On Apr 2, 1:33 pm, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > Most decisions do not have an experience associated with them,
That's an assumption. All decisions could have an experience associated with them without their being part of *our* experience. > we make them > 'subconsciously' (e.g. the movement of my fingers in typing this). That doesn't mean that nothing is conscious of them being made. It is possible to change our attention to include these subconscious movements, or to possibly recover them under hypnosis, etc. Our uppermost consicous layer is just the tip of the iceberg - not an iceberg just of public mechanisms but a whole universe of private experiences on different levels. > So the experience of > free will is just the failure to be able to trace all the causes of a > conscious decision. You are assuming that the causes of conscious decisions aren't conscious themselves. I don't assume that. You are assuming that intention and decision are deployed in a discrete serial system, whereas I think they are just the opposite. I think that because we are a single cell divided, every part of us is actually 'us' in the same way that every piece of a hologram reflects the whole image from a more fixed perspective. The decisions I make are the decisions my brain makes. Sometimes I push my brain to move my body, sometimes my brain pushes me to wake up. There is no reason to make the dynamic have to be more one than the other. > Why are some decisions conscious, while most aren't...I'm not sure. I think > it has to do > with decisions for which we employee language/logic to predict consequences. No, we use language and logic all of the time without being conscious of it. If anything our executive level awareness has to do with dealing with novelty. It's interesting to think aboout how a sudden event can both wake you up to the fact of the event, even as it puts you into a mode where you act out of pure reflex or instinct. You become more conscious and unconscious at the same time. This would support my view that different regions of our brain are conscious (in perhaps exotically different ways) rather than the mind being a motor with a single gear shift. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
