[FRIAM] Subjective experience & free will

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Jochen,

 

FWIW, I think free will is mostly a legal fiction used to determine who is responsible for the various calamities that we inflict on one another.  All behavior is either determined, or free, and there is no useful distinction to be made between free and determined action.   I have wanted for many  years to make a connection between the calculus and mental concepts like motivation.   Just as the derivative is a slope at a point, so a motive is the slope of behavior at a point.  Motives are the limits of behavioral differentials.  The only hard part of the hard problem is that I have a hard time seeing why people worry about it.  

 

Nick 

 

Nick Thompson

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> 

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2021 3:29 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] Subjective experience & free will

 

I am reading a book about Leibniz and started to wonder if the hard problem of consciousness could be the reason why we have the illusion of free will and can not predict how others will act. 


>From the outside a person seems to have free will in principle. From the inside everybody feels something different and is controlled by emotions based on subjective experience, which is unknown to others, because the individual is not transparent and the history is not known.

Once we investigate the life of a person, for example by a detective as part of a criminal investigation, or as movie viewers in a cinema, we start to understand why a person acts they way it does. The more we step into the footsteps of a person, the better we understand the feelings, goals and motives.

Could it be that the same thing which  prevents us from understanding the subjective experiences of others also creates the illusion of free will?

 

-J.

 

 

 

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