RE: Consciousness Trilemma
May 28, 2017 at 1:57 am
(This post was last modified: May 28, 2017 at 2:10 am by bennyboy.)
(May 25, 2017 at 12:22 pm)Khemikal Wrote: I know, I know, it sounds so radical.....that we might have to rethink the notions of mind a bunch of primitives came up with in the absence of nueroscience. Perish the thought. Next thing you know cats will marry dogs, the justice system will collapse, people will become amoral monsters, and it will be armageddon..and then, by god, then.....we'll really wish we'd believed in ghosts.
The sarcasm. It burns!
(May 26, 2017 at 10:59 am)Khemikal Wrote: You and I, on free will advocating hard determinism, might find an easy example of the sorts of qualia that eliminative materialists can be skeptical of. How it feels to freely will a decision. No one, if hard determinism is true, actually feels that. That qualia will not map to any such freely willing system or process or organ..because there isn;t one.
Did someone say my name?
I don't think your semantics on this issue are quite right. Free will is the capacity of the self to express itself in action without undue external influence or impediment. If the self is arrived at by deterministic processes, and collects information by deterministic processes, then it would be strange indeed if the self could act variably: essentially, free will would be the capacity of the self NOT to act according to its nature, which is obviously a paradox.
When I'm standing in the aisle choosing my candy bar, it doesn't matter to me whether the universe is material, or whether it's deterministic. For what I am, that situation is perfectly describable as an act of free will. "Free will," in fact, is a label for that category of experience, in distinction of other categories wherein I'm unduly influenced in my decision.
