There is a recent article, Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not, where a professor said, “You ask, ‘Did you intend to do it? Did you realize you could have done something else? That you had options?’ Most people’s intuitive sense is the answers are yes, and so you have demonstrated free will. But that’s like trying to evaluate a movie by only seeing the last three minutes of it. When you ask, ‘Where did intent come from?’, everything from one second to a million years before comes into play. That leads inevitably to the conclusion that there’s no free will. Because no matter how much you try, you can’t intend to intend something. You can’t will yourself to have willpower. You can’t think of what you’re going to think of next. It’s simply not possible.”
The unknown with the question of free will, intent or control is not what happened before or whether it is a motion picture. The mind holds memory. That memory can be sought intentionally. How?
What is the difference between the memory, and that it can be sought, or that the individual is remembering as a subjective experience, or that the process to recall is in attention?
This means that there is the memory. There is a control to get it. The experience is subjective. The process is in attention. These extras are different from the memory as represented information.
When someone is trying to remember the name of some old schoolmate, intentionally, what does anything else have to do with it, more than what the mind presents? What is the human mind? How does it hold or organize information? When it does, what are the features or the extras or qualifiers that make the information applicable?
The human mind is postulated to be the collection of all the electrical and chemical impulses of neurons, with their features and interactions. These impulses have sets—within clusters of neurons—with which they operate. The central function, conceptually, is formation or configuration, which occurs by the fusion of sets of electrical and chemical impulses.
It is this central function that the mind uses to hold information, including to modulate interoception and so forth. There are qualifiers or features to the central function, with some completing the function.
They include attention or prioritization, awareness or pre-prioritization, sense of self or subjectivity, and intent, control or free will.
Attention, with main vision as an example, is in focus. Peripheral vision is in awareness. Awareness and attention are subjective experiences. There is also intent, such as looking at something, or paying attention, shifting prioritization.
Other qualifiers feature across the human mind. Consciousness can be defined as a super qualifier, aggregating various qualifiers. Consciousness is possible for pain anywhere in the body, even though, for many, as regular functions, they don’t to come to attention, awareness or seem subjective. Consciousness is not just the sets of impulses with the highest number of qualifiers in a moment, but all the sets of impulses that can be qualified. This is because interchanges are possible across sets, and the strengths of qualifiers vary.
Intent is not always constant, but it is necessary. If intent were not possible, attention would be weak. This would make it difficult to think about much, change one’s gaze, listen carefully or purposefully avoid some dangers.
Intent is a qualifier of functions. It also assists major qualifiers. Without intent, attention would rely solely on the flows of arrays, of sets of impulses. Without attention, it would be difficult to learn. Without attention, there is no consciousness. Without intent, attention would be unable to drive the consciousness for survival.
In a set of electrical and chemical impulses for a function, the qualifiers also feature, with some in parallel. Some may argue against free will, with anything, but whoever says there is no free will may also be saying there is no consciousness.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
I am really enjoying all the arguments circulating in this day and age trying to prove and disprove free will. In this article I honed in on these sentences. “This means that there is the memory. There is a control to get it.” “When someone is trying to remember the name of some old schoolmate, intentionally, what does anything else have to do with it, more than what the mind presents?” The control, the intentionality: Where is it, what is it, where does it come from, how is it defined? I understand what you are getting at but where is… Read more »