Again, many of those things can be accomplished to a degree by consuming alcoholic beverages. It wouldn't bear on whether anything's being "received".I can only cite reported observations, IIRC they include alertness, memory, attention, sense of location, body ownership, bounds, viewpoint, emotional response, sense of self, various aspects of personality & personhood, moral values, religious belief, etc., but if you'd can suggest some aspects that you feel are unlikely to be included, it might be interesting to see if there are any reports of such changes.
And I asked how that could be, since the science is supposed to be so definitive on the topic.And I said they're not disagreeing on the science, but on the meaning and usage of the term 'free will'.
You've developed some immunity to your culture that I haven't to mine?No; your question was whether America is a Christian culture, so by that reasoning, the UK is a broadly secular culture.
Again, it's not a definition because it sidesteps the issue, for the reasons I stated.It's generally used as an acceptably coherent definition of the 'free' in free will.
I've already addressed that. My answer is mysterious, but coherent. I've yet to hear a coherent definition from you. You appeal to your own vague, inexplicable mystery, which is a combination of what you call "complexity" and "emergence". But your mystery, being naturalistic, is incoherent.If you can provide a coherent definition of what you mean by 'free' in 'actual free will', i.e. without invoking inexplicables like 'the supernatural', we could discuss that.
A choice made under duress is still a choice. You want to keep your money but you also want to keep your life. You want a bacon burger but you also want to eat healthy. We choose between competing "wants" all the time. It's a matter of degree; a decision involving death is just an extreme example.Yes; but the point is whether they would voluntarily make that choice in the absence of coercion. For example, if a mugger threatens to stab you unless you give him your wallet, and you then give him your wallet, you have been coerced if you gave him your wallet because he threatened you. If you had decided, in a moment of improbable generosity or madness, to give him your wallet before he even approached you, then you would not have been coerced. In the former case it would not be considered a free choice, in the latter it would.
If you recall from the podcast, Dennett was talking of freedom in terms of degrees of freedom as used in control theory; for example, in terms of movement, a hinge joint like the elbow or knee has a one degree of freedom, but a ball & socket joint like the hip or shoulder has many degrees of freedom. Similarly, creatures with complex brains have more cognitive degrees of freedom than creatures with simple brains. Dennett is saying that our freedom in this context is related to the number of different ways we can arrive at, and express, our will, and our competence to control this complexity.
If he says we have degrees of freedom, then he's saying we have freedom. But it's nonsense because hinges and joints do not have any freedom whatsoever in the sense that human will should be discussed, so this is another flawed analogy. The mind either acts freely apart from physics or it doesn't. You and other compatibilists can define "not free" as "free" all you want, but it's intellectually unfair to expect me to play along with the self-serving contradictory semantics. We're talking past each other, and it's tedious, so I think I'm done here.As I understand it this is part of his pragmatic argument that, in practice, we need to take a high-level, i.e. behavioural, societal, view of free will rather than a low-level deterministic view; the former is emergent from the latter, and follows rules that are not applicable or meaningful at the lower level, so our analysis should be at the emergent level, not the substrate level.
The inevitablility of his ducking (the deterministic view) is distinguished from the evitability of being hit by the brick (the behavioural view). Under 'raw' determinism everything is inevitable, so trying to discuss human behaviour becomes pointless - at that level there is no meaning, it's 'just the deterministic interactions of fundamental particles'. However, in practice, at human scales and levels of interaction, we do experience making choices, we can avoid the brick, we do describe human behaviour in terms of meaning, motivations, goals, etc., so Dennett says that we should take these concepts seriously at their level of applicability.
He measures our freedom of will in terms of degrees of freedom, especially of cognition (as previously explained), implying a continuum of freedom, e.g. from the lack of freedom of the simplest organisms that can neither sense nor respond to approaching bricks, through the limited freedom of creatures with hard-wired avoidance responses to sudden movement (perhaps one degree of freedom), to the greater freedom of more complex creatures that can track a moving object and navigate to avoid it, up to the extensive freedom of the most cognitively complex creatures (us) that can (in principle) recognise the object as a brick, visualise multiple strategies involving not being hit, and select the perceived most appropriate strategy. In this sense, the freedom is in the almost infinite variety of responses we could make, and the cognitive means we have to control the processing and selection of these responses.
To make a crude analogy with the emergent concepts of temperature and pressure, he's saying yes, it may ultimately be all to do with the vibrations and velocities of atoms and molecules, but if you want to analyse why you're sweating and your ears are popping, think about adjusting the temperature and pressure, not about the vibrations and velocities of atoms and molecules.
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