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From: jeff@aiva.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Free Will and Self-Awareness
Message-ID: <462@aiva.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 24 May 88 03:19:04 GMT
References: <8805182232.AA29965@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: jeff@uk.ac.ed.aiva (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: Dept. of AI, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK
Lines: 76

In article <8805182232.AA29965@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> eyal@COYOTE.STANFORD.EDU (Eyal Mozes) writes:
>In article <445@aiva.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiva.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>>I would be interested in knowing what you think *isn't* under a
>>person's volitional control.  One would normally think that having
>>a sore throat is not under conscious control even though one can
>>chose to do something about it or even to try to prevent it.

>Which is why I used the word "indirectly".

You introduced the word "indirectly" in response to an earlier
message that suggested that obsessive thoughts might be a
counterexample to your claim that people could always control
their thoughts, which seemed to be a much stronger claim than
what you are saying now.

If the sense in which people can control their thoughts is no
stronger than that in which they can control whether or not
they have a sore throat, than your claim is a rather weak one.

>[...] the choice to focus your consciousness
>or not is the only fundamental free-will choice. However, this choice
>leads to other, derivative choices, which include the choices of what
>to think about, what views and values to hold, and what actions to
>take.

I would like to hear what you would say about some of the other
things I said in my previous message, specifically points like the
following:  Why do you chose to focus on one thing rather than
another?  Did you decide to focus on that thing, and if so how
did you decide to decide to focus on that thing, and so on.
Merely deciding to focus (and why that decision rather than
another?  Did you decide to decide to focus, etc?) does not
determine what to think about, and so does not lead to it in
a very stong sense.  But see my other messages for a better attempt
at explaining this.

At some point, something other than a conscious decision must
be made.  And it is hard to see how that can count as free will
since the decision is essentially given to us by some non conscious
part of our mind.  And it isn't actually "at some point": every
thought just appears; we don't decide to have it first.

What I've just said is wrong in that I've made it sound like we're
something separate observing our thoughts as they "appear", that we
might wish to control them but can't.  It would be better to say that
we just are these thoughts.  We can't go to some independent level
where we control them.

Nonetheless, it is possible to have thoughts that are essentially
instructions (to ourselves) to think certain things, for example
when we try to remember something.  And so we do have a certain
amount of control in that some of the links are conscious.  This
ability is limited, however, and one of the limits is due to the
problems of infinite regress I've mentioned before.

I would recommend (again) Dennett's Elbow Room: The Varieties of
Free Will Worth Wanting and also Julian Jaynes' The Origin of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bichameral Mind.  Even if
Jaynes's central thesis is wrong (as it may well be), he makes
many useful and interesting observations along the way.

>Whenever a person faces a decision about what view to hold on some
>issue, or about what action to take, that person may focus his thoughts
>on all relevant information and thus try to make an informed, rational
>decision; or he may make no such effort, deciding on the basis of what
>he happens to feel like at that moment; or he may deliberately avoid
>considering some of the relevant information, and make a decision based
>on evasion.

Often the most rational choice is to deliberately avoid considering
all relevant information in order to make a decision within a certain
time.  It is not necessarily evasion.  I also see nothing irrational
in, for example, deciding to eat some chocolate ice cream just because
that's the flavor I happen to feel like having.

-- Jeff