No, I don't believe we have free will. I'm a hard determinist.
My view is that consciousness is about differentiating different states of the underlying system, so that everything that is experienced in consciousness represents the state of some - for want of a better word - variable. And that includes the feeling of will... it can be absent or present, suggesting a state change, and like any other aspect of consciousness, brain damage etc can remove it (eg Tourettes). So my view is that every feeling we take for granted as being somehow outside of observation - i.e. everything we attribute to the observer 'I' rather than the observed - is just as much as state as whatever is observed... so for instance the sense of 'understanding' something is in my view a measurement of the stability of a neural context... in neural network terms I'd guess it was the measurement of how 'settled' the network is. The way I see it is that consciousness is essentially layered with all these different 'channels' that co-exist but do not interfere with each other (such as sight and sound, and less obviously will). As I've said in another thread, like transparencies piled up on top of each other with a much richer picture emerging from the sum of them but where any of these layers (ie channels) can be removed by brain damage. So although it feels like free will, like I'm making choices - and that indeed there is an 'I' to make those choices - that's just part of the 'design' of the system/simulation/illusion whatever you want to call it... in the end, in my view everything that is experienced comes from the activities of the underlying neural networks of the brain and therefore can only be deterministic.
My view is that consciousness is about differentiating different states of the underlying system, so that everything that is experienced in consciousness represents the state of some - for want of a better word - variable. And that includes the feeling of will... it can be absent or present, suggesting a state change, and like any other aspect of consciousness, brain damage etc can remove it (eg Tourettes). So my view is that every feeling we take for granted as being somehow outside of observation - i.e. everything we attribute to the observer 'I' rather than the observed - is just as much as state as whatever is observed... so for instance the sense of 'understanding' something is in my view a measurement of the stability of a neural context... in neural network terms I'd guess it was the measurement of how 'settled' the network is. The way I see it is that consciousness is essentially layered with all these different 'channels' that co-exist but do not interfere with each other (such as sight and sound, and less obviously will). As I've said in another thread, like transparencies piled up on top of each other with a much richer picture emerging from the sum of them but where any of these layers (ie channels) can be removed by brain damage. So although it feels like free will, like I'm making choices - and that indeed there is an 'I' to make those choices - that's just part of the 'design' of the system/simulation/illusion whatever you want to call it... in the end, in my view everything that is experienced comes from the activities of the underlying neural networks of the brain and therefore can only be deterministic.
