Free Will

[Yoo]

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.

No of course not. Whether it's an illusion or not, for me and you it's as real as it gets.  But it's still an interesting philosophical discussion, right? I too have doubts about hard determinism, because why would there then be qualia at all? I can't rap my head around them being there without a function, because they seem to be way too complex to be a random by-product of something else. But I also can't think of any possible function they might fulfil, that wouldn't be already fulfilled by the machinery in the brain that caused them. So qualia, it seems to me, can't be entirely caused by the brain. But that doesn't seem reasonable to me either, because where the hell would they then come from?

I'm thinking of starting a thread on the Hard problem of consciousness, see what others have to say about this.