[FRIAM] Subjective experience & free will

[Jochen Fromm]

Spinoza, a Dutch contemporary of Leibniz, argued as well in his book "Ethics" that it is the lack of knowledge & awareness that helps to create the illusion of freedom:"Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined".What I like about these 400 year old philosophers is that they have tackled the really big questions. And they worked interdisciplinary, because fields like psychology or physics have not been invented yet.-J.
-------- Original message --------From: Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> Date: 2/28/21  06:05  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjective experience & free will Skinner had the book "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" (1971) that made a similar argument. Basically, he argued that while we didn't have full explanations of behavior yet, we had made enough progress to be confident that behavior could be explained in various ways - development, immediate causation, etc. - in all situations. If we can agree on that, or even mostly-agree on that, what happens to concepts like "freedom", which seem to be applied primarily in situations where we can't obviously explain someone's behavior? When I train a rat to press a lever when the light in the cage illuminates, is the rat free? If your life has trained you to put on your right sock first, then the left, are you free? Etc., etc. And certainly sometimes people feel as if their choices are more "free" or less "free", but what do we do with that? Presumably we can also train people to generally feel free or not, under ostensibly identical current circumstances? (Note how many conversations about White Privilege, or Wealth Inequality, focus on how people who were given great benefits early in life often feel as if they were independently successful based on initiative and merit.) The issue of variation in feeling "free" under ostensibly similar circumstances, is a huge dilemma for me, as I don't feel social pressures in many situations where others do. "I wasn't free to talk in the meeting", someone says. And I look confused, because so far as I could tell they were clearly free to talk in the meeting, but chose not to for various reasons. "You don't understand how hard it is to X, under circumstances Y!" Well... I do understand why it might feel hard... but that sounds like an explanation for why you chose not to. We aren't talking about how hard it is to run a sub-6-minute mile, or sing an Opera, we are talking about how it can feel hard to call someone out for a racist comment in the middle of a meeting (or something like that). In fact, I often have people come to me before key meetings and ask me to bring up points they don't feel free to bring up. Am I "free" because I find that relatively easy? Are they "not free" because they find it hard? Does it matter that, as Jochen points out, one could certainly look into my and the other person's past, or into my and the other person's physiology, and construct an explanation for why each of us behave-in-meetings the way we do now? Or is it, as Skinner suggested, time to just move "beyond" such questions? On Sat, Feb 27, 2021 at 4:29 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote: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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