right and you merely mistake your heterophenomenology for phenomenology. YOu are the one who follows a guy who believes there's a language of thought and so I'd have thought you'd be wide open to the suggestion that all there is to being in pain is narrative.

I'm not saying that these positions are correct, merely that if you really believe there is literally nothing known about consciousness then you lack the resources to reject these ideas.

 

[DBT]

But we know nothing about it objectively. We do not even know what consciousness is objectively.

Testing the functionality of our senses is objective....a conscious subject can see an eye chart and describe what is on the chart, an A, E, F, c, d, x, etc, which is confirmed or falsified by the Doctor or researcher, colour visual range, hearing accuity and so on being attributes of consciousness that can be tested objectively.

On the other hand, someone who is not conscious cannot read an eye chart and describe what they see....

 

[fromderinside]

On the other hand, someone who is not conscious cannot read an eye chart and describe what they see....

You one small step was great. That giant leap? Not so much. I'm pretty sure manta's (octopus, deer, cats, macaques, oscars) are conscious given their equipment and how they function.

 

[Subsymbolic]

But we know nothing about it objectively. We do not even know what consciousness is objectively.

Testing the functionality of our senses is objective....a conscious subject can see an eye chart and describe what is on the chart, an A, E, F, c, d, x, etc, which is confirmed or falsified by the Doctor or researcher, colour visual range, hearing accuity and so on being attributes of consciousness that can be tested objectively.

On the other hand, someone who is not conscious cannot read an eye chart and describe what they see....

I'm not sure that there is a knockdown proof that this is the case at the moment. It's perfectly possible to tell a tale of the eyes doing discrimination (as, for example, modern video cameras do, to discover the precise shapes of the letters and turn them into streams of information that precisely name the shapes discriminated by the vision system (as optical character recognition systems already do) Finally, with that in place, it's not hard to imagine a program that, in really simple code, could produce canned well formed sentences describing the eye chart.

I'm not saying that this is what we do, but I am saying that such a system would not be conscious but would be able to reproduce the capacity that you describe. As such, I suspect that someone who is not conscious would be quite capable of reading an eye chart and describing the results of non conscious processes of discrimination, even using mental language if that was the language they had learned

The point is that there has to be a disjunction between our very public use of language and our intrinsically private inner mental life. If there wasn't then there simply wouldn't be a problem of other minds - behaviour, including linguistic behaviour, would be enough to prove beyond any doubt you had a mental life rather than merely a grasp of the terminology and grammar of talking about one.

That said, my hunch, a hunch that looks better every year, is that our mental life just happens to be what it feels like to have our incredibly rich and recursive manner of sharing information across the brain. As such, it's more our ability to see an eye chart and be reminded of that girl in Bristol who wrinkled her nose as she put on her glasses to look at the menu, to remember the taste of the coffee as you lightly argued about how well time travel was represented in Back to the Future, which is a film that always annoyed you because John Delorean got the funding to carry on swigging cocaine, while Smiths watches, the very last UK watch manufacturer was allowed to close despite making the finest wrist watch the British army ever got, with the most elegant gilded movement...



I'm not obsessed, but I wish that raw shark guy would stop painting watches.

 

[Subsymbolic]

On the other hand, someone who is not conscious cannot read an eye chart and describe what they see....

You one small step was great. That giant leap? Not so much. I'm pretty sure manta's (octopus, deer, cats, macaques, oscars) are conscious given their equipment and how they function.

I suspect that sapience, if not sentience actually descends to drosphilia given that they have all the neurochemical tools that we use for mediating pain and it is deployed during nociception. However, my position on how much a drosphilia actually feels rather than merely being the location for pain events is another matter.

 

[DBT]

On the other hand, someone who is not conscious cannot read an eye chart and describe what they see....

You one small step was great. That giant leap? Not so much. I'm pretty sure manta's (octopus, deer, cats, macaques, oscars) are conscious given their equipment and how they function.

I don't doubt that they are conscious. Any animal with a sufficiently complex brain is most probably conscious of its environment, some probably being self aware....

 

[untermensche]

But we know nothing about it objectively. We do not even know what consciousness is objectively.

Testing the functionality of our senses is objective...

You can only test senses through subjective feedback.

You cannot test them objectively. You cannot see what any other person is seeing.

You do not know how the phenomena of having an experience is generated. You do not know what consciousness is. You cannot study it objectively.

You cannot study anything objectively until you at the very least know what it is.

 

[fromderinside]

Is it necessary to know consciousness is objectively to know what is sense objectively.

I say one can find sense objectively using objective control of stimuli to elicit subjective responses about whether, what, how, that which is being presented is sensed by observers. otherwise we couldn't develop the following relationships between color temperature, light frequency, and perceived color

 

[fast]

But we know nothing about it objectively. We do not even know what consciousness is objectively.

Testing the functionality of our senses is objective...

You can only test senses through subjective feedback.

You cannot test them objectively. You cannot see what any other person is seeing.

You do not know how the phenomena of having an experience is generated. You do not know what consciousness is. You cannot study it objectively.

You cannot study anything objectively until you at the very least know what it is.

To test something objectively speaks to organized methodology; it's not to deny the use of an agent in the process.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I think I missed that...

There's three notions:

1) Your honor, I didn't want to do what I did. I feel I had no reasonable choice under the circumstances but to do what I did. Surely, you can see that I didn't do what I did of my own free will.

2) Your honor, it was an awful choice I had to make. Even though I was threatened, I ultimately did what I thought was right.

3) Your honor, what I did was caused, not just on the macroscopic scale, but on the microscopic scale as well. The actions, the intentions, the thinking, everything, boils down to atoms in motion which themselves are caused, so of course I did what I did, just as you must (not will but must) take the very singular path you must take. There is no free will when it's already written in the stone of physics.

I agree with the first notion, which carries with it a refined notion of free will.

Yes, I guess (1) is definitely better than (2) or (3)...

Still, I think the wording you used is misleading, and I would rephrase like this: 1) Your honor, I certainly didn't want like what I did. But I couldn't find any alternative course of action acceptable to me under the circumstances. So, I guess I have to accept I did what I did of my own free will.

It's certainly a different conception of free will compared to your own but it seems more in line with our expectation about what the accused could possibly say in the context.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Just so you know, I'm trying to wrap up all definitions mentioned by members so far. For now, this is what I have but I'm not finished...

Free Will possible alternative definitions
(1) Free will is the capacity to freely and willingly (i.e. with will) choose to do otherwise in the same situation (ruby sparks)
(2) Free will is the human ability to make choices that are not externally determined (adapted by Speakpigeon from Collins English Dictionary)
(3) Free will is the ability to do what one wants without compulsion (fast)
(4) Free will is the power of choosing not determined by anything beyond its own nature or being (rousseau)
(5) Free will is what would make human behaviour go beyond the unavoidable consequences of the genetic and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature (from biologist A. Cashmore, adapted by ruby sparks to make clear that Cashmore thinks such a free will is illusory)
(6) Free will is the illusion of conscious agency when it is the underlying activity of the brain that is the agent of consciousness, decision making and related motor actions, thought and action (DBT)
(7) Free will is the ability of human beings to make choices on the basis of their own personal criteria, specifically an experience-based representation of the world, produced internally by the individual, i.e. produced by himself according to its own human nature (Speakpigeon)
(8) Free will is the human ability to make choices intuitively, or beyond the limits of cognition (treedbear)

I modified some definitions to make sure definitions are comparable to each other.

I'm still open to your suggestions in this respect.

I should be able to finalise this list tomorrow to get a decent poll started.
EB