I recently read "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow" and in it, the author raises many interesting ideas about consciousness, the mind, self, free will, etc.
Would someone with DP/DR say they possess free will? Would you say you possess free will?
Is the test for "having free will" simply feeling like you have it? Or saying that you have it? Does an AI that says "I am sentient. I possess free will." actually have those qualities? Do we?
Obvious resolution: There's no such thing, the universe is deterministic but not predictable. This doesn't matter very much in practice, punishment is about game theory so your 'free will' to perform or not perform an action is kind of irrelevant.
That's my takeaway too. In practice, it doesn't really matter since we only have the one universe to observe, so there's no material difference between one model and the other.
But be aware: The free-will model can be uninstalled from your brain, and this may have interesting side-effects. (Including possibly temporary DPDR, though I wouldn’t necessarily call DPDR a bad thing, just... atypical. And it helps to have solid coping strategies.)
My understanding of the thinking about free will is that it actually is an illusion that's a byproduct of the way the brain processes, consolidates, and stores information (similar to the way consciousness is thought to be an emergent property of the same processes). I've read about studies showing that a decision is made at the neuronal level before a person is consciously aware of it, so it's not as though we consciously deliberate before making each decision.
That is not to say that everything is pre-determined, or that we're hopeless to change our behavior. Our self-talk or conscious narrative help to create a feedback loop that can influence the way future decisions are arrived upon by reinforcing certain neural pathways over others, making some decisions more likely than others.
And FWIW, I have dealt with DP/DR for a lot of years, and most of my symptoms fall to the side of feeling like everything is a dream state, or that neither I nor the outside world are actually real. The prolonged detached feeling can be super unnerving before you realize what's going on. I can see there being an aspect of a crisis of free will (or w/e) for others dealing with this, but I don't think it's necessarily true for all of us.
> That is not to say that everything is pre-determined, or that we're hopeless to change our behavior. Our self-talk or conscious narrative help to create a feedback loop that can influence the way future decisions are arrived upon by reinforcing certain neural pathways over others, making some decisions more likely than others.
Yet the self-talk or conscious narrative themselves are a result of a combination of deterministic and stochastic factors. We are not hopeless to change because we are systems that react and adapt to our environment all the time. We are a ship afloat a partly stochastic sea.
Hey, this is out of context, but I noticed you replied on a thread almost a month back saying you were interested in vajrayana visualization practices. Sorry I didn't notice your reply! I cannot reply to that thread anymore, but here's a link for you (sorry everyone else, just ignore this reply).
https://studybuddhism.com/en/advanced-studies/vajrayana/tant...
It's one thing to contemplate whether you have free will or not. It could be a "fun" exercise. BUT to feel like you have no free will is an entirely a different beast. DP/DR sometimes makes you feel like you have no free will and that triggers a lot of panic.
It also makes you feel like your "self" could disappear at any moment. This notion of no self is prevalent in eastern mysticism. Also, folks who have imbibed certain psychedelics can also lose their sense of self. So what we feel is not entirely made up, this disorder may be pointing to something important to look at.
No, just an indication of available degrees of freedom and evolutionary pressure. It is useful for DNA replication machinery to have error-correction capabilities, does this mean DNA replication machinery has free will?
Would someone with DP/DR say they possess free will? Would you say you possess free will?
Is the test for "having free will" simply feeling like you have it? Or saying that you have it? Does an AI that says "I am sentient. I possess free will." actually have those qualities? Do we?