RE: Do animals have free Will?
February 9, 2012 at 2:54 pm
(This post was last modified: February 9, 2012 at 3:02 pm by genkaus.)
(February 9, 2012 at 11:22 am)Rhythm Wrote: So..human beings have "more" free will than animals do? (We've got quite a bit of hard-wiring ourselves). Setting the bar for free-will as an action that only human beings do and then declaring that because of this, human beings have free will whereas others do not (or more free will) is anthropic bias. In effect, we've made the criteria for free will "to be human", and then declared that because only human beings are human beings, only human beings have free will.
You have to start quoting atleast some text so we may know who you are replying to.
If this is directed at me, then no, I'm not saying that at all.
I'm saying that in order to have free-will, the first thing that is required is the awareness of the will itself. That means self-awareness, awareness of your actions, your motivations, your thoughts. This makes free-will not a result of a graded consciousness, but emergent only after a certain level of consciousness.
Self-consciousness cannot be achieved without conceptually abstracting your self from its concrete representation, i.e. your body. I don't know where the line is, but somewhere along the gradation of consciousness, there is a threshold above which an animal is capable of that abstraction. And once it is capable of it, self-awareness is possible and with it free-will.
And this doesn't indicate any anthropic bias. Any animal with that level of consciousness would have free-will. In fact, as I said, I consider quite a few of higher order mammals to have free will and I do not consider babies to have any.
(February 9, 2012 at 11:34 am)whateverist Wrote: I think the ability to conceptualize is certainly an area where humans excel way beyond other animals. But I don't think that is central to the free will issue. For me, free will is the ability to delay automatic or instinctual response in order to modify behavior in a way that reflects prior learning. Apparently it is the frontal cortex that makes this possible and boy do we ever have a big one. But all mammals have it too to various degrees and many animals are able to learn.
The ability to conceptualize can widen the scope of perceived options but it is the mighty frontal cortex holding back the onslaught of instinctual response that makes it possible to act on those options.
I think you are downplaying the role the ability to conceptualize plays in the process.
Before you are capable of delaying or modifying automatic or instinctual behavior, you need to be aware of what that behavior would be. That is self-awareness. Before you gain self-awareness, you need understand what the concept of "self" means. That idea of an abstract "self" as something that is not any single part of your body, but representative of its whole, is not possible without the process of conceptualization.
(February 9, 2012 at 12:24 pm)Shell B Wrote: Here's the problem. This argument is not subject to levels of free will. Either all animals have free will or they do not. Saying a crocodile is more controlled by his instinct than a human is a moot fucking point. More or less, it does not matter. If animals have free will, which they clearly do, the free will hoopla perpetuated by Christians flies out the window.
Not all animals have free-will. Some do. What is the threshold or the criteria do determine if a particular animal has free-will or not has not been determined yet.
