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

[The Grand Nudger]

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

. . . given that they pose no additional utility to any physical system, in terms of physical input and output.

Which seems a ridiculous assumption on it's face by reference to our shared observations of the additional utility our minds provide.  Do you want me to answer you within the framework of the question -you asked-?  Or would you prefer that I mentioned that from my POV "What additional utility does brain provide over brain" is a non-sensical question.......which do you think will lead to discussion and will terminate it?

If I propose that mind offers additional utility over brain within the framework of this conversation, as..at the very least, a conversational distinction which -you- decided to impose......then your responding to my answer with some bullshit about mind/brain being interchangeable...after having assumed yourself that they are not -is- entirely disingenuous....and amounts to a moving goalpost./  If I answer your question as asked, all of a sudden you change your fundamental assumption, implicit in the question.  If I answer this, will you reverse the fundamental assumptions of the question -yet again as criticism? Either an answer distinguishing between the two as asked is acceptable.....or it isn't. I can go either way.

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).

Indeed, and? 

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.

Not the question I asked and you know it.  You used my question as an excuse to reassert precisely what I'm trying to get an explanation for.   I feel safe in the assumption now that you do think that your mind provides you additional utility...since you've been avoiding a direct answer like the fucking plague. 

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.

Not the conversation we're having...but I'm fine with all of that.  I haven;t asked you to prove that you have qualia, I haven;t denied you that experience (though amusingly you've denied mine). Do you think that qualia is providing you with additional utility?  

The answer is yes, we both know that. We both agree on that. That answer is yes for us both regardless of what mind is made of (the physicalist position). The physicalist position has problems, sure...this isn't one of them.

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