Ask HN: Is Freewill a Requirement of Consciousness?
I think both of those words are nebulous and therefore it is hard to talk about them in a meaningful way.<p>I feel like freewill is a made up idea entirely and while we might have the experience of free will, the reality is different.<p>I think drugs are a great thing to think about in reference to free will. There are many drugs that will force your mind into specific modalities. There are drugs that can be injected that will force you to sleep, force you unconscious, or force you to experience reality in a way other than what you are accustomed.<p>Not eating food can result in people become hangry without even understanding they are angry because they haven&#x27;t eaten. Interview results and court judgements are different based on having eaten lunch or not.<p>Even if you believe in the idea of free will, it seems pretty clear that chemical forces can dominate free will. This means that at best free will is a spectrum.<p>The sights you see are little waves reacting with chemicals in your eyeballs conducting electricity through various nerves. The various stimuli we can experience all have physical and chemical basis. These stimuli are then processed by the machinery of our brain, which can alter the structure and machinery of our brain. At least that&#x27;s my understanding.<p>If everything can be explained by a physical processes, then it seems like if you had perfect knowledge about the current state, then you could predict the next, and if you can predict one state, with perfect knowledge of a previous state, then it seems clear that freewill is an illusion and therefore a product of consciousness and not a requirement of it.<p>If I smashed your hand with a hammer, do you think I could reliably predict you will feel pain? Of course you will. Do you that think that even if you feel pain your response is free will? You can choose to say ow, or try to fight me, or run away so I don&#x27;t smash your hand again. But what if you had a history of losing fights? What if your testosterone is high or low? What if you have genetic markers that result in under production or over production of adrenaline? Is the adrenaline causing your heart to race free will? Will the subjective experience of rushing adrenaline influence or control your &quot;decision.&quot; At what point does influence become control? Are counter influences other predictable physical systems?<p>Why can&#x27;t depressed people choose to be happy?<p>Why can&#x27;t ADHD people choose to concentrate?<p>I think dementia and mental illness is another interesting avenue of exploring free well and consciousness.<p>If I were to try to describe free will somewhat rigorously, I would say free will is the subjective experience of the thinking mind overriding the feeling mind.<p>Consciousness is much harder. The idea clearly exists, because we all have some notion of &quot;I.&quot; Being able to say &quot;I feel this way&quot; means that consciousness is an idea that exists. It seems like the idea of consiousness must involve the idea of a closed system because &quot;I&quot; indicates a separation of one grouping of atoms from another. I&#x27;m not sure what the second property is that creates subjective experience, memory?