Our will is our personal motivation. Because our motivation is an expression of our own physiology and no other force, our will is free.

Thank you Arnold

Will is an overall experience observed by a person's ability to initiate, sustain, and direct behavior.

Yes, our will is our personal motivation as mentioned by Dr. Trehub. Motivation comes from social (and philosophical) upbringing, personal experiences, unfulfilled desires and the life's ambition or goal of an individual. Being a biochemist, I tried to analyze this issue from a biochemical point of view and discussed recently in a couple of my RG publications and questions.  

I agree with Arnold in that the only useful meaning of free will is that the causation of our decisions lies in our own little domain of the universe that is our physiology - free from external override. In this sense we are free because we are not in chains. As Spinoza points out, other interpretations associated with the Christian Church are absurd.

But there is an issue about Libet that may be worth rehearsing in relation to the relationship of consciousness to decision making. Libet's scenario was a very artificial one in which a subject had to 'decide when to decide' to move a finger. Arguably this is just not very interesting. Most of the time decisions are based on consideration of premises. We are aware of the premises and if introspecting may be aware of being aware of the premises. We then decide and may be aware of having decided. For many decisions, especially novel ones, it seems that they simply do not occur other than in the presence of these two episodes of consciousness. So it is entirely legitimate to think that consciousness is a necessary part of the decision making. 

And it seems obvious a priori that we cannot be conscious of what decision we have made until after we have made it. The alternative violates causal sequence. The problem is that our language is sloppy and we talk of 'consciously deciding', when what we mean is being conscious of some premises and a desire to reach a decision on them and then conscious of having made a decision, quite often with intermediate stages of being conscious of considering one option then another - but always being conscious of what our brain has already selected.

So the 'free won't' interpretation Libet put on his experiments is probably an artefact of a very curious decision - one of deciding when to make a decision based on no premises with any value. By default the subjects just allowed some random fluctuation in subconscious processing to tip the balance.

Thankyou Jonathan,

The idea that there is two separate states of consciousness one for the premises, and one for the decision to register after the fact, is an interesting new addition to the theory of free will. I have not heard it stressed in quite that manner before.

I am not sure that I have seen it in print, but I have a thought at the back of my mind that either John Heil or David Papineau touch on it. The idea crystallised for me during a seminar given by Patrick Haggard at the Institute of Philosophy a few years ago attended by David Papineau and Tony Marcel. By the end of the discussion everyone present more or less agreed on this formulation as I remember. Conscious will does not seem to work if you assume one event, but if you assume a constant chain of conscious experiences it makes perfectly good sense.

It is especially appro pro if the chain of events is joined in memory as if there were no gaps between the events.

Dear All! It is as I previously suggested that the discussion of free will drifted by itself to consciousness. Consciousness is a firm term and all languages, I presume, have a word for it. Consciousness of course is a subjective experience of my own self. It is me who has this unique experience but I can also judge  other people whether they are conscious or not. Consciousness, our intimate and private inner world, a platform on which we are able to communicate with the outer world but it also enables us to look into us - introspection, which was mentioned already. This keen and bright awareness, alertness and wakefulness is a brain state, where Descartes' cogito ergo sum takes place. It is also the brain state where I am feeling that I am bound into the stream of time. Then consciousness is frozen into one moment, one instant is is compressed into a glimpse. But of course it is a series of glimpses, it has continuity. But this core area of my personality is also the executive control center of the mind, the platform, the commando Bridge or executive floor, and here we are back to motivation, Intention, Volition and will. Will is necessary for almost everything also for thinking. It is necessary for imagery as we have found, I mean the ability to see something in your mind's eye. Also sports champions make use of it  for what is called mental rehearsal. . . I have to stop here and maybe continue another time. Best wishes! Lüder Deecke, >Vienna.   

Glad to see you made it Luder.

Of course the other way to resolve the tension is to use Schopenhauer's sense of Wille as in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. In this sense will is something a bit like 'momentum' in physics - just the acting out of the dynamic oomph that is everywhere in the world, in the waves of the sea or the force of the wind. So 'life force' is just that particular form of a general force or momentum that operates within living things. Maybe there are rather esoteric forces associated with conscious thinking that are both perception and will.

The one thing I would query in Luder's analysis is that there is any single 'core' or command bridge. Neurobiology suggests that there will be lots of parallel sites of will at any one time. Because the brain has no mechanism for monitoring where anything is within itself, only the time it happens, it feeds itself a story of its own biography that seems to be at one place, but the anatomy tells us that it is not. Descartes's mistake was to think it must be in a single place, hence the pineal.

As a learner at this higher-level complexity domain, I was intrigued by Lüders comment that It is also the brain state where I am feeling that I am bound into the stream of time. Then consciousness is frozen into one moment, one instant is compressed into a glimpse. But of course it is a series of glimpses, it has continuity.

The interpretation that I particularly like is the final sentence marked in boldface above.

In reality the “brain state” is no more a “state” than a sequence of pictures showing e.g. a bird standing still on one leg. However, in contrast to the movie, where we can examine its components into individual stationary images, evolution is a relentless, on-going, unstoppable sequence of “states”. The frozen moment, cf. the film analogy, is very persistent and of course important, but it is nevertheless an illusion.

This distinction may perhaps appear unimportant at this level of discussion, but if we would like to “dig down” to a microscopic level of understanding, this feature might become fundamental.

I know that making efforts to bring neurological facts down to a more basic level is mostly regarded as hopeless and therefore not wanting. It is obvious that I do not share this pessimism.

Jonathan:"it feeds itself a story of its own biography that seems to be at one place, but the anatomy tells us that it is not. Descartes's mistake was to think it must be in a single place, hence the pineal."

While I agree that the brain feeds itself a story of it's own biography, and that it is not a single story, in that the brain works in parallel, Thus that Descartes made a mistake, it may be the case that only one side of the brain is monitored, and therefore that the story is singular even if the processing is bicameral. But to add to this I offer a different interpretation of "Trains of thought" where multiple solutions are sought simultaneously, but only the best solution gets reported to the biographic reporting stream. Thus in a Global Workspace like effect parallel functions are simulated to be serial functions. When you add the two together, you get a bicameral parallel stream of functions with only a small portion actually being reported at any point in time.

Graeme,

I am not thinking of two copies of the story, one on each side, but millions of copies - each reaching an individual neuron. It might well be that only the ones analysed on the left get fed into short term memory or language based reporting but there are still going to be millions. And in that regard I take your interpretation as read, or at tleast the default assumption. Each cell based input-output relation or, in a pre-Turing wide sense, computation, will be a different 'solution' or 'inference' and the sum of inferences will be weeded down to a most salient one that gets put back into workspace, exactly as you suggest. I would add to this that I think there may be two quite distinct complementary computational routines in sequential banks of cells. That is to say that cells either integrate in an A or a B style and that signals get sent along ABABAB routes. The difference would be that for A 10,000 'solutions' would compete for salience, whereas for B the pattern of 10,000 yes and no outputs would form the basis of a 'recognition' step such that the entire pattern was relevant. The difference between A and B might involve a quite different sensitivity to time relations based on gamma rhythms or something like that.

I think all this is pretty necessary for any viable model and I have come across half a dozen people who incorporate it in one way or another. Where Steve Sevush and I may be out on a limb is in placing the 'story-listening' in the same place as the solution deriving - in individual cells. Otherwise you have a non-causal explanation for phenomenality which I think sinks the whole project.

Jonathan, I think you are missing an immensely important architectural aspect where massively parallel connections like you describe, are brought together into a smaller set of connections that are merely "Very Parallel" not massively parallel. Before being further separated by the Workspace into reported and unreported connections. It is my contention that these "Trains of thought" are not massively parallel but actually operate as if they were selected functions.

It's not that I am ignoring the massively parallel aspects that you describe, but instead that I point out the presence of another architectural layer where massively parallel connections are reduced to merely very parallel connections. Don't get me wrong this architectural layer is still implemented in neurons, it is just that they are not directly connected to the perceptual filters, but take their information from the working memory instead.

But what would 'very parallel' be, Graeme. It could well be the output of my B processing, I admit, but then we would still have probably 10,000 signals in parallel, each being sent to 10,000 sites for type A analysis. The basic point is that we have reason to think that any of these stages are mediated by less than 10,000 parallel signals, which is an awful lot more than one on the left and one on the right. If there were less than about 10,000 inputs to a site where 'the brain's biography is recounted the story would be so dull that it could not possibly resemble our experience - more like a morse code or the variation on a five lever lock. The number of possible human experiences must I think require 1000 degrees of freedom of input.

I am aware that we need these bottlenecks and subroutines for all these functions but to have a physical model of experience we have to have this huge multiplicity to get the model up and running at all. In a sense all I am really saying is that experience has to be where the information is compresent and if most axons have 10000 branches it is unikely that the information is very often compresent at less than about 10000 locations where the respective signals arrive.