As usual, I am below arguing a position that I don't necessarily believe. This is a game,
a temporary hypothesis. Precede every assertion with "Let's say that ..."
1) There's no need for two of you. You are a steady mesh of choices in
parallel, from the tiniest cellular process to picking up the cranberry. And I
agree, there's no need for free will there.
2) The "two behavioral tendencies" are not *two*. They are a loose collection
of many behaviors that *might* group, ungroup, and regroup. The compositional machinery
that does the grouping does NOT pit one group of behaviors against another group of
behaviors. It mixes and matches behaviors to arrive at a grouping that (kinda-sorta)
optimizes for least effort.
3) The "first person sense" is the perception of irreversibility. It is the mesh of you
clipping the tree of possibilities. In a different post, you asked "freedom from what?"
The answer I'm proposing here is: freedom from evaluating/realizing every POSSIBLE next event. At
any given instant, there's a (composite) probability distribution for everything that *could*
happen in the next instant. Some events are vanishingly unlikely. Other events are overwhelmingly
likely. The interesting stuff is somewhere in between, like 50% likely to happen. Within some ε of
50% are the things you sense/feel/perceive. And as the options fall away, you feel/realize the lost
opportunity. That is the first person perspective you talk about. Again, no free will is required.
4) When you feel that lost opportunity, i.e. when you sense that you've now gone down an
irreversible path, for a little while, you can ask "what if I'd taken that path and
not this one?" Again, no free will is required, only the ability to *perceive* that
there were other paths your mesh/machine could have taken if the universe had been
different.
5) That cohesive sensing is identical to the compositional machinery in (2) above.
There's a storage/memory to that compositional machinery that can remember the historical
trace the mesh took ... the "choices" made by the mesh. So, the NEXT time your
mesh is on a similar trajectory, your compositional machinery will be slightly biased by
your history.
That memory of lost opportunities is what we call free will.
On 6/15/20 8:29 PM, [email protected] wrote:
... when I act deliberately, there are two of me, the me that acts
and the me that chooses to act. [...] Now from a third person point of view,
you have no need of
any of that. [...] No need for free
will there.
Now I am under no illusion that human individuals are wholly integrated
beings. In fact, evolutionary theory suggests that we have been designed by
two selection regimens, one that privileges the individual, and one that
privileges any group that we associate with. At any one time, these two
behavioral tendencies are struggling for the controls of our body-engine,
[...]
The only need for free will arises from my first person sense that I have
made a decision not to pick up the cranberry and then acted on that
decision. [...]
Now I got bogged down over the weekend, so I still don't know where you guys
came down on that issue. I get the impression, perhaps, that what you have
been arguing about is entirely orthogonal to my concern.
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