https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462v2

From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of thompnicks...@gmail.com
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2021 3:08 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjective experience & free will

Jochen,

FWIW, I think free will is mostly a legal fiction used to determine who is 
responsible for the various calamities that we inflict on one another.  All 
behavior is either determined, or free, and there is no useful distinction to 
be made between free and determined action.   I have wanted for many  years to 
make a connection between the calculus and mental concepts like motivation.   
Just as the derivative is a slope at a point, so a motive is the slope of 
behavior at a point.  Motives are the limits of behavioral differentials.  The 
only hard part of the hard problem is that I have a hard time seeing why people 
worry about it.

Nick

Nick Thompson
thompnicks...@gmail.com<mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> On 
Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2021 3:29 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
<friam@redfish.com<mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
Subject: [FRIAM] Subjective experience & free will

I am reading a book about Leibniz and started to wonder if the hard problem of 
consciousness could be the reason why we have the illusion of free will and can 
not predict how others will act.

From the outside a person seems to have free will in principle. From the inside 
everybody feels something different and is controlled by emotions based on 
subjective experience, which is unknown to others, because the individual is 
not transparent and the history is not known.

Once we investigate the life of a person, for example by a detective as part of 
a criminal investigation, or as movie viewers in a cinema, we start to 
understand why a person acts they way it does. The more we step into the 
footsteps of a person, the better we understand the feelings, goals and motives.

Could it be that the same thing which  prevents us from understanding the 
subjective experiences of others also creates the illusion of free will?

-J.



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