thread: 2007-02-26 : Exorcism followthrough
On 2007-03-02, Charles wrote:
Well, as to Vincent's comment #3,
quote: People behave as we behave; we can't change our own behavior without effort and practice. Does the idea of free will survive observations of humans being human? I don't know.
/quote
It depends on what we mean by free will. I'm not really sure what free will really means in a Christian religious context, but the idea that we can change our behavior through effort and practice fits pretty well under my idea of free will, and also matches my idea of self consciousness. Of course, it is all complicated by the fact that the self perceiving self is still a product of both experience and the body, and so is not free to change its own behavior without effort and practice, but clearly change does happen, and people are not entirely predictable. That still doesn't answer the purely deterministic universe question, but I find the relationship between a deterministic universe and free will to be the same sort of unanswerable question that I think Ben feels the source of self consciousness is.
There is a context in which it makes sense to talk about free will as something that people have. There are other contexts in which it doesn't.
Never done ketamine, never plan to (brr! it horrifies me that it has become fashionable, I blame the LSD shortage), but I have done other things of a chemical nature that had similar effects (and even anyone who has been very drunk probably has a sense of having lost self awareness). I have a distinct memory of looking at a clock and actively thinking "There is a clock face, for this thought to happen means that something is perceiving the clock face, the thing perceiving the clock face is me, so I must exist." The moment (however long) before that is an incoherent void, but I expect I was fully conscious and somewhat capable of interacting with others during that void. I just had no self awareness. But I may be mistaken (also, there was severe time distortion involved, so I have no idea how long the disjunct was).
