Ucc.,
Which is a small difference indeed
A difference that I mark.
‘Proposed’ is not ‘found’.
Just as freewill is proposed.
There are belief systems which we develop, and then there are beliefs that spring from the constitution unbidden.
How do you determine the difference? You, if the product of the former, would never be able to tell them apart.
Will trees be doing it next?
Don’t look now but trees might be operating in extremely complex ecosystems, a vast network of life more complex than any human brain…if humans have mind, so must many other things, I am not adverse to that. I am a pantheist and thus a panpsychist.
As far as your model can predict, the desire that makes us act is completely random.
This is very close to my suspicion. I actually do believe in freewill in the radical sense that it appears that the body-as-mind in ideational and causal fashion balances out possibilities which then reach a threshold and are randomly then found to be willed. Ostensibly it is a coin flip that happens behind the veiled moment when we “decideâ€, the moment even freewillers cannot experience or see. But a strictly determinist model works as well here, if that is more comforting to others. What seems the least probable is that the “I†operates in Lord of the Manor fashion, weighing reasons in his right an left hand, and then completely free from cause, self-determines a decision. Decisions that are experienced as such very often are proved to be caused by any number of explanations that go far beyond the knowledge of “deciderâ€. Further, mitigating factors always intrude on the freewill description, factors that strike me as completely arbitrary in application: operating under mental illness, addiction, retardation, autism, emotional intensity, intoxication, not to mention unconscious motivation, all to some degree suspend the status of freewill. I suspect that just as these cases suspend freewill due to cultural attempts to explain and assess behavior, so too freewill is also an attempt to explain behavior, and as such, influences our personal experience of our very own actions. There is no freewill will experience that cannot later be susceptible to suspended explanation by way of other causes.
But as it seems you will not let go of your freewill view, I propose a compromise. Hold on to freewill, but accept that all that one can do is decide to place oneself in the hands of much larger forces than you. And in so doing, one becomes an expression of those forces.
Dunamis
