(May 17, 2025 at 12:48 pm)Alan V Wrote:(May 16, 2025 at 11:54 pm)emjay Wrote: But what I've personally always meant by free will, the altogether more reductionistic view, is that ultimately both the bottom up and the top down functions in the brain are enacted via the same physical mechanisms, eg neurons. Different areas of the brain may have different functions relative to each other, but they are all achieved through the same physical mechanisms, which follow the laws of physics and thus, barring quantum effects, are determined in my view, and thus cannot be considered 'free'.
I don't think we have to appeal to quantum mechanics to acknowledge free will in human brains, just to the processing of information. We generate our own information, and respond to it just as readily, if not more so, than to any external stimuli. We are, in fact, constantly talking to ourselves: describing realities, abstracting ideas, modeling possible responses, and assessing outcomes. Somehow that is all done within the laws of physics, but I can only think it is because new properties operating by new rules emerged as life evolved.
As I said, I really don't think we're going to be able to get on the same page about this... and we've certainly tried... because it's as if we are talking different languages or at different levels of description. Basically, nothing you've said necessarily disagrees with determinism in my view but it does in yours, and therein lies the problem and why I think we keep talking past each other. Ie you can talk about all the cool things our brains can do, or 'we' can do in consciousness, but it's all in my view still ultimately achieved by and represented in physical neurons and thus determined by physical laws.
I think it basically comes down to... and I think this should go some way to addressing Breezy's point to me as well... whether you consider consciousness 'epiphenomenal' or not. There would seem to be three possible positions on that;
1. I believe it is epiphenomenal; that is for every conscious state I believe there is a corresponding brain state... a neural correlate of consciousness... and therefore to me the driving power is the physical brain, at all times, and any emergent properties are still represented physically and thus governed by physical laws.
2. The second position would seem to be a view where consciousness is emergent and has causal power of its own distinct from, and unrepresented by, the underlying physical structures of the brain, and somehow interacts with it but as two different types of 'stuff' interacting, ie a feedback loop of physical brain interacting with phenomenal consciousness (as opposed to my view of both phenomenal consciousness and non-phenomenal consciousness both being represented physically by the brain, and thus any interactions between the two occurring only on that physical level). Is that your position? Within that view there seems to me two basic possibilities:
i. that within that framework, consciousness is still dependent on the brain in some sense. This is what I assume is your position, but I'm not clear on how you relate consciousness, or its states, to the physical brain.
ii. the more extreme, typically theist position, that consciousness can exist completely independent of the brain, after death.
