Free will again (Humans)

by romansh , Sunday, March 18, 2012, 16:25 (4632 days ago) @ dhw

"What ever that means" is what we're trying to find out! I'm tempted to ask if during the day you become a zombie. I don't mean that rudely. My point is that there are degrees or levels of awareness, and I just don't believe that you go through the day without being aware of what you are doing and perceiving. But being "consciously self aware" is a different level. In my correspondence with BBella, I suggested that small children are conscious/aware, but do not have the same levels of self-awareness that an adult has. They clearly know, for instance, that they're hungry, and they do what is necessary to satisfy their hunger. I don't think they consider different options, effects, influences, relationships etc. In our daily lives, we may well operate much of the time on a similar, lower level, but that doesn't mean we are not conscious.
Dennett in his Consciousness Explained (which it didn't at least for me) had an interesting idea - if a zombie could behave in exactly the same way as a 'conscious' person then that zombie is in effect conscious. But at least for me this logic also works equally well in reverse.-Different degrees of consciousness? Well perhaps. All I know if after an hour I look back on a supposed highly consciously self aware moment, it's all the same 'zombie' jumble.-> 
> If I'm to make sense of these two purely hypothetical statements (the reverse of which would be equally true), I need to know what consciousness "seems", and in what "sense we perceive it", and that requires definition. I perceive consciousness (it "seems" to me) as "awareness of one's surroundings and oneself". If that doesn't exist, I don't know how we are managing to conduct this correspondence. I perceive will as "the faculty of conscious and deliberate choice of action" (Collins). These definitions are valid for me, whether our will is free or not. If you disagree that the will (free or not) operates through consciousness, it would be very helpful to have your own definition of the two terms.
This whole debate gets locked up in a semantic debate. But if we have an unconscious desire (will) are you saying by definition it cannot be free. If so what are your reasons other than convention?
will - for the purposes of this discussion, synonymous with want, desire, wish.
consciousness - what I perceive as awareness.-Do I believe consciousness as a separate "soul'. Definitely not. But if it did exist it would have the same problems as my material self. How does it interact with my body, does it conform to the first and second laws of thermodynamics?
> "Less" conscious (why the inverted commas?) does not mean non-conscious. It confirms my argument that there are different degrees of consciousness. If you can see why there is no difference between lesser and greater degrees, e.g. between a child's awareness of hunger and what to do about it, and an adult's awareness of the different options, effects, influences etc.- not to mention the capacity for self-analysis - do please explain it to me!-The "" were to imply uncertainty. I can no more describe consciousness to you than I can describe the colour blue. We can exchange wavelengths and we can exchange fMRI pictures of conscious minds.-I'm coming to the conclusion that everything is conscious at least to some degree or nothing is conscious. Consciousness while a useful model in some aspects of science but only because it does not lend itself well to reductionism.-
And that zombie remark. That was highly personal and inappropriate. But then again I am shaped to say this beacause of sense of humour amongst other things.