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by robwwilliams
942 days ago
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Fun and insightful comment. Not sure at all. Also some ambiguities in definitions. Above I mean “consciousness” of the type many would be willing to assume operates in a cat, dog, or mouse—attentional and occasionally, also intentional.
I agree that this is downstream of pure attention. Attention needs to be steered and modulated. The combination of the two levels working together recursively is what I had in mind. “Free will” gets us into more than that. I’ve been reading Daniel Dennett on levels of “intention” this week. This higher domain of an intentional stance (nice Wiki article) might get labeled “self-consciousness”. Most humans seem to accept this as a cognitive and mainly linguistic domain—the internal discussions we have with ourselves, although I think we also accept that there is are major non-linguistic drivers. Language is an amazingly powerful tool for recursive attentional and semantic control. |
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My take on "free will" is definitely partly based on Dennett's work.
As for "consciousness", it seems to me that most of not all actions we do are decided BEFORE they hit our consciousness. For actions that are not executed immediately, the processing that we experience as "consciousness" may then raise some warning flags if the action our pre-conscious mind has decided on is likely to cause som bad consequences. This MAY cause the decision-making part (executive function) of the brain to modify the decision, but not because the consciousness can override the decision directly.
Instead, when this happens, it seems to be that our consciousness extrapolates our story into the future in a way that creates fear, desire or similar more primal motivations that have more direct influence over the executive function.
One can test this by for instance standing at near the top of a cliff (don't du this if suicidal): Try to imagine that you have decided to jump of the cliff. Now imagine the fall from the cliff and you hitting the rocks below. Even if (and maybe especially if) you managed to convince yourself that you were going to jump, this is likely to trigger a fear response strong enough to ensure you will not jump (unless you're truely suicidal).
Or for a less synthetic situation. Let's say you're a married man, but in a situation where you have an opportunity to have sex with a beautiful woman. The executive part of the brain may already have decided that you will. But if your consciousness predicts that your wife is likely to find out and starts to spin a narrative about divorce, loosing access to your children and so on, this MAY cause your executive function to alter the decision.
Often in situations like this, though, people tend to proceed with what the preconcious executive function had already decided. Afterwards, they may have some mental crisis because they ended up doing something their consciousness seemed to protest against. They may feel they did it against their own will.
This is why I think that the executive function, even the "free will" is not "inside" of consciousness, but is separate from it. And while it may be influenced by the narratives that our consciousness spin up, it also takes many other inputs that we may or may not be conscious of.
The reason I still call this "free" will, is based on Dennett's model, though. And in fact, "free" doesn't mean what we tend to think it means. Rather, the "free" part means that there is a degree of freedom (like in a vector space) that is sensitive to the kind of incentives the poeple around you may provide for your actions.
For instance stealing something can be seen as a "free will" decision if you would NOT do it if you knew with 100% certainty that you would be caught and punished for it. In other words, "free will" actions are those that, ironically, other people can influence to the point where they can almost force you to take them, by providing strong enough incentives.