The impulse to act is called a reflex. The desire to act is a "want", not a "will".
Not quite.
Reflex action come in several forms, nerve loop response that does not involve the brain, ie, tapping the knee.....
Yes, I know.
Muscle memory is the act of committing a specific motor task into memory through repetition.
Yes. For example, learning to walk, or learning to play the piano. When you begin you are very conscious of your movements, but once you've acquired the skill you do so without thinking.
Psychological drives, urges, impulses, the desire to eat chocolate, the felt impulse to act, etc, is a matter of acting according to ones will.
No. There's a
key distinction between simply doing whatever you feel like, versus doing what is appropriate. The inability to act appropriately is sometimes referred to as "a lack of
impulse control". For example, you are at a friend's birthday party, you see the cake on the table, and you stick your hand into the cake and put a handful in your mouth. That's an example of a lack of impulse control.
Knowing what behavior is appropriate, or ethical, or legal gives us the ability to make moral choices, to do the right thing rather than the wrong thing. Such knowledge is not expected in a toddler, but it is expected at an appropriate stage of maturity.
So, the child who plays with a loaded gun is not held responsible if he accidentally kills his brother. Instead, his parents are held responsible for failing to secure the gun where the child cannot reach it. The child did not deliberately kill his brother, because he did not understand the consequences of his actions.
But a bank robber knows what he's doing and he knows that it's wrong, yet he deliberately chose to do it anyway, because he wanted the cash. So, the bank robber is held responsible for his deliberate actions.
Now, all of the events, in all of these examples, were all causally necessary from any prior point in time. There are no meaningful distinctions between any events with causal necessity. To say that it was causally necessary that the child would learn to walk, that someone would learn to play the piano, that another child would shoot his brother, or that the man would decide to rob a bank, tells us nothing useful. All of these events, without distinction, were equally causally necessary. So, if we want to distinguish these events in some useful way, we need to look at the details, at who caused what, and why they did what they did.
Free will is when someone decides for themselves what they will do, while free of coercion and undue influence. It makes a significant empirical distinction between the causes of specific events.
Okay, so I was wrong to equate "impulse" with "reflex". But you are wrong to equate "impulse" with "deliberate will".
Wants drive our will. Wants are formed through experience and memory, a sense of pleasure or desire driving our will to acquire or ppsses the object of our desire.....
Acting according to our wants without reflection or thought is
a lack of impulse control. That is why I use the problem of rape to bring this to your attention. There is a strong physical attraction, and a strong desire, to have intercourse with a woman. And if we give into that desire, without considering the consequences, then we get rape. So, our wants and our desires cannot be allowed to govern what we will do. Instead, we need to choose our desire to do what is appropriate.
Our will is our deliberate intent to do something specific. It is not a desire to do something, but an intention to actually do it.
What we think, feel and do is up to what the brain does with sensory information, which is determined by past experience/memory function, things that have brought us reward in the past, things to avoid, whether it is better to postpone pleasure now for greater reward in the future.
Correct.
1-You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are.
Correct.
2-In order to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are—at least in certain crucial mental aspects.
No. It is never necessary for a person to be personally responsible for their own birth or for the way they were raised. They are held responsible for the consequences of their deliberate actions,
regardless of their past. Our
interventions (arresting them, trying them, imprisoning them, offering them an opportunity for rehabilitation) are
justified by the
harm they have done to someone else. That harm, the consequence of their deliberate act, is all the justification that is required for our intervention.
It is not our philosophy of determinism and free will, but rather our philosophy of justice that controls here. It is in thinking about justice and what it means that we find the answers regarding what we should do and should not do, and what is and is not justified.
3-But you cannot be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.
Ah. Hello Zeno. You're creating a new paradox for us. A paradox is a self-induced hoax created by making one or more false, but believable suggestions. The
false suggestion here that if you have prior causes, then they must be held responsible rather than you. But we can see through this little hoax by extending it. How can we hold those prior causes responsible if they too have prior causes? So, we have to keep shifting responsibility back through the prior causes of the prior causes all the way back to the Big Bang. And then someone needs to explain how we are going to rehabilitate the Big Bang so that it ceases robbing our banks. The notion that we are not responsible because we have prior causes creates an absurdity.
4-So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do. - Galen Strawson.
Nope. We're not following you down that rabbit hole Galen.
The problem is this: if causal necessity is used to excuse anything, then it excuses everything. If it excuses the pickpocket who stole your wallet, then it also excuses the judge who chops off the thief's hand. If it removes one person's responsibility, then it removes everyone's responsibility, including the sense of responsibility that motivates people to advocate for prison reform and other social progress.
Universal causal necessity/inevitability is a logical fact, but it is not a meaningful fact and it is not a relevant fact. It has absolutely no meaningful implications for any human scenario. The intelligent mind can simply acknowledge it, and then ignore it.
Unfortunately, those trapped in the paradox see it as a force that robs us of control and freedom. Ironically, it never seems to rob them of their control and their freedom, as they feel responsible for converting us to their way of thinking, by seducing us into the paradox.
Not knowing what is going on in your head means that you have no control or say on what happens in your head, yet what you think, feel and do - what you are - is the result of what is going on in your head.
But what is going on inside my head is a model of reality that includes: me being a process going on inside my head (let me know if you're getting dizzy, yet, but that's the correct empirical description). What I am saying is that I do not need to
control what is going on inside my head in order to simply
be what is going on inside my head. Some guy once said, "I think, therefore I am (or, at least I think I am)".
You're creating unnecessary puzzles that require no solution. Yet, solved it is.
Saying 'you made the choice for yourself' is deceptive because it gives the impression of self-control in the form of conscious or willed regulation of the decision making process, which is actually an unconscious interaction of information, inputs being integrated with memory through the agency of neural networks.
Like I said, it is not necessary for me to consciously control the neural activity in order for me to BE the neural activity.
The conscious self is not running the process.
But it must explain the process, because if my unconscious brain decides to rob a bank, without letting my conscious self know about it, then both parts will be arrested and jailed. Our deliberate decisions will involve both conscious and unconscious processes.
That's the point, one is no more an instance of free will than the other. The distinction lies in external factors Being free from externally applied force, a gun at your head, doesn't free you from the constriction of 'an action’s production by a deterministic process.'
Yes. The distinction lies in external factors, like the guy with the gun, or internal factors in the case of insanity. Determinism makes no distinctions.
However, determinism is not in any way a "constriction". No one experiences reliable cause and effect itself as a constriction. Only specific causes can prevent me from doing what I would normally do.
In fact, causal necessity is exactly identical to "me doing what I would normally do." So the notion that causal necessity is some kind of constraint is false.
If patterns cannot be recognized, distinctions cannot be made. Pattern recognition enables distinctions to be made, intelligence and memory function. Without memory function, patterns cannot be recognized and distinctions cannot be made.
Okay. That's not a problem then. I have no issues with any of the facts of neuroscience. On the other hand, I may take issue with any philosophical or semantic problems that they introduce into their interpretation of the evidence.
