Consciousness: brain lesions remove free will (General)

by dhw, Saturday, August 03, 2019, 10:15 (1937 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I don't know where consciousness goes, but my thought is in a layer of our reality at a quantum level. Not another world or whatever you mean.

dhw: Then I apologize. I thought you believed in an afterlife in which our consciousness linked up again with your God’s.

DAVID: I just reiterated my belief in a panentheistic God in and out of this universe.

dhw: It would be interesting to know what you really believe will happen to your consciousness after your death! Anyway, the fact remains that the concept of free will remains highly dependent on dualism, and even then it requires careful handling of the problem of cause and effect, since all our decisions are predicated on factors such as heredity, environment, upbringing and chance experiences which determinists rightly claim are beyond our control.

DAVID: First a note re' yesterday. We had no internet for long periods, so I couldn't respond. My view is after death my consciousness completely rejoins God's consciousness, and that is 'Heaven'.

Sounds to me like another world.

dhw: I suspect, however, that most of us – myself included – are convinced that we do have freedom of choice, and I remember in our discussions with Romansh pointing out that even if it is indeed the cell communities (principally of the brain) that make the decisions (= materialism), they are MY cell communities and no one else’s. No matter how many external factors may have influenced me, those influences have become part of MY individuality. And so to deny free will is to deny my individuality, but how can you do that? I AM my cell communities and all that they contain, and so their decisions are MY decisions, which are not controlled by anyone or anything else – an important element in defining free will. Whether those cell communities can also generate something greater than the sum of their parts (a possible compromise between materialism and dualism) is another subject dealt with in my Theory of Intelligence.

DAVID: Good discussion of how everyone feels about free will. What confuses the materialistic attempts to explain consciousness is that it is obvious the brain has evolved to have helpful mechanisms to overcome how wet biology creates our perceptions of reality, in that the brain catalogs previous experience to fill gaps. Ask yourself: Why do we look at clouds and see patterns of known objects?

This is a totally different topic: the subjectivity of perception and the forming of “Gestalten” (as in gestalt psychology), or patterns. I don’t know why you, as a dualist, say the brain “overcomes” our perceptions of reality: for a materialist, the senses do the perceiving and the brain forms the patterns, and you seem to agree. I would have thought that as a dualist you would argue the opposite: that the soul processes perceptions and forms patterns out of them. However, I’ll leave you to argue with yourself on that topic! It has nothing to do with the subject of free will.