Consciousness and Free Will

There is another video on YouTube entitled: “Free will is scientifically impossible.” My objection to this is: if there were no free will, if we were doomed to be mere spectators of events that unfold deterministically, why do we have consciousness at all?

Consciousness must have evolved (or access to consciousness, if, like me, you consider the psyche to be something immaterial). What survival advantage would living beings with consciousness have if they were unable to make decisions? 

Claus D. Volko 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reprogramming Bacteria for Symbiont Conversion: A Review

Bacteria are prokaryotic cells some of which have positive effects upon the human organism and some of which have negative effects. I coined the term “symbiont conversion” for methods that convert, or reprogram, bacteria (and other cells, such as tumor cells) that have a negative effect to cells that have a positive effect. With such methods the urgent problem of antibiotic resistance could be solved. [Volko2025] This short paper is about such methods, but in a more broad context – I want to review different approaches towards the reprogramming of bacteria and not necessarily in the context of symbiont conversion, although symbiont conversion is the motivation for doing this literature survey. Basically a literature survey shows that there are two different approaches towards the reprogramming of bacteria: On the one hand, bacteria can be reprogrammed by altering their genes, for example by using bacteriophages (viruses that target bacteria) or methods like CRISPR/Cas9. These approache...
Read more

A Proof of the CTMU - Sketch

The CTMU is a theoretic model proposed by Christopher Langan. More information on it can be found at: https://ctmucommunity.org/wiki/ The core statement of the CTMU is: The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe is a language that describes itself. Another statement is: The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe is equivalent to Reality. From this follows: The universe is a language that describes itself. A language is a set of words that are generated using a set of rules called a formal grammar. A language can describe other languages - for example, English can describe French - and it can also describe itself - English can describe English. There is nothing that exists outside of the universe - everything that exists does so inside the universe. For this reason whatever describes the universe, as well as the language using which it does it, exists inside the universe. Therefore it it is legitimate to state that the universe describes itself. Since the language using which the...
Read more

Summary of "The Inappropriately Excluded"

The late Michael Wells Ferguson was the author of the article "The Inappropriately Excluded", which I consider a classic and a must-read. Many highly intelligent people dream of reaching high positions in society, such as becoming university professors or winning the Nobel Prize. Ferguson shows that professors, doctors, judges, etc. are on average not that smart and that people with far above average intelligence usually do not get into these positions. The reason is not that these people have shortcomings but that highly intelligent people are systematically discriminated against. <<In the popular culture, IQ has become a point of contention. Many people credulously accept that the eminent have very high IQs and that people of ordinary accomplishment have ordinary IQs. For example, it was widely reported that Garry Kasparov has an IQ of 190. In truth, his IQ is verified to be 135.>> <<Over an extensive range of studies and with remarkable consisten...
Read more