Free Will, Consciousness, Identity (Identity)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Wednesday, July 11, 2012, 01:39 (4306 days ago) @ dhw

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...
> -Pardon me, I (sincerely) thought that I was clear *exactly* why the question is irrelevant!-Will is ultimately manifested in action. And truthfully, even the best of us can only *consciously* do one thing at a time. -You raise the question of a degree of choice: By the time we act, the degree of choice is 1. If will is deterministic (and our feeling of "freedom" is an illusion) than what it means is that the single strongest drive causes us to act. -If our feeling is right, and we can have equal ability to choose *every* path (with the constraints you mention), it simply shifts "the strongest drive" to that of the drive that wills to choose. -So in all those examples you carefully concocted: By whatever method, "free" or "unfree," the question is categorically irrelevant. It's not even a legal question. By the time action is manifest, even in the scenario where I'm talking someone out of killing my family--only the strongest will manifests. -> 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 ...-You bring up the justice system, as always happens in these discussions. That's precisely what drove me to the irrelevancy of the question: "Does free will exist?" -Since you keep insisting on its relevance, let me throw a couple questions your way, to continue my thrust:-What would "unfree will" even look like? Would it look like free will? If hard materialists are correct, and free will is simply an illusion, a fiction due to long memory, I state that it doesn't actually matter: We're not going to overturn our institutions: everything we have built we have built upon the notion of a rational, free, actor. (The core of humanist thinking.) -If we can't tell the difference between a free and unfree actor--and I challenge you to try--than at worst we can agree that "free will" is a useful fiction for us to be able to justify an order and punish wrongdoers. -Again, the question has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with the manifest. Again, I draw you to the attention of how you could tell the difference between free and unfree wills--we can't. Therefore, it's a question about a useful fiction. -Nietzsche's analysis I think has little to do with his ideas of God. Remember, he was more mystic--Read the section in Zarathustra called "The Apostates" and you will watch him categorically castrate "pale atheism." That entire novel is what challenged his thoughts about free will, because it sprang from below--it was its own torrent. A buddy of mine was assigned Zarathustra's first three books in a class about Gnosticsm. -Ironic, that!

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"