rationalskepticism.org

GrahamH wrote:I think I know what you mean, but wrt free will I think we need to consider the situation where we experience anticipation of events yet to occur. Anything where there is confabulation after the event is really not a candidate for free will. We need thought preceding action. We need the "conscious choice", however that works.

Of course the relevant event in those cases is what brings about the experience of the anticipatory thought and action, so confabulation can still apply, but the event is hidden.

Yes, what you describe is arguably just another confabulation process, which at first sight seems different but isn't really. I suppose the confabulation in that case is 'you' thinking you're in charge of the foresight, when, how can 'you' be, without you having some version of a laws-of-nature-defying hommunculi directing your mental traffic?


It's also interesting to ask what foresight and anticipation are. My guess is that they're (automatically/instictively induced) 'dry runs' (tests) made up of regurgitated memories. In that sense, foresight is possibly not much different to hindsight. I mean, I would have trouble imagining something that I had no experience of whatsoever. I don't think I could manage that. For example, if we could hypothetically ask a newborn baby what it thinks is going to happen next, I'm not sure it would be able to tell us much, even assuming it could somehow communicate.

GrahamH wrote:It seems to me that experience is all about self understanding, modelling the organism as a unified subject has considerable value, from working out where the body is, what moves it can make, to what it will do in those supposedly "realisable alternatives". Beyond the basic sensory information there is the experiential context that "I see a tree". Imagine experience as a virtual world model of an agent in a location with various states and dispositions. This allows prediction of what's about to happen. It's like tracking other entities, but applied to self, with much richer input. It is highly functional, but the causl effects arise from the simulation activity, rather than the simulated self. Calculating the subjective state is valuable without literally being the subjective entity. Still, if the subjective state is there as a construct that has been worked out there is a good chance of mistaking the model for an agent that is doing things in and of itself. You go and get a sandwich because you feel hungry and want to eat vs. the brain responding to physiological state to work out that you are in a hunger state and in doing so precipitating behaviour to get food. If the various physiological information was not integrated into "hunger" coordinated "strategic" behaviour to stay alive would be difficult.

Yes, but it would seem to me that all this calculating, predicting and learning could be automatically (algorithmically) done (and I'm thinking, more efficiently) without 'you' thinking 'you' are in charge of any of it. This is, after all, the way it works for the vast majority of the things happening in our brains and bodies. So the question is, why does an apparently tiny minority of them 'break the surface'?

I agree with you that it seems to help sustain in us a sense of self, I'm just not sure why we even have or need such a thing in the first place.

Personally, mine is a pain in the ass quite a lot of the time and not all that attractive.