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zazzologrendsyiyve t1_jbkymua wrote

Reply to comment by WrongdoerOk6812 in I just published an article in The Journal of Mind and Behavior arguing that free will is real. Here is the PhilPapers link with free PDF. Tell me what you think. by MonteChristo0321

You could easily see that if you just google “all roads lead to Rome” and then you google “circulatory system of a rat”.

Regarding the first one: it took millennia to build, the efforts of perhaps millions of people, with different ideas, objectives, needs, in different times and for different reasons (commerce, love, power, money, craziness, etc).

Also, you could draw a similar map for pretty much every major city in the whole world, it just depends on which road you select and why. You could say that it’s the product of the free will of millions, so it should be unpredictable.

The second one (the rat) we think is just the product of biology, chemistry and physics. No free will at all, in fact it is predictable (it’s the same in every mammal, in every leaf, in every hydrographic system, etc).

So…millions of “free people” were able to recreate a pattern that does not require free will, and they did it without even knowing it, across millennia.

My point being: our brain runs a sophisticated software that gives us a very bright and realistic illusion. We are just organic cells with shoes.

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MonteChristo0321 OP t1_jbl0ted wrote

If we are "just" organic cells, then who's being misled by the realistic illusion? Can a cell experience an illusion? A cell can't experience anything at all. Only a non-reduced, complete functional pattern of billions of cells can experience something. So that complete pattern has very different properties and capacities than do "just cells."

That complete functional pattern of cells, when taken as a whole is called a person. So a person is not "just" cells. If we want to know whether a person has free will, it's a mistake to change the question to whether or not "just cells" have free will.

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testearsmint t1_jblgjom wrote

The Cartesian approach is always very interesting in this regard. Consciousness implies at least some kind of self.

Out of curiosity:

  1. In this case, do you believe consciousness encompasses the entirety of the person, as in the "I" that we can most certainly believe to exist (the one that sees, experiences, feels, etc.) is the same as the one that moves, acts, speaks, etc. and thus there is only one "self"?

  2. As a follow-up, what do you think our existence consists of? Non-reductive physicalism, mind-body dualism, idealism, something else?

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WrongdoerOk6812 t1_jblgc4o wrote

It's certainly a very interesting and possibly valid point that a person is not the same as just the collection of his cells... But then my question is what separates that person from said collection rather than being just a huge pile of complex cooperations between those cells in which the predetermined nature of everything just got a bit lost or impossible to perceive?

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zazzologrendsyiyve t1_jbm1bkk wrote

We are not just the sum of our cells because emergent properties exist, and those always show complex behavior that are not intrinsically present in the individual cell.

Much like an ant: she doesn’t own the whole knowledge needed to run a colony, but sure as hell the whole colony does.

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zazzologrendsyiyve t1_jbm1z6t wrote

Of course I don’t think that we are the exact same thing as a single organic cell. From a certain point of view we are completely different thing (in fact a cell is not made up of billions of cells).

I was just trying to show that from another point of view, cells show complex behavior as a whole, but you wouldn’t say that the single cell has free will.

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