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

[bennyboy]

Your moving the goalposts now.  You started out by claiming that mind offers no additional utility now mind offers no utility over brain?

Don't accuse me of dishonest argumentation until you've actually read the posts again. The nice thing about forums is that they record a record of what people ACTUALLY said. I said, and you quoted, ". . . given that they pose no additional utility to any physical system, in terms of physical input and output." As far as I'm aware, the brain is a physical system, and the physicalist position is that mind represents a category of brain function. You could (theoretically) determine the entire range of data processing of a physical system, without knowing whether that system actually experiences a subjective perspective (aka qualia).

Take away that mind bit (whatever that means to you).  Assume your body keeps doing what it normally does, minus that (whatever that is to you).  You see no decrease in utility?  

To me, mind is the subjective experience of ideas and sensations: not the processing of information, but the experience of it. And if you took this away from a functioning brain, then no, from a physicalist perspective I would not expect to see any degradation of functionality, because there's no part of the biochemistry or physics of the body which is posited to be affected by the existence or non-existence of qualia. There's no criterion by which a physicalist can differentiate between a sentient human and a philosophical zombie.

See, this is the problem: I know for sure that qualia exist, because I experience them. However, I cannot prove it, cannot have it proven to me by anyone else, and have no way of knowing whether a given physical system does or does not experience qualia. You can equivocate on different definitions of mind, or throw debatey terms at me, but I don't think you can deny that any of the previous sentence represents truth.