Free Will

[bennyboy]

Is the sense of self an illusion as well?  You could equally argue that every particle and wave in and outside the body is not a human mind.  And yet-- here I am, and the sum is greater than the parts.  And that is pretty much the definition of supervenience-- that new properties arise at new levels of organization.  If the ability to experience qualia can arise on the shoulders of dead matter, then why should not free will arise with it?

Of course it depends on your definition of free will, but I already made the distinction between qualia (I used consciousness) and free will. Experiencing qualia is compatible with the nature of the particles in the sense that arising qualia don't seem to change the particles that produce them. Qualia just seem to happen, whereas the arising of free will would change the particles themselves. This is because free will arising from a configuration of particles (or something else), would change the way those particles would interact. If it didn't, and the particles just continued their predetermined chain of causing and being caused, then I wouldn't call it free will, because it was predetermined. Do you get what I'm saying? I'm having trouble explaining.

I get it.  You are talking about determinism.

What's the point of consciousness, by which I mean the ability to actually experience qualia, then?  If it's all just brain "doing stuff," then what's the point of having an agent around to serve only as a sideline observer?  Why have the illusion of free will at all? That's a pretty curious byproduct, I'd say.

But my position is a little more semantic than that. I have experiences, and I use words to describe them. I go to 7-11, I sit there for a minute deciding what I want, then I buy and consume it. That's about as free as it gets, and it doesn't really matter to me what's going on in the machinery underneath.