If there's no awareness or consciousness, then "free" doesn't matter. An entity without any awareness or consciousness does not want or desire anything. Being "free" applies only to conscious entities which want something, and if they are allowed to pursue what they want, we say they're "free," but if they're prevented, then they are not free.
Whether an entity is free might very well matter, even if it is not consciously aware, if the word is being used within a proper context. Such as when a rock is free to roll downhill, . . .
No, it doesn't matter if a rock is free to roll downhill, and that use of "free" is different than the case of a conscious entity being free or not free. Being "free" (in the case of the rock) matters only if you add something else which does matter. A rock rolling downhill per se does not matter. But if you add that an innocent critter is in its path and might get injured, then it matters if that critter gets hurt, but the rock rolling per se does not matter.
Something, even a rolling rock, might "matter" if you add that it might cause some benefit or harm to someone. But then you're just saying that EVERYTHING matters, no matter what (because it's always possible that it benefits or harms someone), but then you're just saying a tautology: Everything imaginable matters, whatever it is (because it might do benefit or harm). Which is pointless. If EVERYTHING matters, then "mattering" itself doesn't matter. So no, only some things matter, not everything imaginable. And so only things which might pose benefit or harm to sentient beings can matter.
Obviously we don't always know FOR SURE that it matters, that a sentient being is harmed or benefited. But still some things do matter and others do not, and the rolling rock in itself having no impact on any sentient being does not matter, and that rock is not "free" to roll, nor is it "good" or "bad" if anything stops it.
. . . or a weed is free to take over a garden.
Only if you assume that it poses harm to someone, like the owner of the garden. In which case it's not the weed per se that matters, but the desire of the garden owner to maintain his garden. So it's the human's desire for the garden which matters, not the weed. But the weed per se takes on importance as it intrudes into the interests of a sentient entity which wants something. The freedom of the weed per se does not matter because the weed is not a sentient entity, or an entity with consciousness. Only entities with consciousness matter. Or whatever they want matters.
Or the freedom of sentient entities matters. But the freedom of a non-sentient entity, in itself, does not matter.
Of course if you bring external restraint or coercion into the equation then you've established a proper context within which delineated types of behavior is nominally considered to be free.
Yes, and such restraint or coercion does not matter if the only thing affected is a rolling rock or a weed spreading somewhere. If nothing else is impacted by that object, or by restraint or coercion against it, then it does not matter. But if a sentient being is benefited or harmed, then it matters.
Conscious awareness of one's wants and desires doesn't automatically confer freedom.
Yes it does, if along with it there is selection or choice taking place. If one is conscious of making the choice and also of one's wants or desires, then that combination of factors makes the choice a free choice, if it is made without threat or coercion from someone outside who makes the choosing one worse off than s/he would be if that outside threatening one did not exist. And if the threatened one chooses differently only because of the outside threat, then it's not a "free choice" but is a case of that one's free will being suppressed.
In fact the opposite can be true. Ask a Buddhist monk. We can be prisoners of our desires, whether we are conscious of them or not.
No we can't be. But, our desires can change, in which case we can desire something different at a different time. And we might judge that our earlier desire was flawed in some way, while our later desire is more genuine. So when there are conflicting desires, it's more confusing, or ambiguous. Our mindset at one time judges against our mindset at another time and would suppress those desires.
But even if we want to suppress certain desires, we can't do that unless we're conscious of those desires. So it makes no sense to say we're "prisoners of desires" and still not conscious of them. We have to be conscious of it in order to be imprisoned by it. An animal that is penned and doesn't know it is not a "prisoner" of the pen. But if it's trying to get out, unable to crash down the fence, then it's a "prisoner." You can't say the victim is a "prisoner" and yet never knows it. Possibly the victim knows it at one time and not another, and so it's an ambiguous case of being a prisoner in a lesser sense. But being a "prisoner" makes no sense if there's no consciousness whatever of the imprisonment (or what another is calling "imprisonment").
The one "imprisoned" has to recognize it at some point. Perhaps you can offer that victim new information, so he learns of something which then matters and he wants the change, because he sees a better prospect. So giving new information can in some cases lead to the subject's desire for change and a discomfort or sense of "imprisonment" that didn't exist before. But if the subject still wants the same as before, despite the new insights offered by the Buddhist monk, then it's not true that this "victim" really was "imprisoned" by those desires, despite the babblings of the monk.
But without any awareness of anything, or without any consciousness, it's neither free or non-free. Without that awareness, i.e., without the caring or desiring or wanting, then it doesn't matter what happens to that entity. Nothing about it matters if there's no entity that cares or wants or desires. If the entity can suffer pain, that means it has awareness or consciousness about that pain which it wants not to happen.
You've made a good moral case for why we value conscious life. And that we value it more than non-conscious life. I get that. There's solid reasons for doing so. Our society wouldn't function very well unless we did. But it's too general a statement to say it doesn't matter what happens to any and all non-conscious entities.
No, it's a good description of what "matters" and what does not. As long as we include ALL sentient beings, all animals (or other sentient entities in the universe) which want something (or want not-something).
Outside of those wants or the conscious desire for something, it's impossible to identify anything that matters. How can anything "matter" unless some entity wants it or wants it not to be? What's an example of anything that matters in the universe but which no sentient being cares about (or ever will care about) in any way? It's always possible that it will affect sentient beings in a million years from now, and so therefore it matters for us now, to protect the interests of those later sentient beings. But it cannot matter unless it eventually at some point affects sentient beings.
If we don't know about the future (a million years from now), then it's impossible for us to determine whether it will matter or not. Whether it matters depends on what's probable -- i.e., whether it will have an impact on sentient beings.
And conscious awareness still doesn't seem to determine whether it's free or it isn't.
Again, the conscious awareness is necessary in order for there to be free choice or free will, BUT -- by itself, with no selection or choosing process, it's not enough. There has to also be the choosing or selecting along with the awareness. When all that happens in combination, there is free choice (or suppression of freedom if coercion is imposed onto the chooser). So the conscious awareness is necessary and is part of what determines whether it's "free" or if free will is happening.
You can call it free will and I'll concede that this is what most people define as free will, but what is actually meaningful about calling it free?
It's meaningful that it be allowed to pursue what it wants, or what it's conscious of and seeks to acquire. All else being equal, it's "good" for an entity with wants and awareness to gain satisfaction for those wants.
You'll need to define "good", because it . . .
You never use the word "good"? We shouldn't have to stop and define every word. You don't think satisfying wants is "good"? It's not necessary to define a term which is already being used in accordance with its common usage, as in this case, where we're assuming that it's "good" for wants to be satisfied and not frustrated.
. . . because it can be applied to rocks and weeds just as well.
No, rocks don't have needs or wants.
Weeds don't have wants, but perhaps have "needs" (for CO2 etc.) in order to survive, but even then it's not necessarily "good" for them to survive unless a sentient entity somewhere wants them to. So "good" cannot be applied to weeds or rocks per se, because they aren't conscious, so it doesn't matter what happens to them, unless they have some effect on sentient beings at some time or place. If there was a time when no sentient beings existed, then at that time nothing mattered. However, those events could "matter" in terms of their impact on later times when there would be sentient beings. So something 3 or 4 billion years ago might have mattered because it had some later effect on us now.
Or if there was a God observing them, they mattered to him/her/it.
When it comes to living entities it usually pertains to its ability to survive and prosper.
But if it's a non-sentient entity, then it doesn't matter if it survives or prospers, what happens to it, in itself. What happens to it matters only if it has an impact somehow on sentient beings somewhere. I.e., on conscious beings -- including possibly a lower level of consciousness than that of humans. A primitive sensing, being aware, can be significant enough so that it "matters" what happens to it, though to a lower degree than that of humans. The greater is the sentience, the more it matters.
The issue is not whether we "call" it something. Being "free" simply means that the entity is allowed to pursue what it wants, and this allowance is what is meaningful, because it's what is "good" in life, or what matters. It's "good" or "it matters" that entities with awareness get what they want. Like your desire to post your opinions on this message board. It's "good" for an entity which wants to post messages to actually succeed in posting messages.
Excepting those on one's ignore list.
The problem is that lots of people want to call it something as if it had some absolute existence. As if it was a property of consciousness and specifically human consciousness. Now I'll go further than you might by saying that what is "good" in life is what matters to the well-being of humans.
Humans are more important, generally (being more sentient). But "good" pertains to non-humans also. Or, it matters what happens to ALL sentient beings, not only humans. Higher degree of sentience increases the "good" or the mattering.
I'm a humanist and I build my system of morality on that foundation. But I see it as narrow-minded to confer free will only on human beings as some kind of special sauce, because that only obscures our ability to discover the true source of our motivations.
Animals also have a degree of free will, at varying levels as you go down to the more primitive or simple forms. At the extreme lower end it's reasonable to say they have no free will, because it's such a low level. It's not all-or-nothing.
It's "good" for us to get what we want, as much as possible. Obviously it's often difficult, and one person's want conflicts with another's, and so on, but getting those wants fulfilled as much as possible is what makes life meaningful and "good," and being "free" to pursue those wants means more of those wants will get satisfied.
There's lots of good reasons why that isn't true, mostly having to do with the context of which "us" you're talking about.
Only because we're unaware of the others, in the "us vs. them" reality we have to deal with, and we can only judge based on what we know. As we learn more of the "them" and what they want, we have to recalculate what is wanted and has to be satisfied.
And it speaks directly to why desires are often in direct conflict with freedom, and how the satisfaction of desires can result in a loss of freedom.
We have to keep recalculating as we recognize more and more of the existing desires. But in all the reconsidering what's "good" and how much can be satisfied and how much curtailed, it's always the case that only conscious beings need to be "free" to choose and have "free will" and that "free" does not apply to non-conscious entities. So free will and "good" pertain to conscious entities only.
The word "free" implies without restraint. Being consciously aware of a decision doesn't necessarily mean it was unrestrained.
But what it means is that you're not a computer or robot making decisions. The computer/robot is not "free" or "unfree" because it's not aware of anything and does not have preferences it wants to pursue. So "free will" or "free choice" or "freedom" applies only to conscious entities making decisions, not unconscious entities like machines, even though they can also make decisions.
I can't help but think that you're taking a perfectly good and meaningful word and distorting it (the way dualists and spiritualists often do with words such as faith, hope, and love) to imbue it with some absolute connotation that makes it ambiguous and useless. Just like any computer you are free to be what you are. No more and no less.
No, "free" does not apply to the computer which has no consciousness. It's incorrect to say it is "free" (or has "free will") simply because it is left untouched to do whatever it's doing. An untouched moving object might be called "free" in a sense, but it's a bit metaphorical. And it's incorrect to say it has "free will." Nothing unconscious, even if it's moving and selecting options, can be said to have "free will" as DBT said earlier, which is the origin of most of this commentary and text walls. That was incorrect, to say that a machine making selections must also have free will. Because free will must be more than just selecting options. It must be a consciousness which is selecting options, and also a consciousness with preferences, or wants.
Conscious awareness is normally highly focused and restrained. I'd even say that the source of one's desires and subconscious decisions is . . . [and so on]
The point (about conscious awareness) is that it's not machines which have "free will" or need "freedom" -- as DBT said earlier that even a computer or robot must have "free will" if it means choices are made. But "free will" doesn't mean only that choices or selections are being made by something. If the entity making the selections is a non-conscious entity, then it's not a case of free will. For there to be free will there must be intention and preference, meaning awareness of something that is being chosen by the entity having a desire and pursuing this by making the choice.
Computers have intended purposes.
Only the intention of the programmers. The computer per se has no preferences or intentions.
They choose according to programmed or derived preferences.
But only the preferences of the conscious entities which programmed them. Only conscious entities can have preferences or intentions, not the machines programmed by the conscious entities. A motor might run according to the design from the engineer, but it has no intention or preference of its own.
They are aware of inputs and outputs as well as internal status.
No, they are not "aware" of these, anymore than a motor is "aware" of the on-off switch which made it start running, or the wheels or pistons it drives. We have no evidence that these machines have any consciousness of what they are doing or what drives them or what they are driving.
And they have goals that can change independent of external manipulation.
No, they cannot change their "goals" unless there is a malfunction. If they gather information unknown earlier to the programmer, depending on something the programmer didn't know, this information is still something the programmer wanted to gain, knowing the information was out there and could be found by the machine, so that it was the intention only of the programmer, not the machine, that the information be found. It cannot happen "independent" of manipulation by the machine designer or programmer unless there is a malfunction.
Sometimes even an ACCIDENT can happen, not expected by the designer, leading perhaps to a good result, in which case it is good luck, or a "gift from God" or other metaphor, but not an intention or preference of the machine or anything the machine was conscious of.
I've also heard DBT say that free will simply doesn't exist. It varies with the progress of the discussions which tend to go on forever and bring in many points of view. For me the term can have meaning or not depending on how it's being used in the argument. As I've said it's useful within certain contexts, such as legal, or colloquially to describe a particular circumstance of daily life. But all it really means is that a choice was made . . .
By a conscious entity. But if by a non-conscious machine then "free will" does not apply.
. . . and it was within a range of choices that could reasonably been expected to have been made.
By a conscious entity, in which case it can be called "free will" -- but not if it's a selection taking place with no consciousness of it by the one choosing.
