/lit/ - Literature

>>12722223

Nowadays there's a lot of bottom-up approaches to this. We have many empirical studies suggesting that what we consider to be a "decision" was already triggered inside the brain several microseconds before we even think the thought of taking a certain action. People like Sam Harris and Thomas Metzinger use that as a way of putting the whole notion of self aside and not only that of free will. Even thinking about yourself, they'd say, is a mere by-product of a complex system recollecting data about itself in an absurdly organized manner, which makes it seem like there is a single entity doing it (i.e the 'you').

This approach is still simplistic, and very insidious in spite of the field of complex systems being so developed for years now. Asking about free will or conscience as a yes or no question might not even make sense when applied to the kind of systems that our mind belongs to. There is a kind of self consistency going on with us where preconditioned stimuli is fed back to our brains in a way that for all intents and purposes can be considered "top-down" and not "bottom-up". In spite of all the utilitarianism, the modern atomizers can't see that it's not useful to merely try pinning down the constituents of a given collective response, without considering that the collective response itself can change its constituents through external preconditioned means.

For example, when you decide to go eat a burger, it might not be a useful or even pertinent question to ask whether or not it was a transcendental, independent consciousness that willed this, or merely a consequence of the complex relation of your body to the external ambient throughout all your life. Both things are always acting in a self consistent manner and simultaneously being the cause for each other's movement (where the transcendental consciousness of course can just as well or even better be described by the emergent effect of all your cells). With gravitation this seems obvious but it gets that much more complex when it's about brains.

There's also the matter as per >>12722495
that the very framework under which you are posing this question cannot really accept either answer wholeheartedly in a trivial manner.

>>12562202

>>12562235
>>12562243

German idealism at its best. When you try to think about yourself, smoke some weed and then you'll be able to take a step further: thinking about thinking about yourself. This third layer of thinking, after the actual thinking about thinking has been done (so not the thinking about thinking in itself, but its result) is your actual self. Such thought could only have led to the many Farming/Truck/Work simulators of today's Germany.