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

[Angrboda]

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.

I don't know what your definition has to do with it. It seems you are conflating having mind with experiencing qualia. If so, my earlier example of cerebral achromatopsia, where an individual can have visual qualia without the color of ordinary visual qualia, is good evidence that qualia isn't an all or nothing proposition. Regardless, I'm not arguing about qualia. Mind (or subjectivity) could be either vague, or it could be that there is a definite boundary between mind and no mind. Your continually repeating that you think there is a definite boundary does nothing to settle the matter. I don't personally see any reason why there has to be a definite boundary, which is why I question you as to the basis of your belief. Why do you feel there has to be a definite boundary? I don't think that mind is a result solely of complexity - it needs to be complexity of a specific kind. But if animal's nervous systems evolve incrementally, I see no obvious argument that subjectivity or mind wouldn't also have evolved incrementally.

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.

(bold mine)
Did you really just say that? My point is that I believe there will likely be cases where, under any criterion, it's not clear whether the organism does or does not possess mind. Given that, your continued insistence that it either is or isn't present is just an assertion, one which you keep repeating to no effect.

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 don't find current explanations of mind sufficient either. So let's dispense with that misunderstanding.

 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.

Here your assumption about the non-vagueness of mind resurfaces. If you could grant that the boundary between mind and no-mind is not distinct, the origin of mind would make a lot more sense, as it wouldn't have to be there all at once. This is analogous to the case of cerebral achromatopsia, where one can have partial qualia.

I do think mind possesses utility to the organism, but yes, it is just one form of processing among many forms of processing that the brain does. My hunch is that the brain uses the neurological machinery of perception to form mind, such that we think in visual images, or in words as in how our auditory systems process; to my view, mind, meaning subjectivity, is just an aspect of making use of the brain systems devoted to perception. It's as if a process in the brain hijacked the machinery of perception for its own ends.