consciousness + decision / selection − coercion = free will (free choice)
I disagree with most of what you just posted. I intended to convey that free will and self are lies, misrepresentations, of [what] an individual actually perceives.
What you are successfully conveying is that it's difficult to explain or identify "self" and "free will" -- but you are not conveying that they are "lies" or "misrepresentations" of something. You don't know what an individual "actually perceives" any better than what you're calling the "lies" and "misrepresentations" of what is perceived.
The "free will" and "self" are what we actually perceive, but they are more difficult to explain and analyze -- it's not that they are "lies" and "misrepresentations" anymore than all the rest of what we experience in life. They are more complicated than the other perceived objects, but they are perceived objects, just as space and time and causality and happiness and freedom and love and hate etc. are perceived objects also difficult to analyze.
Illusion is exactly what I meant. A person continuously gathers information about the world trying to make sense of what it is she's sensing. What is actually happening is mostly different from her developing models in process.
But how much is "mostly different" and how much is accurately understood? In your judgment of "what is actually happening," you're assuming there is some accurate perception happening.
Yes, there's always more that we don't understand. But that doesn't make the part we do understand a "lie" or "misrepresentation." We do perceive things correctly in part, but there's always more which we missed, and there's usually some misperception along with the correct perception. That's true of all that we know -- we never KNOW it fully, 100%, accurate in every imaginable detail. So there's always the erroneous part -- but still there is the part that's correct, and our knowledge or understanding does increase as we keep investigating further.
If you don't believe this, then you're opposed to education and all other pretense of trying to gain more truth, so you discourage learning and teaching and want schools eliminated. And you don't waste your time posting in a message board saying things you pretend to believe are true.
All that's different about "free will" -- and "self" and "freedom" and "good" and "evil" and "justice" etc. -- is that these latter are more difficult to analyze than the less complicated truths or objects of reality. It's nonsensical to say they are "lies" or "misrepresentations" in some special sense. If you mean that everything imaginable is a "lie" and a "misrepresentation," then your own posts in this message board are lies and misrepresentations. So then why are you engaging in this lying and misrepresenting?
One is defending one from revealing anything about her while one is also processing some stuff her body has produced to sustain and maintain a base level of alertness and comfort which is probably not now relevant.
"now"? You mean it was "relevant" earlier, but is not any longer? When did it cease to be relevant, and how do you know it was relevant earlier?
You are continuing to ignore the fact that the consciousness of what we do, and the decision-making, and will to act, are parts of an ongoing process happening over a time span, maybe several seconds, or maybe several minutes or even hours, and during this decision-making event there are many moments of consciousness and of selecting, and so some of the conscious awareness moments do happen earlier than some of the brain impulses causing the desires or urge to act, so that the consciousness does also serve as an input actively affecting the elements happening later, such as future brain impulses.
You keep falsely putting ALL the consciousness LATER than ALL the brain cell activity causing the urges, when in reality some of the conscious moments happen PRIOR to some of the brain cell activity -- i.e., the brain cell activity happening later.
Consequently she comes up with contingency models which may or may not conflict with her primary status models.
You are artificially distinguishing "contingency" models from "primary status" models. You've not explained this distinction, nor can you. It is your make-believe only. When the decisions or judgments or perceptions are made, they are real, not "lies" or delusions based on something "contingent" conflicting with the "primary" part. Rather, they can be difficult to explain totally, and we have to keep rechecking our knowledge or understanding to try to improve it.
When we make a judgment or decision, where consciousness plays a part in it, this could be partly something later (e.g., a conscious moment) acting on something still later (primary brain-cell impulses), which then alters the final action, and this is a free-will act, or choice. A "choice" or "decision" can be an ongoing process, spread over a time span, in which later factors enter into the final act, or the final option selected. (And this does not rule out also the more spontaneous "choices" happening in a flash with little or no time for reflection. But if consciousness is totally left out, playing no role, then it's not really a free-will act, but just a reflex impulse which cannot properly be called a "free choice" one makes.)
You capture a piece of my thesis with your statement about behavior not completely .... but you miss the main point. The main point is one is continuously evaluating what one has processed after the fact sometimes out of error sometimes out of intent.
"after the fact" -- translation: after the "decision" or "choice" has taken place.
Yes, but there's also evaluating that goes on BEFORE the "decision" or "choice" has taken place. That processing might continue on for several seconds or minutes, during which consciousness happens and evaluates the options. This makes the final "decision" or "choice" a free-will act, because it happens in conjunction with the conscious awareness, rather than totally PRIOR to consciousness. Just because some brain cell activity happens very early does not mean the later consciousness plays no role. That earlier nerve cell impulse is not the entire decision-making process as long as the final act is delayed for a time period, as it often is.
. . . conflicting with what her behavior was meant to suggest using prior presumptions.
What "was meant to suggest" originally may be less important than the later processing, including the consciousness, as long as this happens PRIOR to the final actual move or body activity chosen by the decision-making process, which continues on until the moment of resultant action.
The "decision" is not complete until the action decided upon takes place.
It is a fact that when the 'choice' was made the following conditions are most likely now inappropriate for what one had intended to do to be useful.
But the CHOICE is not completed until the action chosen is performed. Until that action decided upon actually happens, the choice is still in process, and whatever affects it, including consciousness, can alter the selection. And this final selection and action is just as "appropriate" and "useful" as you can ever expect a chosen act to be. It is wacko nonsense to say that nothing ever done was useful or appropriate if it required a few extra seconds of reflection before being carried out.
The point is evolutionarily we've developed systems for making multiple models for what we expect which are changed as we see how our latest behavior is received by our social group.
That change takes place does not mean our choices are "lies" or "misrepresentations" -- the adjusting and modifying something earlier is just as legitimate and authentic as the earlier spontaneous impulses. Actions decided upon in a process where consciousness has time to enter and affect the outcome (or action decided upon) are actions of free will, or actions we freely chose to do, and this freedom or choice is not a lie or misrepresentation of anything. It's just something difficult to analyze and explain scientifically, like much of life is difficult to analyze and explain.
It is impossible to remain consistent or accurate given the lag between what we think about the now past and changes by others to that since we executed particular behaviors.
But our thinking is not limited to only behaviors already past. When a decision to act takes place consciously BEFORE the behavior, then it becomes a free choice, because there is selection plus also the consciousness entering into the process. A conscious moment in that process can affect a later brain impulse also playing a part, as not ALL the brain cell activity happens prior. Some of the brain impulses are earlier, but some are later, and these later ones can be changed by the consciousness happening earlier (or in between the earliest and the later brain impulses) over an extended process of ongoing brain impulses intermixed with conscious moments.
Decision-making is not limited to the earliest brain-impulse flash to the exclusion of anything happening a second or more later.
Awareness of actual now is never possible in necessarily respondent beings.
Maybe, but neither do the responses happen immediately and simultaneously with the earliest brain impulses, but can be delayed over a time span, and within that time span the awareness can enter into the process and affect the final delayed response.
We project an awareness anticipating now which is never quite right.
Probably our awareness is never 100% accurate about anything. Everything is in flux, at some level, and no matter how much we pin down the objects perceived, the millions of changes happening inside them every microsecond are never fully accounted for. But this less-than-100% grasp of what's happening does not turn all our knowledge and understanding into a lie. The need is to keep improving the grasp or the understanding.
If one looks at social transactions one sees how inappropriate one's behaviors were when we executed them.
And also how appropriate they were. If you can detect the "inappropriate" part, this means you also see the "appropriate" part, which is also real. Just because something was less than 100% perfect does not mean it had no appropriateness whatever. That we can recognize past errors in actions means there's also a correct part, which was not an error and was not inappropriate.
It would be senseless babble to insist that everything we do in life and all choices have been inappropriate. If everything imaginable we do has to be inherently inappropriate, then a words like "appropriate" and "inappropriate" have no meaning.
We are a future oriented machine still operating in the past.
No -- at least not always. Our consciousness can affect an action not yet taken. The decision to act is not finished before the consciousness enters the process -- or not always finished. Some (or most) decisions to act continue on long enough for the consciousness to enter it prior to the act being decided. So that consciousness operates also in the future, impacting what happens later, even though it was prompted by something earlier.
There's both. Even if all choice is a result of physics, it's still a free choice if the action decided on happens after the moment(s) of consciousness.
No one is giving any reason why a choice is not still a free choice, or free will, even though it was caused by something earlier. All that's necessary for it to be free will is that the action decided on happens after there was some conscious activity during the process of deciding (and of course that the action was not determined by coercion or threat of punishment to the one deciding (making him/her worse off than s/he would be without the threatening one), in which case it becomes a suppression of free will).
You have to eventually get beyond the mere dogma that there can be no free will if there's causality. At some point you must finally give a REASON why this must be, or why a choice cannot be both free and yet also caused or determined by something prior. It's only when it's caused by an intended threat of harm toward the one deciding that it changes from a free to an unfree choice. Otherwise there's no reason to insist that an act cannot be free while at the same time being caused by something, e.g., something like the person's brain-cell activity.
Detection theory which provides methodology for comparing human and animal observation with respect to a theoretical Ideal observer.
\equiv {\frac {p(y|H2)}{p(y|H1)}}\geq {\frac {\pi _{1}\cdot (U_{11}-U_{21})}{\pi _{2}\cdot (U_{22}-U_{12})}}\equiv \tau _{B}}\Rightarrow L