Free Will, Consciousness, Identity (Identity)

by dhw, Sunday, July 08, 2012, 20:12 (4520 days ago)

Back from our family holiday in North Wales (thanks for all the good wishes). Despite torrential rain most days, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and one another's company ... and we also made a conscious, collective, "free-will" decision to defy the constraints of our pluvial environment, and go out and explore the region.-And there you have a most unsubtle introduction to the above topic, which has once more dominated the forum in my absence. We had a good old ding-dong over this last autumn, when I suggested that will, consciousness and identity were inseparably connected. No-one seems to have considered the framework I tried to establish then, so I shall put it forward once more.-I offered the following definition of free will: "an entity's conscious ability to control its decision-making process within given constraints." The constraints are:
1) Nature and/or the situation.
2) Factors connected with the decision-making process itself, which include genetic make-up, family influence, education, chance/accident, illness.-As regards 1), the constraints are insurmountable (I can't decide to fly, or be 10 feet tall; if I owe you $1000,000 or am in prison, I can't decide to be debt-free or to run around outside). As regards 2), no-one can draw clear borderlines between conscious decisions and unconscious influences, and so until we know the nature and source of consciousness/ will/identity, no-one can know the extent to which our decisions are or are not free from these influences.-Identity itself clearly emerges from an ongoing interaction between the factors listed in 1) and 2), but consciousness has to be conscious of something, and this is where I'd like to take up a comment of Matt's: "For an observer to exist in the first place, it is necessary to be able to remove yourself from the raging river of consciousness. THAT is free will, consciously exercised. Buddhism's underlying goal [...] is to exercise our ability to be an observer. In Hindu tradition, this "observer" is the soul itself."-I'd like to offer a different perspective. Firstly, observation demands consciousness of the thing to be observed, and secondly if the thing to be observed is myself, I see this as additional consciousness (not the removal of consciousness), and since I can also observe myself observing, I must be capable of many layers of consciousness, which may well set us humans apart from other animals. And these layers of consciousness lead me to a degree of scepticism concerning the materialist's belief that will/consciousness/identity are forms created solely by the chemicals within my body and their (mysterious) interaction with the influences I have enumerated above.-The (equally mysterious) alternative to the materialist explanation attributes the controlling layer of consciousness (the will) and other layers (including emotions, memories, reason, imagination etc.) to a form of energy which interacts with those chemicals but which transmits signals to them ... as opposed to being their product. Here I might tie the argument in with other recent posts on brain scans (which cannot prove that the brain is the transmitter, not the receiver) and on dark energy ... a form of energy whose existence is inferred from its effects. Perhaps will/consciousness/identity are also forms of "dark" energy, interacting with the known energy of the physical body. If this kind of dark energy exists, it's what I might call "the soul itself".-As with God versus chance, we have a choice between what seem to me to be two improbabilities: self-aware chemicals versus an unknown form of energy.