@phxbillcee You present a puzzlingly enigma. I’ve been saying all along that our physical reality is an illusion—even our sense of self as a separate individual, but that we do have one real experience—that of conscious awareness and its accompanying free will. Now are you going to take even that away from me? . This bears further thought.

I’ve been thinking of the bodies/brains/thoughts as something like driverless cars, having no conscious awareness and no true free will. The car can do a lot of things by itself through good programming, an internal database, and through outside communication via GPS and the like. For a driverless car to have much purpose it needs at least a little bit of conscious oversight. A conscious being wants to go to a particular place and that being has to nudge the car into action. The conscious being has little or no control over the internal affairs of the car. It can step in at appropriate times and influence things to some degree, but constant interference would be inefficient and possibly even dangerous.

This model requires thinking of ourselves, not as our bodies, but as conscious awareness itself.

@WilliamFleming

@phxbillcee I watched all three of your videos all the way through. I have various objections to the information presented.

Starting with what is fresh in my mind, at the end of the third video comes a vehement attack on libertarian free will because those ideas are based on “metaphysics”. The metaphysics referred to challenges and threatens the world view of those who cling to a materialist/physicalist/reductionist philosophy. In this light, the entire spiel appears as an indoctrination piece in my mind. (Sorry, but I can not control my thoughts and beliefs. Even you have said as much. That’s just how I see it.)

I will not waste much time arguing against scientism because those who cling to that faith are generally adamant and totally unwilling to discuss any other options. I suppose it is a refuge from the stark, overwhelming glare of reality—whatever. Who am I to deprive them of their comfort? I will say though that it is pretty well established by physics that nature is not deterministic. Things happen without cause.

Going back to my first response, I said that I experience free will, and that personal experience trumps philosophy. You seemed to indicate that personal experience is not reliable because it is colored by prior experiences and filtered by the mind. If that is true, then shouldn’t we say the same about all our experiences? When does a personal experience become unreliable? I don’t believe that you can perfunctorily dismiss a person’s experience so easily. For example, Hurricane Michael recently blew through my region. It was a personal experience and I don’t think you can dismiss that.

When you think and analyze a philosophical idea like free will, is not that train of thought your own personal experience? As you say, personal experiences are unreliable. I would think that my direct experience of free will is more reliable than some mental rumblings originating in your brain.

The second video is wasted on me because it is all about our thoughts and the workings of our brains. I have already expressed the opinion that our bodies are nothing but robots, with no free will or conscious awareness. All the bodily decisions are based on instinct, learning, mental analysis, outside communication, or randomness. I gave the analogy of a driverless car, where consciousness coaxes the car into certain actions.

IMO the concept of free will is meaningless without the presence of conscious awareness. If I thought that conscious awareness somehow arose from the firing of neurons, then I would agree that there is no free will. However, I can not agree to that. There is no proof of such a thing and no one has the slightest idea of how it could happen.

On the contrary, since I have personal experience of awareness and free will I lean toward the concept of universal consciousness.
Long live metaphysics!