csbrown28 said:
Why are you obfuscating? It's a simply question. If a mouse is hungry and it smells food (and now the caveat) if there are no other negative externalities, can the mouse choose not to eat? Can it say......Remember that it has food at home or decide it isn't in the mood for cheese?
I'm not obfuscating. By my lights, I'm getting to the heart of the question. Here--let me see if I can break it down a little further.
The answer to the question is: who knows? There are reasons to think that maybe the answer is yes. After all, if the mouse can see the cat and decide not to eat the cheese, the mouse may also respond to other things, such as that it's not in the mood for cheese, or some other such.
On the other hand, perhaps the answer is that mice cannot do this. But the reasons a mouse might not be able to do this seem to have little to do with free will, as such. Mice might not have moods, for example--and so, a fortiori, no anti-dairy moods might interfere with the gathering of calories. Similarly, mice might lack sufficient memory facility to recall that there is food at home. Neither of these have anything to do, at least on their face, with free will.
Generally speaking, I think I have free will in the sense you seem to mean, in that, given all the information present to my mind at some time, I'm able to make choices. Those choices are only caused by that information in a teleolistic sense--the information in question just more or less is the end of my decision making process. But the decision-making itself is separate from the information present. We infer this because the information present to me at any one time differs sharply in content, quantity, and quality from some other time, and yet the faculty of choice never leaves me. The fact that the biological endowment of a mouse presents its mind with very much less information, generally speaking, than is present to my consciousness doesn't mean the mouse lacks the power of choice; as I've already observed, that power remains regardless of the content, quantity, or quality of information present to me--presumably, the same is true of other conscious creatures.
csbrown28 said:
I can decide not to eat I can make a choice based on lots of reasons, some rational and others not so much
The point I was making is that even human beings make choices based on reasons. Will is not random--or at least, it usually isn't. If you design a thought experiment which has it that the mouse
has no reason not to eat the cheese, of course the outcome is that it will eat the cheese. In order to determine whether mice can make a choice, you need to introduce an element of competing motivations.
csbrown28 said:
but my question has always been, if a person is acting without free will what exactly would that look like. How would he differ from those with free will?
I thought you were asking the converse: i.e. how to distinguish free will from unfree will--and I believe I've already answered that question. (The answer, to review, was that the mental states, and presumably behavior, of a being with free will could not be predicted from physical information, no matter how complete that information. But also, such a being would not behave randomly; logical connections between its mental states at differing times, and again, presumably its behavior over differing times, could be found). We could predict the behavior of a being without free will based on sufficient physical information, and at least possibly, there would be no logical connection between its various mental states.
csbrown28 said:
Poorly worded on my part. "Goal" makes it sound as if it were a choice Not what I meant. If a sophisticated program has been given a task, it will complete that task based entirely on the program it's given.
Sure. I agree.
csbrown28 said:
Even if they are programed to improve their own programming?
Yes, of course.
csbrown28 said:
I suspect the same could be said for the human brain and the actions taken by the body if we had , literally, all the information there was to know about that brain and it's environment.
I disagree. There are properties of minds which could never be predicted from physical facts alone.