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

[bennyboy]

Take a hypothetical scenario.  Eye spots are first used to trigger reflexes in the movement of the organism.  The eye spot evolves into an eye and is used to detect movement, not just light and dark, in the visual field.  A cluster of neurons in the brain gets involved so that the reflexive movement is persistent.  The persistence of the movement is reinforced by a feedback loop in the brain re-presenting the image of the stimulus to itself to aid persistence.  The eye perception evolves to where it can recognize patterns; each of these patterns stimulates a different movement reflex.  The feedback loops get more complex.  These feedbacks work by 'strobing' the neurons in the brain associated with activation by signals coming from the eye.  Is this not a possible beginnings of awareness and memory, the memories being fixed patterns of feedback from the feedback loops?  Is this awareness?  Or is it no longer clear where awareness begins and where it leaves off?

Yes, this is almost the exact kind of argument I was anticipating. In terms of light reception, there definitely must have been a point at which a species with no sensitivity to light suddenly had an individual instance of light sensitivity: specifically, the point at which, for the first time ever, the reception of one or more photons directly affected (even slightly), that organism's behavior. The question I'd have would be-- is there some kind of awareness of this light at that simple level, or is it simply a kind of gimpy mutant reflex? I don't know the answer to this question.

The point is not to say "evolutiondidit", but rather to show how it is possible that evolution "couldhavedoneit".  The proof still lies in the future, but an immobile obstacle to the puzzle of psychogony has been tentatively removed.

Okay, you and I are still, I believe, working at opposite ends of the micro/macro scale. Let's look at the eye, or even the human body. In purely material terms, the body has evolved through statistical interactions with environmental forces, etc. etc. However, the most fundamental physical particles did not, so far as we know, evolve. Rather, it is the relationships AMONG the particles which evolved. This is my view of mind: that there must be some maximally minimal (lol) thing which can be called "mind," below which there is nothing, and that what we normally refer to as mind-- the perception of shapes, colors, etc. represent a complex interrelationship among instances of that most simple element.

In the end, you might be right-- we might have to agree to disagree. I cannot imagine a gradient between not-mind and mind, anymore than I can imagine a gradient between not-space and space or not-matter and matter. But though nobody yet has said it, my inability to imagine something isn't a good argument against it.