Free Will, Consciousness, Identity (Identity)

by dhw, Sunday, July 29, 2012, 14:17 (4499 days ago) @ romansh

Romansh, thank you for your detailed response. I'll try to answer you point by point.-ROMANSH (re determinism and indeterminism): How does either give us the ability to have free will?...Indeterminism does not give us free will either...None of these give us free will.-Of course they don't. No 'ism' can "give" you free will. It can only explain why free will is or is not a possibility.
 
ROMANSH: Of course your answer should be don't know - because you don't know where consciousness comes from. Which is fair enough. But there are clues - i don't have memories of being conscious before I accumulated enough biological matter and programming. -This is indeed a clue that our consciousness depends on biological matter. On the other hand, mystic and psychic experiences (such as NDEs) are a clue that our biological matter acts as a receiver, not a transmitter, and that consciousness and identity can survive the death of the brain. Neither clue is decisive, and so I keep an open mind.
 
ROMANSH: [Irrelevant] to me, and I would argue to you if you looked at the problem the way I do.-I know you regard the subject as irrelevant, but I also asked to WHAT. (See the next point). If I looked at the problem as you do, I would agree with you. But I don't, and that's why we're having this discussion.-ROMANSH: In one sense I would agree the free will discussion is relevant. If free will is false then much of our perception is built on a house cards.-We can hardly separate our perception from our self-understanding or our consciousness, and the nature of the latter (materialism versus unknown form of energy) is relevant to the God question. Therefore we now agree that the subject is relevant!-ROMANSH: But a belief in free will (an indpendent agency) is similar to a belief in a god.-They are connected. Both beliefs entail a form of energy that does not depend on the material world as we know it.-ROMANSH: If we don't have free will (whether conscious or unconscious) then our consciousness is an illusion (not what it seems). This is why I don't accept including consciousness in any definition.-True, but this is precisely the "if" that's in dispute. We seem to have a different concept of how definitions function. For me the term free will automatically refers to a faculty for making conscious decisions. If consciousness is an illusion, that does not mean the definition is wrong, it means we do not have free will as I have defined it.
 
ROMANSH: I can't show you that I am conscious, and you cannot show me that a brick is not conscious. These are assumptions we make.-Agreed. Epistemology has taught us that we can't be sure of anything, so the most we can aspire to is belief, based on experience and observation ... our own and that of others. It is my subjective belief that you and I aware not only of ourselves but also of each other. I also believe that all living organisms have a degree of awareness, though I very much doubt if any of them reach our level of self-awareness (a vital prerequisite for my concept of free will). Believe in conscious bricks if you want to, but I'm not sure what relevance that has to our subject.
 
ROMANSH: After living fifty odd years of so called consciousness and believing in free will thoroughly, I thought about free will. Once I thought about it made no sense to me. That is why I don't believe in the concept.-I have lived a lot longer than you, thought about it, and went the other way, from youthful disbelief to open-mindedness! It makes sense to me, but so does determinism, and that is why I neither believe nor disbelieve in the concept. If you could present me with evidence that the materialist concept of consciousness is correct, that every mystic and psychic experience is a fake or a delusion, and that my self-awareness and intuitive sense of control are illusory, I would share your disbelief.
 
ROMANSH: But is it [the will] a consequence of something? Or is it some independently intrinsic entity?-See below.-ROMANSH: Whether we are conscious or not is irrelevant - unless you are pointing to something supernatural similar to a god's ability be independent. If so then there is little point in this discussion.-I don't like the word "supernatural" as it implies that we actually know what is natural. About 90% of the material world is unknown to us (dark matter and dark energy). The quantum world is a mystery. But yes, this discussion boils down to whether all our questions about consciousness (of which free will is one possible manifestation) can be answered materialistically. I don't know. Nor do you. So how can you be so sure that our "ability to make choices" (part of your own definition) is never under our own conscious control?