Free Will, Consciousness, Identity (Identity)

by dhw, Tuesday, July 10, 2012, 20:40 (4518 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: After having this topic recently rear its head several times, I find myself returning to, and agreeing with Nietzsche, as stated in a recent post to George:
The question of free will IS purely irrelevant. Because it is a fact that we cannot will more than one thing at a time.-As always, Matt, your posts are nothing if not stimulating! The question of free will is irrelevant to whom, in what context, and to what subject? I have already defined (ad nauseam) what I mean by free will ... namely: "an entity's conscious ability to control its decision-making process within given constraints" (for further details of these, see my post of 08 July at 20.12). If you do not accept this definition, do please tell us why, and give us your own. The test of free will, as I see it, involves a) choice, and b) decision. Since Nietzsche believed there was no God, clearly religious agonizing over man's freedom of choice (e.g. man's responsibility for the Fall) would have been irrelevant to HIM. Does that make it irrelevant to your Christian friends? If you and your wife have been tied up by a gunman, and your lives depend on your ability to persuade him not to kill you, will you NOT try to persuade him, because the question of whether he can or cannot make a choice is "irrelevant"? I suspect that on the contrary, you would lay enormous emphasis on the fact that he DOES have a choice, and his own future (not to mention yours) will depend on his decision. And how does "one thing at a time" influence whether we are or are not in control of our choices? Would you argue that the gunman has no choice (or choice is "irrelevant"), because this is just a one-off decision? (Here, incidentally, the given constraints are the situation of gunman threatening to kill you. You have to decide whether to try and talk him out of it or just sit back and say nothing. He has to decide whether to kill you or not.)-I simply don't know whether we have free will, because I don't know to what extent our conscious decisions are controlled by the (largely unconscious) factors I enumerated under 2) in my last post. But I do believe that the subject is HIGHLY relevant to our understanding of ourselves and our fellow humans, not just because it lies at the heart of our justice system (to what extent are we responsible for our actions?) but also because it is inseparably linked to the problem of consciousness and identity. Is there or is there not an unknown form of energy that controls our physical selves, or do our physical selves constitute everything we are? At present our consciousness (of which will, memory, reason etc. are all integral parts) is a total mystery. An unknown form of energy would explain it, but would then confront us with another mystery ... what IS this unknown form of energy, and where does it come from? By extension, the problem also involves the possibility of an unknown form of energy that may have consciously created us, as opposed to our being the product of blind chance. Understanding our own consciousness and how we are able to control what we do with it (through the will) is therefore one possible means of access to the wider issue of God's existence or non-existence. If you regard these questions as "irrelevant", you may as well dismiss every single discussion we have ever had as "irrelevant". I can only repeat: irrelevant to whom, in what context, and to what subject?