Posted: Oct 06, 2017 5:30 pm
GrahamH wrote:John Platko wrote:
It's certainly not obvious to me why conscious intent is needed for the choice. Why is unconscious intent insufficient?
quote]
"unconscious intent"? WTF is that? Is it something you intend to do without knowing that you intend to do it?To intend is to have in mind something to be done or brought about
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/intend
If you do something with no forethought we call that "unintentional".
I'm talking about something that was intended by the mind but perhaps unconsciously so. That's is, you really deep down want x but think you want y and yet somehow you end up choosing x. Admittedly, words like intention, and unintentional have too many degrees of freedom to be of much use in this discussion but I think you get what I'm saying. My kind of free will is not limited to conscious intent. We often consciously make choices to supress conscious knowledge (this explains it rather nicey) and our free will then has hidden states which never-the-less become part of our free will neural mechanism.
It's easy to see how this plays out in reality. A person keeps ending up in the same sort of bad situation (maybe a bad relationship keeps repeating) even though they are consciously trying to avoid that situation again. Often this is by choice but not conscious choice - hidden state choice.