Quote Originally Posted by Switch View Post
Now you are choosing to be facetious just for the sake of it.
I was joking about the Thai Chicklenhead, but not about chimpanzees or neanderthals.

If you agree that humans are the product of an evolutionary process then you would also agree that free will is an evolved feature of human psychology.

Evolved features do not appear overnight like an on/off switch, they gradually appear.

So the proposition that we either do or do not have free will seems to me not to make sense.

What would it feel like to have half as much free will as we do today?

Or 25%

How much free will did Neanderthal man have?

How much free will do chimpanzees have?

When I say free will I am referring to the sensation of being able to ponder the future and juggle future behavioural options mentally before executing them. I think 'free will' is a generous and self-flattering label for this mental capacity.

I suspect that this internal mental process is probably essentially an illusion. The decision making probably takes place at a subconscious emotional level (like all the goal driven choice-making behaviour of other pre-human ancestral animals). The conscious human self is a recently evolved module and it is unlikely to have wrested executive control of the behaviour of the creature quite as fully as we imagine.

The conscious juggling of options that we feel we engage in does, I suspect, actually happen in reverse. It is still the subconscious goal driven modules that jostle with each other to grab the attention of our 'conscious self'. Our conscious self accepts whatever our subconscious throws at it most forcefully and paints some rationalising on it and then serves it up as behaviour that can be retrospectively explained to oneself and to others.

Our conscious self is not the grand CEO of our mental faculties that it imagines itself to be. It is more like the humble press agent.

Quote Originally Posted by Backspin View Post
So there's something special about humans. Want to call that a soul or something ?
I concur with the Spinner, just like the medieval soul (which seems to be an illusion conjured by the mysterious quality of internal reflective consciousness) I think that Free Will will also prove to be largely a conjured illusion.