Free Will and Consciousness

Created by DALL·E 3 from my prompt

You are a consciousness, the individual experiencer of a conscious experience. You can be conscious or unconscious.

You recognize that you are conscious and exist. You can be absolutely sure of that.

A consciousness could possibly be in a bit more extreme state than sleep paralysis, conscious but without free will or illusion of it. No action — not even a mere action of willing — would be possible or would seem possible for you. You wouldn’t be able to even try to move a limb. (And you wouldn’t be able to even want to try to move a limb?) You can know that state by imagining it and acting it out.

Only a consciousness could be free, so we are at least halfway there. Everything else is dead matter. (Or something that’s not matter, but is still dead in comparison to a consciousness, such as antimatter and fields.) There wouldn’t be an actor there. We are probably dependent on matter though and ran by our brains. {Unless we shift to an emphatically supernatural worldview and wonder about the freedom of nonconscious spirit beings, for example.}

You recognize other things besides you existing and being conscious. Events that feel like your actions, for example. If unfreedom is true, they are pseudo actions (a will [a will to move your arm with the illusion of choosing it yourself] and the willed event [the movement of your arm with the illusion of moving it yourself] happen one after the other) and if freedom is true, they are actions. You notice their beginning and end.

{The will and the action seem to happen about concurrently.}

(An action the cause of which is not freedom, and in the place of which there couldn’t have been another action, is not a real action in my opinion.)

You may also notice apparently outer forces, such as very strong wind or another person, move your limbs. These events don’t feel like your own actions. Things would be very crazy if they were, so you are probably right.

I believe you get the rest of it right too. A consciousness can reach a state of completely free will. We are in it for most of our time.

The readiness potential observed in lab studies doesn’t disprove free will. It is interesting though. Is there truly a related brain event 0.3 seconds before every action you make? Has a test subject ever attempted to upset the prediction visible to him on a monitor? Would he never be able to make a surprise? Would voluntary stopping of actions with an involuntary beginning be observed?

(In Libet’s experiment, the test subject reports his decision to move his finger. In my opinion, this is not the real decision. We don’t work like that. The real decision is in the movement of the finger.)

[A. Hard determinism: The universe causes your will to move your arm, the movement of your arm and your illusion of doing them freely yourself.

B. Compatibilism: That counts as freedom.

C. Agent-causal libertarianism: You as a free agent and, in this regard, independent from the rest of the universe, are the cause of your will to move your arm and its movement.

Some believe in the existence of randomness. That would be unfreedom just like determinism, I think.]