Compete for whose attention?
This is all information processing, so the actors are the various processes involved. The activity related to options that trigger the highest level of, for example, reward associations, will propagate into areas associated with conscious deliberative processes, often called the 'global workspace', becoming the focus of attention. The onset of conscious awareness of unconscious or pre-conscious processing is characterised by widespread ('global') synchronised activity across the brain.
It's a function of the way the system is organised. Processes that produce the highest salience in some context, e.g. reward system activation, will suppress 'competing' activity, and if the activation crosses a threshold value, will trigger deliberative processing, involving conscious awareness.
Can you elaborate on "reward system"? I think of reward in the common sense - someone does something "good" (according to some kind of spectrum of good and bad) and some willful agent rewards them for the behavior, and I suppose it usually includes the idea that the reward will serve as an incentive to induce more of that or similar good behavior. What exactly are you talking about?
It's a core system that's responsible for basic positive motivational behaviours conditioned by associative learning; so it's a primary driver of goal-seeking activities. A reward is something that we respond to with a positive approach, to which we are attracted. It's based on an ancient part of the brain that mediates the behaviourally dependent aspects of homeostasis by responding to so-called 'primordial' feelings (e.g. hunger).
It provides the physiological basis for experiential judgements of 'good' and 'bad' (e.g. what satisfies hunger is 'good'); and it's also the system so easily 'hijacked' by maladaptive rewards such as drugs, gambling, sweet food & drink, social media, etc. The
Wiki page is pretty good on this.
Is this based on some science or are you giving thoughts about how you personally experience things?
It's based on science research - I'm trying to give a simplified interpretation to indicate how the sub-systems interact. It's actually considerably more complex than what I've described.
Honestly it seems like you're making a case for a high-level arbiter, what with the talk of "assessing" options, and an option "winning". Matter cannot assess anything, nor declare winners. Matter would not know a winner from a loser.
No, it's just that complex functions are easier to grasp described in anthropomorphic terms. When I say options are 'assessed', I mean that there are comparisons of the degree of activity triggered by the salient associations of each of those options, which effectively ranks them in terms of the strength of those associations. When I say one option 'wins out', I mean the option that best matches the contextual criteria is processed further or becomes a goal.
I would use a computer analogy, but although one can think of what the brain does in computational terms, functionally it's very different from a digital computer, being a collection of neural networks, where hardware and software are indistinguishable, and having dynamic local connectivity. In theory, they can be computationally equivalent, but it would be via an emergence relation, i.e. a digital system emulating a neural network.
The arbiter regress doesn't matter since I'm Christian. The scriptures say that we were created in God's image, so we are like Him in that we are "little gods". As such, each of us are soveriegns. That's just a belief, but it does nicely solve the free will problem.
Not so much solve it as simply label it 'solved'.
"Got a difficult problem, an unknown, or an inexplicable? God-did-it™ solves 99% of all known imponderables!"... Meh.
But the fact that Black may or may not have to act assumes that Jones has free will. The premise depends upon the truth of the thing it claims to refute, which is a contradiction.
The question is whether Jones has, i.e. can
exercise, free will
in that situation, whether he can be held morally responsible for his choice. The idea is to refute syllogisms along the line of:
P1. You have moral responsibility for your choices iif you have free will.
P2. You have free will iif you can choose differently (i.e. freedom of choice)
P3. You cannot choose differently in situation X.
C. You have no moral responsibility for your choice in situation X.
I'm not sure that's the conventional definition. It means that every prisoner who has the will to be free but can't be, doesn't have the will to be free.
No. In philosophy the question is not about what you can or can't wish for, but is pragmatic, revolving mainly around determinism/indeterminism and moral responsibility. So, the argument goes, free will means the ability to make free choices; if determinism holds, your choices are predetermined, so you don't have freedom of choice, therefore you don't have free will, and if you don't have free will, you don't have moral responsibility for your choices.
The implication follows that (assuming non-determinism) if you cannot choose differently (have freedom of choice) in some context, you don't have free will with respect to that context (i.e. you can't exercise free will in that context), therefore you cannot be morally responsible for that 'choice'. This is what Frankfurt's example refutes. I think this distinguishes a significant difference between pre-determination (which is absolute) and Black's
conditional coercion.
I don't believe that "Again" prompts a command in our brain which requires us to "run through scenarios". I don't see how anything is required.
I said that
inference (inferential processing) of that kind requires evaluating a number scenarios. The word is processed for semantic content by the auditory areas of the brain - see
Language Processing - and the results initiate a (mainly unconscious) search for relevance and suitable responses. Explicitly conscious deliberative thinking will be invoked if the results are ambiguous (at which point you probably try to work out what he's talking about) or raise concerns (at which point you probably try to come up with a plausible excuse)...
We have to take into account technology. Pre-historic man didn't have quality brushes and ink, and cave walls make for lousy canvas. You're not going to create the Mona Lisa with your finger or a stick.
I don't think that's a significant consideration - some early cave paintings are extraordinary renditions, made with primitive equipment. Passable brushes can be made from frayed plant stems, and coloured earths & minerals, plant pigments, and charcoal are readily available. Technology increases the possible range and finesse of artistic effects, but the
Lascaux paintings show it's not necessary to produce excellent art.
Yes, that's the point - that naturalism is a contradiction. The key word is "wholly", if they are determined wholly by the motions of atoms...
Er, no; given his premises, i.e. if it was true -
for whatever reason - that he had no reason to suppose his beliefs were true, then he'd have no reason to suppose that
that belief (about his beliefs) was true.
In its basic conception, a belief is an internal model that is held to be an accurate representation of some state of affairs in the world. It's only by convention that we restrict its use to conscious creatures, perhaps, ironically, because they have a tendency to hold beliefs that are not accurate representations or don't represent
any state of affairs in the world (or maybe it's just considered to be an attribute of thinking creatures
).
Up above, you sound fairly Dennett-like in describing us almost as philosophical zombies, saying that we make decisions mostly unconsciously, that some reward system determines a winning impulse for us, and that some decisions just happen when the clock runs out. Now you tell me that our beliefs accurately reflect reality. It sounds as if you're holding two contradictory views simultaneously.
1 - No: Dennett thinks philosophical zombies are logically incoherent, and so impossible (I agree).
2 - Yes: most of our decision-making is unconscious or preconscious and our conscious awareness of it is post hoc.
3 - No: I didn't tell you that our beliefs accurately reflect reality. You may have misinterpreted the last part, "
i.e. they reflect reality", which was intended to paraphrase "
they have reasonable correspondence with states of affairs in the world". IOW, we have no reason to suppose our beliefs are true, except to the extent that we can see that they are a reasonable reflection of reality (which we can achieve by testing them).
Your brain perceives it as logical and axiomatic. You cannot possibly know if it is, because natural selection would select for that perception as a trait if it were useful, whether or not it was true.
Natural selection has selected for broad perceptual and cognitive capacities in relevant areas, not specific perceptions. Mathematics originated as an extension of our capacities for abstraction, symbolic representation, and sequential processing, starting with substitution representation (scratches, imprints, knots, pebbles, etc.) for simple counting, before becoming formalised and fully symbolic, it's statements tautologically true-by-definition.
Its physically represented statements (e.g. moving pebbles around when counting) could be seen to be true in the world long before it was formalised, and even now it can be seen to represent relationships in the real world -
Eugene Wigner published a paper on "
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences".
Hope you don't think I'm being nit-picky about language, but for me it's the crux of the matter: what is this "I" that feels it's captain? And if it's not captain, why is it deceived about its rank?
It's an interesting question - to cut a long story short, it's a simplified, idealised, mental model of the whole individual, carrying (often inaccurate) summaries of its relevant characteristics. I think it has two main functions, one is to be the model self that represents the whole in forward planning, retrospection, and everyday navigation of the world, and the other is to be a social interface or avatar, a flexible and adaptive facade that represents the whole during social interaction.
The reason it's a cut-down idealised model of the whole is that it has to respond rapidly and in real-time, which means having a relatively low computational overhead, particularly in complex social situations, and important personal information must be readily available, which means having summaries to hand is an advantage. It is continually updated with relevant information by the unconscious 'background' processes (System 1) so it can function effectively.
A reasonable analogy is that of a large company, with many departments beavering away in the background, producing plans, analysing data, managing the company's affairs, all reporting summaries to the boardroom, where the department heads exchange information, and the company PR and sales chief gets updated with bulletins on overall progress. He is the company's interface with the world, and is fed stories and information from PR department, which he can pass on in press briefings, meetings with other companies, etc.
He represents the company, identifies with the company, and gives the company line. When the company decides to undertake some new activity, he feels like it's his decision. When the company blunders, the PR dept feeds him a suitable excuse. It's only an analogy, but it's the best approximation I've yet seen. It's important to understand that the conscious 'I' isn't a separate entity helplessly carried around by a silent and spooky brain, nor does it drive the body around like a soccer mum in an SUV; it's a part of the whole and it has its role to play.
My specific point was the inefficacy of naturalistic explanations to exclude the need for God, and specifically as pertains to free will. In the paragraphs above, you've given some probable descriptions of what may be going on when we make decisions. I'm just saying that, if what I believe is true, then still, of course, it will manifest itself though natural (or natural-looking) means.
The question then becomes, if all the day-to-day stuff can be explained by natural, mechanistic means, what role does God play in it?
As already mentioned, I see free will in terms of our experience of making choices; if we can have the experience of freely choosing according to our will (preferences, desires, needs, etc.), that is what having free will means. However, we would have that experience even under determinism - in that situation, our will (preferences, desires, needs, etc.) itself would be the deterministic result of prior events - the result of the unique interactions between our genetic inheritance and our life experiences. It seems to me that it is the sum of those interactions that makes us who we are; personally, I
want my choices to be determined by the effects of the experiences that have moulded who I am - if that were not the case, they wouldn't be
my choices...
Again, my argument relies on the fact that it's a selective advantage, so we're in agreement. What are you saying doesn't follow?
I disagree that the claim that saying, "
reason is the result of unreasonable forces" means "
we've contradicted ourselves". That's equivalent to claiming that saying that "temperature and pressure are the result of the movements of atoms and molecules that don't themselves have temperature or pressure" is a contradiction, or that it must be a contradiction to say water is wet if individual water molecules aren't wet.
Emergence is the explanation; it gives rise to systems that have novel properties and behave in novel ways according to novel rules or laws. Reason is an emergent property of creatures capable of abstraction, logic, etc. (and is not restricted to humans).
I think you'll agree that bacteria and sharks and lots of stuff have been doing fine for a very long time with little or none of our capacity for reason.
Sure; for most creatures, reason, and the capabilities that support it, have no selective advantage, and the majority (especially unicellular organisms) don't have any prospect of developing the necessary information processing power. The majority of creatures don't have wings either, and most don't have any prospect of developing them. Horses for courses.
