Do Humans Have Compulsary Will? Which best describes your take on 'will'?

[bennyboy]

Yes.  I am suggesting that the line between subjectivity and no subjectivity is blurred.  It's a vague property.  And your appealing to your belief that it is not a vague property cuts no ice; it's just an assumption.  And it's an assumption that appears undercut by the biology of basic organisms that, while they may not possess subjectivity, appear to possess mind in varying levels depending on the complexity of the organism's nervous system.  Mind and subjectivity are both vague properties.  Look at the psychological development of a baby.  Babies are born with subjectivity but without the full complement of mind features that an adult has.  They acquire new properties of mind, such as theory of mind and object persistence, over time.

I don't think mind, under the definition I've given, is vague, although determining what systems have it is wayyy beyond vague and bordering on impossible. But with the baby example, you are still talking about psychology rather than psychogony.

Repeating your assertion doesn't make it more true.  I bolded the right sentence.

It's not an assertion. HOWEVER you define mind, either it exists or it doesn't, under the definition I gave: that where there is even the vaguest subjective perspective, there is mind. If you want to argue that mind means something more complex, that's fine-- but since we're talking about evolution, I want to start with the simplest possible definition, and look at how it relates to the development of the nervous system and then the brain throughout our evolutionary history.

Do we really care about "ultimate causes"?  I think this is just a position you've taken to be contrary.  Newtonian physics doesn't describe ultimate causes, but it is sufficient for explaining why billiard balls behave as they do.  Are you interested in an understandable explication of the nature of mind, or are you just holding out for an unreachable perfection.  This is the nirvana fallacy in full bloom.  It's also an example of the fallacy of the beard if you are holding that there are unsatisfactory explanations, but no satisfactory explanations.  What are you really looking for here?  Some unimpeachable metaphysical truth, or a plausible and understandable explanation of the phenomena?

As I said, it's easy enough to point to a brain and claim it "makes" the mind-- but this is only in the same sense that magnets make magnetic fields. Both these answers answer the "why" question, but in ways that some, myself included, don't find sufficient. I think, philosophically, the question of mind is why there are minds rather than not, given that they pose no additional utility to any physical system, in terms of physical input and output.

I know, at this point, some are likely to say, "Well, that's just dumb. Mind IS brain function, so of course they come together." But now we are, as I mentioned in the post you first responded to, down to a statement of brute fact.