BRUTE wrote: so, in brute's mind (<- haha), if human consciousness exists, it must be a composite phenomenon, just like life. hard to even define, but humans know it when they see it. every single defining feature of it seems to disappear under scrutiny (such quantum!).
now the big question, to brute, is: is there even any free will in the lying, history-rewriting human mind at all? or are humans just automata that follow relatively deterministic patterns, and tell themselves a story to feel good about themselves, as some evolutionary quirk?
I side with BRUTE here.. life/consciousness/free will is just an emergent thing, and it is still ultimately a slave to physics, mathematics.
Though I think "free will" is a real thing, a human thing, a construction. But it is a real thing (as real as ethics, psychology, language, etc). The capability to do self-modification or feed back into your own systems to achieve some outcome that you pre-conceived ought not be taken lightly. The self is also part of the larger system and it can fiddle with the I/O there as well.
Do we believe there is a distinction between strong/weak emergence? Or is strong emergence just the bundle of things we can't explain yet, and destined to be reclassified? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence ... _emergence.
It seems pedantic to distinguish free will or no free will of humans (or animals, computers).
Humans (emergent automata) live in a system of emergent properties emerged from other emergent properties (emergence all the way down?). It gives us plenty of unpredictability in our day to day to the point that I am not practically motivated to draw any actionable conclusions out of knowing that it's all just quantum physics in the end.