[Mind's Eye] Re: My fellow zombies

I don't understand how some can say we don't have free will. You can
choose to do anything you want at any given time. How is that not free
will?

On Aug 2, 12:51 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> "We have access to a technology that would have looked like sorcery in
> Descartes's day: the ability to peer inside someone's head and read
> their thoughts. Unfortunately, that doesn't take us any nearer to
> knowing whether they are sentient. "Even if you measure brainwaves,
> you can never know exactly what experience they represent," says
> psychologist Bruce Hood at the University of Bristol, UK.  If
> anything, brain scanning has undermined Descartes's maxim. You, too,
> might be a zombie. "I happen to be one myself," says Stanford
> University philosopher Paul Skokowski. "And so, even if you don't
> realise it, are you." Skokowski's assertion is based on the belief,
> particularly common among neuroscientists who study brain scans, that
> we do not have free will. There is no ghost in the machine; our
> actions are driven by brain states that lie entirely beyond our
> control. "I think, therefore I am" might be an illusion.
> So, it may well be that you live in a computer simulation in which you
> are the only self-aware creature. I could well be a zombie and so
> could you. Have an interesting day." (from a recent New Scientist)
>
> We range over debates in free will and what it is to be human. So far
> we haven't established free will or even that we are not merely
> avatars in 'something else's game'.
>
> I wonder whether there are advantages in considering ourselves as
> creatures limited by programming and also capable of it?