Does Evolution Have An Objective?

I disagree because I cannot see any difference between what the nematode is doing and what Cavediver's spreadsheet is doing. Can you point out the diffence?This is a problem because if there are no choices then the whole shebang falls apart doesn't it. All of our notions of responsibility go out the window. So even if we could prove that we do not actually make choices we could not accept it.The film Minority Report does a fair job of highlighting this paradox.

I believe Cavediver's spreadsheet is also making choices. I also believe there is no categorical difference between the way a nematode chooses and the way we choose; both are using essentially the same hardware. Not really. Responsibility can work perfectly well in a framework only of predictability. We hold people responsible for their actions, punish them for bad actions, and reward them for good actions, because that helps to change behaviours and create a better society for us to live in. This remains true even if there was no choice (which there is).

Ah, but I actually agree with Mr Jack for exactly the reason you give above Does the word "decision" have more or less connotations with "free-will" than the word "choice"? I'm unsure myself.

You know who we really need for this discussion, Syamsu, he was all about the choice.TTFN,WK

The concepts of choice and free-will as used in an everyday sense have probably been around as long as human consciousness. Certainly they are ingrained in our language, laws and sense of being. They are so implicit in our sense of self and our interactions with other humans as for it to be almost inconceivable to think of people as anything other than agents that are free to exert conscious will.Conversely the conceptual meaning you are applying to the terms choice and freewill are specifically derived from very recent research in the fields of psychology and neuroscience. And the conceptual meanings you are applying are directly at odds with the common conceptual meaning with regard to the key role of conscious volition. It does matter if conscious volition (whether actually real or not) is part of the concept being expressed. They don't point to the same thing conceptually. That is the problem.

I think you underestimate just how intrinsic to ‘self’ the illusion of conscious control is.Imagine if whatever mechanism it is that deceives you into thinking that your acts are acts of conscious volition were to simply stop. You would become a conscious observer of your own body. It would seem to you as if something or someone else were controlling your body. Like being a powerless consciousness inside a remote control robot. Now I wholly accept the factuality of what you say about your unconscious also being you in strict technical sense. But I challenge anyone to experience such a thing and maintain your rather philosophical outlook that it is all me and all choice regardless of whether your conscious self has any significant role to play or not. If actually faced with that situation I think most people would make a very clear distinction between the terrified conscious me that resides helplessly inside that body and any more abstract me that is unconsciously causing that body to react deterministically to external stimuli. Whether scientifically accurate or not we conceptually think of our self as a mind capable of exerting conscious will rather than as a mere reactive information processing physical brain. And our language reflects this conceptual framework."Because of the way we're made"..... Could you be ore specific? What is it exactly that consciousness adds? It's "trivially obvious" in the same sort of sense that our ability to control our bodies as a result of conscious will is "trivially obvious". But as we know such "trivially obvious" conclusions are not to be trusted. So I'll ask again - If conscious volition plays no part in either scenario then deterministically speaking what is the difference between the actions of our sleepwalking typist and your own as you type? But what is consciousness other than that brain activity? Earlier you said that a heart makes choices about how to beat. Is a heart responsible for the choices it makes? Or can something only be responsible for choices if it is also conscious? If so why?There seems to be a real inconsistency between your view of consciousness and it's irrelevance to making choices and your insistence that consciousness is required in order for one to be responsible for those choices.

I do not think the conscious mind has zero role I think it has a minimal role. You know those feelings things that you doubtless think are rather important to your sense of who you are? Where are you imagining they come from? You certainly aren't consciously choosing them. There is no self separate from the unconscious.I doubt your full on zombie concept is plausible, although some people have experienced an "alien limb" effect that is some way along the same line. And all of this has nothing to do with determinism.People who are awake are in a different state to people who aren't. Part of that difference is consciousness. Is it really that hard to grasp that?

I am not saying that there is. I am saying that what actually constitutes "self" and what appears to constitute "self" are not the same thing and that our language and concepts are based around the illusion rather than the actuality.Thus if you insist on using that same language to express the actuality rather than the illusion you are going to face all sorts of problems because they are conceptually quite different in very significant ways. It has everything to do with determinism (or lack of it) if one's concept of choice is that of an act of conscious volition rather than deterministically predefined act that operates independently of conscious will.Determinism is incompatible with this concept of choice. And it is this concept of choice that the vast majority of humans are expressing when they use the term "choice" in the vast majority of cases (e.g. I chose what to eat for breakfast or I choose which colour shirt to wear). Hijacking the word "choice" to fit the evidence may or may not be justified but you surely must accept that there is a conceptual mismatch between the two uses? It isn't called the "problem of free-will" for nothing. Of course they in a different state. But what is it about that difference of state that decreases or eliminates responsibility for the "choices" they make? That is the question. The conventional answer would be that the actions taken whilst unconscious are not made as a product of conscious volition and are thus not "choices" in the conventional sense at all. That is why one cannot be held wholly responsible for them. But if no choices are made through conscious volition then conventional reasoning on responsibility with regard to one's choices falls apart and something else is required.So I am simply asking you why you think consciousness is required for responsibility if it plays little or no role in choice.

Consciousness is also deterministic.And you're again conflating the discussion of choice, the discussion of free will and the discussion of how consciousness works. I'm not using anything in a non-standard way. Every single case in which you could use the word 'choice' you can still use the word 'choice'. You have just adopted a particular position on how choice happens and are trying to insist that it must work that way to use the word choice; I see no reason to reject the word we usually use.And, again, I do not believe there is anything illusory about choice. There is something illusory about consciousness. There isn't any deterministically predefined act that operates independently of conscious will. Our will and consciousness is produced as part of the same process that is actually making the choice. We are just not separable like that!In organisms which worked differently than we do and in which consciousness and fully active cognition weren't strongly coupled states there would be no such requirement. It's just that the two happen to be related in humans.We are not in a state in which we are fully able to make choices when we're not conscious.

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Similarly, one of the most important ("first rank") diagnostic symptoms of schizophrenia is the delusion of being controlled by an external force. People with schizophrenia will sometimes report that, although they are acting in the world, they did not initiate, or will, the particular actions they performed. This is sometimes likened to being a robot controlled by someone else.

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Of course this 'external force' or 'someone else' controlling them is simply their unconscious mind. But if a victim of this condition said "I am not in control of my body" we would all know what that "I" was referring to despite it being nothing more than an illusion. Intellectually so do I. But if either of us found our unconscious controlling our body without the normal illusion of conscious volition in place I suspect we would be a bit less philosophical about it.And our language of "self" and "choice" etc. etc. reflect the illusion rather than the intellectually accepted reality.

But it isn't perceived to be so. Do you understand why it is referred to as "the problem of free-will".....? You are using words "choice" and "freewill" in a way that has a different conceptual meaning to the same words when used to refer to acts of conscious volition.You can either confront this difference in conceptual meaning between your usage and common usage. Or you can continue to just pretend it doesn't exist. Yes but why? If conscious volition plays little or no part in our choices why does being conscious have any bearing on our ability to make, or take responsibility for, those choices? Is there any evidence of this or is it an extrapolation of your own?Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

I'm not suggesting that we are not agents that are free to exert conscious will. I'm just saying that the exertion of free will is as determined as anything else. 'Free' can't mean 'without any constraints, uninfluenced by anything', since that would just be pure randomness which is clearly not how we make decisions which we would colloquially call 'acts of free will'. We are influenced by our memories, personality and so on. Our memories, moral codes, personality and so on all go into determining how we will 'freely choose' something. Is there something that can cause us to make a decision that doesn't go towards 'determining' our decision? That sounds like nonsense to me. Not for the purposes of identifying the thing in question. We can point to thunderstorms even if we don't understand that they are entirely deterministic systems. We can identify that we choose things, and that we are capable of simulating a world to predict the possible consequences of our actions and therefore make those choices with awareness of said consequences. They both point to a real thing, but different people have different conceptions of the explanation behind that real thing, and what that real thing implies etc. Not at all. Compatabilism has a long history, it's just better informed by recent research now.I am not really all that compatablilist. I hold that 'free will' is an incoherent idea, and if it were real it wouldn't be something that is to be desired and wouldn't give us any basis for moral responsibility. If we are asserting that 'free will' exists at all (for example, if we are to take 'free will' as trivially readily apparent) then I agree with the compatabilist's notion. I think calling it 'free will' can be misleading, but sometimes people do insist that disputing that we have 'free will' is the height of ludicrousness, so it can be necessary; their version of free will is at least coherent and evidenced.Dan Dennett likens consciousness to a magic trick. We are amazed when we see a magic trick, the seemingly impossible in front of our eyes. Some people are disappointed to learn that a cool magic act was just a cheap trick of misdirection or the like rather than a real thaumaturgical act. Free will is a bit like that, the thing we all agree we have, we have - but it isn't the magic we initially thought.So sure, sawing a woman in half isn't real magic (thaumaturgy), it's just magic that's actually real (illusion). This can be confusing, but there you go; just because sawing a woman in half is just the illusion of thaumaturgy doesn't mean we should therefore avoid using the word magic to describe it.

Ah, there you go, you learn a new thing every day.So people with a mental disorder suffer problems with their conscious awareness, what has that got to do with anything?

Really? How would you tell? Yes, because archaic notions of dualism continue to pollute our thinking about the matter. "Freewill" maybe. Although the concept is so poorly defined it's hard to say."Choice", absolutely not. You mentioned choosing the colour of shirt to wear today earlier - that's exactly the choices I'm talking about. Do you imagine you exercise conscious volition at that point? Think back to it, or any similar event, did you actually consciously weight up the options or did you just go with a feeling? I chose Weetabix this morning, but I didn't consider the pros and cons of Weetabix vs. Cornflakes, I just looking in the cupboard and thought "I fancy Weetabix today"; that choice was not made at the conscious level and neither are the overwhelming vast majority of choices we make on a daily basis. We don't use conscious consideration to make most choices we simply rely on a "gut feeling"; it happens so often we don't even think about.Yes, despite the fact that the vast majority of choices are quite clearly made in this way, you want to use a different word for it? Huh? I'm sorry: what? Are you seriously asking whether there's any evidence that people are in a different cognitive state when awake or asleep? Or are you asking whether there's any evidence that there could be full cognition without consciousness?If the former: buh? If the latter: no - ask again when we've figured out exactly what consciousness is, how it works and why we have it - but I can think of no a priori reason to think it's not possible.

Our concepts of self, freewill and choice are derived from, and tied to, the illusion that we are non-deterministic minds that are able to initiate cause by exerting our conscious will. Unsurprisingly these concepts are not entirely compatible with the fact that we are wholly deterministic Input/Output devices otherwise known as physical brains. In short our concepts, and the language we use to express those concepts, relate to the illusion rather than the actuality.Now it may or may not be justified for the scientifically savvy to re-translate these terms into different concepts that are compatible with the evidenced actuality rather than the illusion. But what makes absolutely no sense to me is the seeming desire to deny that there is any difference in conceptual meaning between the two at all.Either we can confront these differences in conceptual meaning, deal with them and move on. Or we can continue to deny that any difference exists and watch as people talk at cross purposes because they are applying different conceptual meaning to the same terminology. If you do use the word "magic" to describe it don't be surprised when someone points out that it is a magic trick rather than real magic. That is what CS and others have been effectively doing here with regards to the use of the terms "choice" and "freewill". In the case of self, choice and freewill the explanation and implications are as much a part of what is being expressed as the physical outcome. Hence the ongoing objections to the use of these terms in a deterministic setting. The notion of free-will has been described as a "problem" by far better men than me. And I am not disagreeing with you about the actuality. But the illusion is that we are free to consciously initiate cause in a way that isn't entirely deterministic. And this is what our language is expressing. So we shouldn't be surprised if people object when the same language is used to mean something conceptually different.