Yeah, we can always just make shit up. — Banno

And everyone does. Some made-up stuff works better than others, but it's all made up. There are no givens, apart from perhaps ordinary language.

There is nothing it is like to be conscious per se, unless, perhaps, there is something it is like to be conscious of consciousness. Consciousness is the property of a system whereby there is something it is like to be that system when it undergoes a change.

If the galley, all the people and all the parts, is one consciousness, it doesn't make sense to me that it would not be able to communicate with us. A consciousness that is made up of, among other things, a bunch of pretty competent communicators should be able to communicate at least as well as any of its independent parts. A human communicates far better than any if it's parts can. — Patterner

That's interesting, thanks. I hadn't thought of that that way before. Yes it's a serious objection I think.

I view the objects and phenomena of pretty much all the special sciences (e.g. biology, ecology, psychology, economics, etc.) to be strongly emergent in relation with the the objects and phenomena of the material sciences such as physics or chemistry. Some, like our apokrisis argue (and I would agree) that even within physics, especially when the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium processes is involved, many phenomena are strongly emergent in the sense that they aren't intelligible merely in light of, or deducible from, the laws that govern their smaller components. — Pierre-Normand

Presumably you'd say that the relationships between micro-properties and emergent properties are lawlike. If so are some laws emergent then? Or have all laws always existed, even if they never have a chance at any point in the history of the universe to describe an actual natural event?

No, the galley is not conscious as a unit. — Patterner

I think it may be. There are (at least) two problems the panpsychist must tackle at some point:

1) What are the units supposed to be? (Searle's challenge)
2) Relatedly, how do subjects sum, if at all? (The combination problem)

Both these may be rebutted by the idea that every system whatever, no matter how arbitrarily defined (the galley is a good example), is conscious. It may not be conscious of very much, it may have extremely limited content to its experience, but nevertheless there is some kind of unitary experience. This makes a colossal number of subjects. The galley minus one of its lignin molecules would also be conscious. The galley plus one of the water molecules from the sea a mile away would be a separate conscious entity. Neither would experience much. So to rebut the challenges: (1) the units are whatever you can think of, and (2) they don't sum. Each one is its own unique identity, and you can have 'nests' of subjects, there is no 'pooling' of identity.

This is still vulnerable to @Banno's Blank Stare of Incredulity of course. We sacrifice intuitive appeal on the altar of metaphysical possibility. But who cares? I don't. The universe is weird. Philosophers should be willing to follow the logic, or at least entertain odd possibilities.

irreducible substance — MoK

That seems much more like theory than definition to me. The other things in your list may be definition, depending on who you ask.

I'm not sure what it would mean for an inductive argument to be sound. Strong or weak, yes. Soundness and validity are properties of deductive arguments.

This is almost certainly wrong, but my current formulation as a panpsychist (and if I want to try to make sense of the word 'soul') is this:

A soul is a zone of conscious space that identifies with the body that occupies it.

Or possibly:

A soul is the substance that constitutes a body, conceived of as substance and not body

That is an interesting approach. Not sure I buy into it though as there is evidence enough that one physical event leads to another (physically) and this is quite easily observed. — I like sushi

Indeed. You can still have the intuitive 'physical' causation we ordinarily see all the time, say in machines. It's just it would be reducible to the mental causation happening at the micro-level on a panpsychist metaphysic.

If you push your view to the point you are I feel you are effectively end up arguing for solipsism?

Panpsychism might end up in a kind of cosmopsychism, which is arguably a kind of solipsism, but any theory which does not allow for some kind of plurality of points of view I would have thought has gone wrong somewhere. The evidence for other minds is overwhelming it seems to me. One challenge to a panpsychist cosmopsychism is how to account for plurality and privacy of points of view within the overall unity.

I was considering starting a thread about this. I'm doubtful about whether there is any physical causation. I think it all might be mental. There are problems whichever way we jump.

- The problem of overdetermination - can an event have both physical and mental causes (e.g. the decision to raise one's arm causes the arm to go up, but so does the purely functional brain chemistry - this is suggestive of functionalism as a solution)

- The physical causes the mental but not vice versa - epiphenomenalism

- The problem that decisions seem to be made before conscious awareness of them is prima facie suggestive of epiphenomenalism

- The strong intuition that experiences do, in fact, play a causal role in behaviour. Consider a jealous person murdering their ex's new partner. Non-mental causation does not seem sufficient, the felt emotion strongly seems to play a causal role.

- Mental causation is the only causation we are acquainted with - physical causation is inferred from correlation.

Panpsychism is a possible solution

How well might this satisfy people who think a person's experiences can only be experienced by themselves? — TiredThinker

Not much I suspect. If two people experience the same token quale, they're not two people.

I was taught by Williamson as an undergrad for a year. Don't remember a thing. I'd be much more interested now.

I'd have to do an awful lot of work to properly understand the article in much detail. It's quite meta.

My intuition is, for example, incompatible with bert1's distinction between cognitive empathy and affective empathy. To me (intuitively), cognitive empathy isn't empathy at all. — Dawnstorm

Yes I think you are probably right. Perhaps it would be better to say that empathy has two components, both of which are necessary for empathy to occur. You can't feel another's pain (in some sense) without first recognising that they are in pain.

Vera seemed sane. Not that I think everyone else on here is insane. Vera seemed like she could view a topic both from a distance and close up, perhaps.

That's a shock. I enjoyed her posts.

Also, the issue of empathy has become an important area in psychiatry, in relation to autism. Lack of empathy has become medicalised. However, even in that context there may be blurring of semantics. Some assumptions and assessments may be about the ability, or lack of ability for 'feelings'. This may involve value judgements on the part of those assessing. Nevertheless, on a more analytic level, the research on autism looks at theory of mind, involving the ability to be able to imagine another's perspective, which is the basis of the concept of empathy. — Jack Cummins

In autism the view is that they don’t have what’s called a theory of mind. Many autistic people can feel deeply for the plight of others and may have a highly developed sense of social justice, — Tom Storm

The view that autistic people lack theory of mind any more than anyone else presented with another creature different from themselves, is out of date. Simon Baron-Cohen did a lot of damage with this, and the experiments purported to show this lack of theory of mind have been robustly challenged. See Damian Milton on the 'Double empathy problem' in which he argues that non-autistic people have just as much trouble understanding the autistic perspective as autistic people do understanding NTs.

As a panpsychist, I think there is a similar problem with rocks. It's hard to attribute mind to them because they are very 'other'.

There is a distinction between cognitive empathy and affective empathy. Cognitive empathy is understanding that someone else is feeling something. The more different that other person is, the more difficult it is to notice that they are feeling something. Once you have noticed that other person is suffering (for example) then affective empathy comes in. You 'feel the pain' of the other in some sense, you care and are moved to help to alleviate their suffering. With autistic people, sometimes they fail to notice that an NT is in distress (cognitive) so do not have the opportunity to care (just as NTs frequently fail to notice autistic people are distressed). However, once the distress is recognised, autistic people care just as much as anyone, and will often try to help.

A clever psychopath, by contrast, may have excellent cognitive empathy, but lack affective empathy. But I'm not an expert on psychopathy.

The particulars here, seem to be in decisions made from past experiences. In your example the choice was made by a past decision. — DifferentiatingEgg

Quite possibly, but what decision exactly? Was the decision to like cakes (in the cases of Geraldine and Ursula especially) made by them? Or was it made by their ancestors desire for calories in order to survive? Do we carry on the decisions of our ancestors? Or is that just a weird way to think of it?

But perhaps something occurs that makes you change that decision. Like some Icecream is 400 calories per serving, some are 100 calories per serving. You may decide that from now on you want to try something with less calories. So you update a decision preference. To decide means to kill off other options.

Yes, so your decisions are influenced by education perhaps? So you want to survive, that's instinctive, perhaps a decision made by ancestors and carried on in you. Now in the modern world, this instinct to acquire calories, works against the overall will to live. Once that is learned, by means of acquiring a concept (say, of diabetes), then a choice becomes available when it wasn't available before. One is no longer determined just by the instinct to acquire calories, the overall desire to live can allow one to decide not to consume the calories. Is this later state more free in any sense? It's still determined, but there are more options, and each alternative is, perhaps, possible.

Where as true spontaneous choice in the matter requires us to be free from preformed decisions.

Would such a choice be random/arbitrary, then? I'm open to the idea that that's what free choice is, and that's OK.

So my desire is predicated on the assumption that ecclesiastical cakes and my tastes are predictable and consistent. {I decided to leave that autocorrection just for fun} In other words, desire presumes determinism. — unenlightened

I see what you mean. The OP wasn't intended to be a total refutation of determinism. The idea is that our choices are determined, but the thing that determines them can range from the particular to the universal. I'm wondering if that's interesting and relevant to the free will/determinism debate as it allows for freedom from some determinants but not others. And it's possible to become more free (perhaps) by valuing more universal things than particular things. Are we free to choose our values? Maybe not, but if we are determined, perhaps by our education, to value the general and universal, then perhaps we are more free as a result.

Interesting topic. Drive-by quote from the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy (or one of the books maybe the second):

Ruler of the Universe: "How can I tell that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations, and my state of mind?"

Yeah I guess so.

Yes there is arbitrariness in the things we choose to count. Very interesting. I'll get back to your earlier posts as well asap.

I'll respond to this quickly and then get back to earlier replies (sorry to everyone for the delays).

Yes, I think I agree with you. I was speaking very loosely and I'll come up with a different formulation to express the gradation I was thinking of.

I'm interested in non-vague concepts, that is, concepts that do not admit of degrees, and do not admit of borderline cases. It seems you think that the line between free will and unfree will is sharp (or perhaps the line between will and non-will is sharp), and also the line between alive and dead is sharp, perhaps? Other possible concepts that are perhaps not-vague are consciousness, space, and less-than-7.

The vast majority of concepts are vague - they admit of borderline cases. Famous ones are heap/pile and baldness. Others could include human, chair, lawnmower, male, female, liquidity, planet, wall, food, kidney, brain, and pretty much any concept you care to think of.

Oh, and welcome to the Philosophy Forum :)

You can change the order they go into the shop if you like. Could any of them have done otherwise than they did?

Part of the point of the OP is to look at the level of abstraction to see if it has any relevance to the free will/determinism debate. Is somebody who likes cakes in general any more free than someone who likes a particular cake only? The generalising person has more options, no?

Is the educated person, who perceives causal societal structures in the world and can more effectively strategise and make choices based on this invisible underlying structure, any more free than someone who doesn't see any of that and only perceives what is happening in their immediate concrete particularised environment? That may be a different kind of question than the one posed in the OP, I'm not sure.

I think "will" consists of just two parameters:

Direction and magnitude.

"Will" is a vector. "Freedom" is not a parameter of a vector.

In your model I see various wills and a variable range of options. Omni Otto steers the vector to a direction according to Otto's desire (by the way, avoiding the worst case in the long run can also a be desire). I think, freedom, in this context, is a metaphor for the range available, and this range doesn't lie in the vector per se; a vector is not a range but an "arrow", so to speak. — Quk

I think I'm pretty much happy with that. Makes sense to me.

Still, Otto's "decision device" is not really free; his desires are caused by something or occur at random. In either case -- causal or random -- it's not Otto's "will" that generates Otto's desire. — Quk

It seems to me that particular desires just are will-vectors, no?

And it occurs to me that desire in general is perhaps a restlessness of the will. Will is such that it tends to pick an object, at random if there is no pre-existing particular desires that already condition it in a relevant way.

Perhaps the freedom of the will is the portion of will that is not committed to an end, not desiring something.

An individual has free will perhaps is a couple of senses: (1) they have uncommitted will 'spare' perhaps (2) there are things that s/he is free from. I passed a copy of 50 Shades of Grey today in a bookshop, and I was free not to buy it, as it has no hold on me, I don't have a will-vector committed to obtaining it. In the scenario, Geraldine is free from having to buy an Iced Finger and one of the Eccles cakes. Not caring, and indifference (which have negative connotations) might describe a kind of psychological freedom in relation to the objects one is indifferent to.

"Will" is neither free nor unfree; "will" is just a force. Can a gravitational force be free? Can a magnetic force be free? No, it can only be forceful. It's something else that can influence a force. The force itself cannot influence itself. — Quk

That's interesting. I'm not sure. What about an unmagnetised bit of iron? There's no overall force - the forces of the crystals average to zero over the whole thing (or something like that - please correct me). That might be analogous to the person who desires/wills many things simultaneously to an equal degree, and therefore is unable to choose any of them (except at random) - the vectors cancel.

I would say there are gradations of will; to be precise: Gradations of the will's direction and the will's magnitude. If we talk about the gradation of options, then it's about options, not about will. — Quk

Yes that sounds reasonable and more precise than my original wording.

If Pete chooses not to buy a cake, he's not Particular Pete any more, he's Absolute Pete.
— bert1

So Pete does not determine his choice, but is determined by it? — unenlightened

Maybe yes. Pete's choice might change his nature perhaps.

Cool, that's very interesting, thanks. I'll come back to it later.

Desire is a projection of memory.

Thus the determinism of the mind is an introjection of the determinism of the world , which is a projection in turn of the need for stability and predictability. — unenlightened

I don't immediately understand this. Could you elaborate a little?

In your story, you are god and always correct. — unenlightened

Sure, but my artificial universe is intended to be a simplified version of this one, and therefore meaningfully critiquable. I'm happy for people to complicate it to make it more realistic.

If that were the case, then that would mean someone WASN'T exercising free will every time they did something they really wanted to do, or avoided doing something they didn't want to do, and thus they deserve no blame or praise for those actions. So if a rapist really wants to rape, and prefers that strongly above all other options, that means they have no free will in that choice? And thus can't be blamed? — flannel jesus

That is indeed the intuition, yes. For the avoidance of doubt, I do think that rapists should be prevented from raping, but perhaps not that they should be punished because they are to blame.

They are all chained by desire, and their freedom is nothing but a conflict of desires. is that right? — unenlightened

Yes and no, it's relative. Geraldine, for example, is chained by her desire for a cake, but is not chained by her indifference to which Eccles cake she prefers.

Thus the determinism of the mind is an introjection of the determinism of the world , which is a projection in turn of the need for stability and predictability. The storyteller is constrained by their need for neatness. — unenlightened

The storyteller is a philosopher who wants to start with a simple OP that is easy to comprehend but serves as a basis for exploring some ideas. :)

Wilful Willy is a significant complication to the universe.

uh no not necessarily. someone can of course have reasons for choosing something that isn't their preference. — flannel jesus

Sure, I'm trying to keep the universe simple to make it easier to think about. But these other reasons, are they anything other than competing preferences? In which case must Pete choose the option that his strongest preference inclines him to?

I've set it up that way I guess! This universe consists of a cake shop, three cakes, and four people. What else is there to do? If Pete chooses not to buy a cake, he's not Particular Pete any more, he's Absolute Pete.

How can we help you?

Also, 100% of marriages are initiated by men, but 70% of divorces are initiated by women. — Brendan Golledge

Therefore, what? Men aren't very good at marriage?

Pre-conventional morality is only concerned with power. People in this stage don't have genuine moral opinions, but only act off of reward and punishment. So, they will do whatever authority tells them to do, no matter how transparently stupid it is. The left must clearly be in this category, because they talk about equality, and then discriminate against white men. They talk about saving the environment, and then burn electric cars. They talk about "justice" and then burn cities and punish good Samaritans. They are for feminism, but refuse to define what a woman is. So, the left has no genuine moral beliefs; all their beliefs are only verbally espoused in order to try to win the approval of other leftists. — Brendan Golledge

The difficulty with your OP is that there's too much in it. This paragraph alone would take weeks to conceptually clarify. There is putative evidence in there somewhere. Also inferences. I don't have the time or inclination to try and explicate it all though. In any case, you haven't told us what you want to talk about. How can we help?

BLM riots dwarfs — Brendan Golledge

Were they all dwarfs?

You fall into the atheist trap of self-contradiction, if you try to deny that God who is defined as the necessary being, is not a being. — Metaphysician Undercover

Why is that different from saying:

"Let 'Fido' mean 'the dog whose existence is necessary,' therefore Fido exists." Have I just created Fido? Or did Fido exist before the definition?

Surely God's necessity should depend on his other characteristics, no? Shouldn't God's necessity be in virtue of, say its timelessness, or infinity or something?

Does your mind cause anything? Are there such things as physical causes?

Can't we monitor people's physiology - brain activity, heart etc - with specialized equipment designed specifically for this purpose, in relation to various stimuli, thereby building a huge database correlating physical processes with experiences? — Pussycat

Yes, but that won't tell you which things are conscious, or will it?