[FRIAM] Subjective experience & free will

[Frank Wimberly]

I think Spaniards think Spinoza was a Spanish Jew (Espinoza).  I realize
this could probably be resolved to my satisfaction by Wikipedia.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sun, Feb 28, 2021, 6:50 AM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:

> 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?
>
>
>
> <echarles at american.edu>
>
>
> 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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