Information and free will (Introduction)

by romansh , Friday, October 14, 2011, 19:52 (4789 days ago) @ dhw

I defined consciousness as:“awareness of one’s own thoughts, perceptions, actions and environment”. I’d be interested to know how you distinguish between consciousness and self-awareness, and in what "rudimentary" way computers and snooker balls are aware of themselves.

Consciousness and self awareness - Not sure that I'm too fussed about it. I suppose consciousness would not be just limited the self.

Are you aware of all the unconscious drivers that cause your will? Or is it just conscious drivers that create your will. If my will is created by my unconscious it seems pointless to me to force conscious into the definition.

Dhw: No matter how much freedom I have, I cannot make decisions that will go against the constraints of Nature, which includes my own nature as it is now: I can’t decide to fly, jump fifty metres, become dictator of the world, or eat a thousand bars of chocolate at one go. None of these “decisions” are within the compass of my current identity, and so they represent given constraints.

The everyday perceptions of freedom are irrelevant and fairly obvious. We are talking about the the ability to choose what we will or desire. Speaking personally I can choose between vanilla and chocolate ice cream, but I can't choose which one I desire more at any given moment in time.

You challenged me on what I meant by “Nature”, and you’ve quoted my response but then asked a totally different question! This one, of course, is unanswerable because it relates to the nature of consciousness, which nobody knows. It therefore reinforces the alternatives I offered you. I’ll rephrase them: 1) we are at the mercy of our chemistry and other influences beyond our control, so we do not have free will; or 2) the chemistry among other influences IS us, and we control it, so we do have free will. What is the "we" that controls, and is the "we" itself uncontrolled?

Whether we have consciousness or not in free will is irrelvant and not necessary at least according to my perception of what "free will" should be.

Now you may add consciousness to yours. Fair enough. The question remains in that we have wills (wants, desires) that we are not aware of, so we should be asking can these wills be free.

You think whether our brain chemistry affects our thoughts is unknowable. But we can experiment on the effect chemicals on my brain and thoughts. I volunteer to be tested - I can suggest some nice single malts as chemicals.

I’m afraid its convolutions leave me cold. We don’t know the nature of consciousness, but if you accept that it includes awareness of one’s own thoughts, you will also have to accept that if our thoughts are about awareness, we are aware of our awareness. We will also be aware of our awareness of our awareness, and so on. Fair enough.

But don't you find like Blackmore most (if not all) your daily activities are as if they were done on autopilot. I can look back on my day or the last half hour and not find any truly conscious spots (memories yes, but consciousness less so). And when I ask myself the question Am I conscious now?, I find what I perceive as my conscious raised, yet I know from experience this apparently conscious will be in gone in five minutes.

You can describe Blackmore's observations as convolutions, but it does not make them such

You still haven’t told me why, in my example of choosing a TV programme, a) consciousness is not integral to the process, and b) in what way my decision is forced on me by influences beyond my control. If now your only answer to b) is that I’m at the mercy of my chemistry, we’re back to the alternative views expressed above.

Think of TV program you really detest. Now when it comes on watch it all the way through. You seem to think this is somehow independent of the conversation we are having. I simply would argue your will (desire) to prove me wrong is simply greater than your desire not to watch the program.

It's not about the control, it's about the homunculus you keep pointing to.

In your earlier post you argued that all choices are dependent on the information we get from our environment. I pointed out that free will relates to the conscious ability to use that information in order to make decisions. Without x and y, there can be no choice between x and y, but free will (if it exists) is the conscious ability to choose between x and y – in other words, x and y are the trigger that sets free will (if it exists) in motion. Again you have not responded.

No - its about the the ability to make those decisions freely. It's about how we choose our wills.

I suspect that you’ve used your conscious ability to control your decision-making process in order to ignore certain arguments, but on the other hand, you may prefer to attribute it to your brain’s ongoing chemistry! (“My brain made me do it!” as the man says on the video.)

Perhaps, but did I do so freely?

One of the reasons I do not answer all your questions, is that there are many of them. My posting style I find lends itself to relatively short exchanges. So I find replying to long posts like this one I tend to miss the odd question or three.