Free Will, Consciousness, Identity (Identity)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 11, 2012, 17:26 (4279 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: 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.-Yes indeed, will is ultimately manifested in action. What I do not understand is firstly why doing one thing at a time makes free will "irrelevant". Secondly, I take the word to mean not related to a particular subject under discussion, and therefore not important, and I do not understand to whom, in what context, or to what subject "free will" is unrelated and therefore unimportant. This is what needs explaining.-MATT: The strongest drive causes us to act.-The strongest drive is just an expression for what determines the final decision. The question is whether that drive is consciously controlled by the mysterious entity I call "myself", or by influences over which "myself" has no control. Of course there is no difference between what free and unfree will "look like", because the "look" is the action resulting from the decision, which will be the same either way. In the context of justice, the court has to determine the degree to which the defendant's "myself" was in control of the decision, which is precisely why we have terms such as "mitigating circumstances", "balance of mind was disturbed", "under the influence of"... The fact that we are "not going to overturn our institutions" only makes the question irrelevant if your criterion for relevance is the need to overturn or maintain institutions. My criterion for relevance is the light which the question sheds on our understanding of ourselves and of our relation to the universe we live in. -By calling free will "a useful fiction" you have already predetermined that it is not real. I have not. I am not convinced that we are no more than our cells and chemicals, because I do not understand how cells and chemicals can create consciousness of themselves, consciousness of being conscious, and consciousness of the feeling of being in control of the decision-making progress (= the will). You say "the question has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with the manifest." I say the exact opposite. The manifest is the ACTION, and free will concerns the forces that CAUSE the action (or the strongest drive, if you prefer your Nietzschean terminology). Do I or do I not have (a degree of) control over them? What constitutes this "I" that believes it does have control? -I have no answer to these questions ... and it surprises me that by calling free will a fiction you seem to think you do. However, I am even more surprised that you consider the nature of our will (whether free or unfree) to be unrelated to the subject of our consciousness and our identity, and hence to be of no importance. But perhaps we simply disagree on what constitutes (ir)relevance ... which is why I keep asking you: irrelevant to whom, in what context, and to what subject?


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