John Mikes wrote:
The question of (in)determinacy within our judgement is model-related. A distinction:
"..."free will" to refer to conscious entities making indeterminate choices..." is as well the judgement of reasonability in our limited views. There may be (hidden? undiscovered?) 'reasons' that make us choose a (seemingly) "unreasonable" decision.
To Statis' question I don't pretend to have "The Answer", :
"...Can someone please explain how I can tell when I am exercising *genuine* free will, as opposed to this pseudo-free variety, which clearly I have no control over?"
but a consideration may go like this:
our mind is interrelated to the rest of the totality (wholeness) and stores individually different mindsets as a result of memory and ideation (genetically + personal history-wise modified).
The 'mind' (what is it? self, memories, etc., I say: the mental ASPECT of our complexity)
is not a sole function of the brain-tissues which are only the tools working WITH it. There is no 'mystery' in this statement: only our ignorance preventing to discover things beyond our present models by our physical and physiological observational (and explanatory) skills.
At the level of complexness in our mind-state we have choices. Not freely, but definitely 'ways' to compare and choose. "We are free" means we can choose the route that fits most the combined image of our mental state at the moment. We are "free" to choose otherwise, again, deterministically by the background(s) we consciously know or don't. No matter if
it looks 'reasonable' for others, ot not. Statis is right to feel not responsible for such choices - only religions impart such guilt-feeling to keep the flock under control.
Since the actions are deemed (in)deterministic in both 'conscious(?)' and 'inanimate(?)' units, it points to our ignorance about the functional originations for them. The unlimited interconnections with their differential efficiency on the different targets that makes the wholistic interconnection of the totality incalculable (not prone to Turing-Chuch application) gives us the feeling of a free will, of indeterminacy, earlier: of a miracle and awe.
I don't want to even guess how much we did not yet discover.
Just to clarify, my request for a method to distinguish "genuine" free will from the "pseudo-free" variety (deterministic or random) was tongue-in-cheek. A person's decisions and actions must either follow deterministically from a set of rules (which at bottom must reduce to the laws of physics, whatever these ultimately turn out to be), or else they must be random; what other possibility is there? Certainly, when I make a decision it doesn't *feel* as if I am bound by any absolute deterministic rules, nor does it feel as if I am being driven by a random number generator. But if I think about it seriously, it is clear that this is what must actually be happening.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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