Free Will

[Angrboda]

My computer seems to work okay without it (so far as I know) experiencing what it's like to be a computer.  My car seems to drive around pretty well without it (so far as I know) experiencing what it's like to be a car.  There's no reason to think that ANY mechanism would need to experience what it is like to be itself in order to function properly.  So are you disregard mind as a brute fact, or attempt to explain why one particular mechanism experiences what it's like to be itself?

I would say that you aren't experiencing what it is like to be yourself. You are nothing but meat, if by you we mean that physical mechanism which houses your brain. Your brain, too, is meat. There is no "what it's like to be" for meat, just as there's no what it's like to be a brick, or a car.. The what it's like to be is a persistent projection; it's a model of what we are. It describes 'us' as being inside the head, a couple inches back from the eyes. It describes this meat as being what we are, though we are in no sense this meat; we are a process in the brain that is modeling the self as a consciousness. Qualia are the bones of this model. We create a sense of self by modeling our thoughts as belonging to a unified center of awareness; yet these thoughts need not be in any sense central or unified. That is simply another aspect of the model, that our thoughts are coming from one location in space. There is no "what it's like to be" because this what it's like to be is nothing but a fabrication, a construct created by a thinking machine. There is no 'you' except that which the brain creates. What the brain creates is the appearance of a self, complete with unitary consciousness, a body, and a past history. These are just phantoms created in the brain. No brain process 'owns' a body. The effect of the brain process is that things are controlled in the same way that the brain process models them as being controlled. The body isn't a part of 'you' -- you are just a computation inside some neurons. You are the brain's mannequin. It clothes you with all the accoutrements you associate with the self, but it is not the self. It's merely meat thinking thoughts about meat.