Thanks for posting this! Free will is an amazing and deep and important problem, and I'm glad to see discussion of it gaining such traction on Steemit! Besides neuroscientists and gurus, there have also been philosophers who work on this problem. (Disclaimer: I'm a philosophy professor who has also posted on it twice recently.)
Before I evaluate your solution for myself I would have to understand what it is. You say your two crucial conclusions are
- freedom is not a product of mere mechanical happenings but a consequence of our consciousness. 2) freedom doesn’t come from a part inside consciousness, it comes from the totality of our conscious awareness.
One favorite question of analytic philosophers is what does that mean?! This question is a very useful tool. It's a kind of check on letting our ideas run ahead of what makes sense, since it's easy to sound deep - even to ourselves - without actually saying anything of substance. Consider this product of the Deepak Chopra fake quotation generator:
Experiential truth is the foundation of innumerable images
It turns out that many people will rate such phrases as sounding deep, even though they are nonsense.
So in the light of that, when I don't understand a phrase that sounds deep like "freedom ... is a consequence of our consciousness", I have to pause and say: that could be because I just don't understand it yet, or it could be because there's nothing to understand.
So can you say a little more about how freedom "is a product of" consciousness? Is this freedom that comes from consciousness compatible with our consciousness being caused by a determinstic universe? Is it enough to give us true moral responsibility - the kind that justifies retributive punishment, for example? Why or why not?
Nothing justifies retributive punishment. Our consciousness is not caused by the universe, it is a real part of it. I can't spell out the nature of conscious freedom without going into the ontology of consciousness and the nature of freedom. The problem here was free will and its seemingly illusory nature. My solution navigates between quantum mysticism, wittgensteinian deflationism, new age relativism, dennetian eliminativism, and dualistic atomism. In a later post i can go into the positive ontology.
Hi @clains and @camilla. Thanks for your patient answer, and I will look forward to the details of this account. I'm especially curious to hear about how our consciousness is a real part of the universe but "not caused by the universe" (panpsychism?), and how you could be any variety of Dennettian eliminativist about consciousness and still say that we have freedom as a product of this (non-existent) consciousness. (Or when you say your solution navigates between these positions, do you mean it avoids them all?) Anyway I suppose I will have to see in the full account!
And at any rate, I'm glad to hear we agree that retributive punishment is not justified (since I think that's the real heart of the issue).
Avoids all the issues yes! I hope. Will have the positive account out maybe by next week, maybe consciousness first then freedom. :) -clains
My gf's account - clains