[FRIAM] Free will part 20250223

[Jochen Fromm]

What Ryle and Dennett have in common is the trick to state what something is not: Ryle argued there is no ghost in the machine and Dennett claimed there is no central self in the Cartesian theater. For free will Dennett says we have free will if we are not acting under duress.I remember we had a discussion about first person view and third person view but I don't remember if we have arrived at a common conclusion. Normally animals perceive themselves in the first person view and others in the third person view. Social animals perceive the own group in the first person view and other groups in the third person view. The hard problem is of course to understand the first person view in others (the hard problem of subjective consciousness) and the third person view of ourselves (related to self-awareness and the problem of free will). From this point of view the two fundamental problems are related. Interesting, isn't it? -J.
-------- Original message --------From: Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> Date: 2/25/25  8:51 PM  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free will part 20250223 
Hi, Jochen,
I thought I would beard you in your den!
I think the question is whether to privilege the first person or the 
third person view.   To anyone who privileges the third person view the 
question of whether animals have free will or humans don’t is just 
cartesian silliness. To an experience monist, such as myself, first- and
 third-person views are both presumptively valid, but prove themselves 
by their capacity to predict future experiences.  If you think that you 
are better able to predict your own behavior than your partner — or your
 dog, for that matter — then the evidence is against you.  First-person 
accounts of behavioral causality are notoriously shoddy.    I feel that 
that was a bullet that both Ryle and Dennet were unable to bite.

On Sun, Feb 23, 2025 at 8:35 AM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:FYI if someone is interested I've written a blog post about "Free Will". It is based on stuff I have written here. Do people still write blog posts in the age of all knowing AIs? I don't know. Will somebody read it? Probably not. Well I feel I am getting old..https://blog.cas-group.net/2025/02/free-will-is-the-prize-the-treasure-of-independent-thinking/-J..- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
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