Wednesday, December 08, 2010

FREE WILL IS A FEELING, NOT A REALITY

Hey! I'm getting there, to the robot self brain flow. The following is another entry on the World Pantheism Website:

Walt writes: A FAAP Free-Willist asserts that ultimately all our choices are determined in a physicalist way by nerve action potentials, etc. but that for all practical purposes, (due to irreducible complexity) we have free will, or what is operationally indistinguishable from free-will.

I would not say FAPP "we have free will." Free will is traditionally defined as the conscious human animal control of our human behaviors. What FAPP is saying in reality is that because no computer can copy a mind well enough to duplicate and/or predict a human act (a human act as understood as a series of synaptic firings), then to that computer (which does not possess a consciousness function via language that corresponds to "I"), the action would automatically be channeled into a category or storage function that would register as "misunderstood and/or random activity" versus another category that would be counted as "understood and predictable behavior i.e. copyable behavior". Since to that computer all human activity would be counted as "misunderstood and/or random behavior", no human behavior can be counted as copyable behavior. Free will and determinism do not exist for an unconscious computer. Only copyable or nonsense behavior as recorded in its memory banks.

Taking consciousness out of the discussion eliminates the concepts of free will and determinism. Only consciousness through language can assign meaning to those words. It's the paradox.

The human brain, because it must understand other human activities so as to respond to those behaviors appropriately for survival purposes, functions as if there is an understandable behavior (purposive function) operating in the counterpart it observes outside itself. So the default mechanism operating in the brain is assigned the words FREE WILL by all the robots operating on the global environment, whereas what an individual brain is actually doing is interpreting and responding to stimuli which a computer would send into the "misunderstood and/or random behavior" memory bank. A computer can not generate an appropriate response to any human activity whereas the human brain, because its program is identical to the program operating in its human counterpart, imagines its response to the other human brain as a FREELY WILLED behavior. It experiences its responses to the OTHER as self-generated behavior because it senses its actions as occuring within its carcass. The SENSATION or FEELING of SELF-GENERATED ACTIVITY is interpreted, via language, as a free will activity because the computer brain can't catch itself being a computer, but it can use consciousness to label its felt activities as free will activities when, in all actuality, the brain is just a computer, with quantum capabilities, responding to another computer with quantum capabilities outside of its housing or carcass.

Can I try to say this more succinctly? Yes, maybe: The brain is a computer which feels itself functioning. The sensation caused by its functioning gives the brain a sense that it controls those activities. The brain's feeling of its own functions is consciously encapsulated in the words FREE WILL which it has assigned to those sensations of function that it experiences. Just as we assign the word "love" to a set of physiological sensations we experience so we assign the words "free will" to the physiological sensations of computation we experience.

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