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TheOtherDave comments on Righting a Wrong Question - Less Wrong
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Nice post, and great method.
On free will, I'd like to pose a question to anyone interested: What do you think it would feel like not to have free will?
(Or, what do you think it would feel like to not think you have free will?)
During the first month or so after my stroke, while my nervous system was busily rewiring itself, I experienced all sorts of transient proprioceptic illusions.
One of them amounted to the absence of the feeling of free will... I experienced my arm as doing things that seemed purposeful from the outside, but for which I was aware of no corresponding purpose.
For example, I ate breakfast one morning without experiencing control over my arm. It fed me, just like it always had, but I didn't feel like I was in control of it.
To give you an idea of how odd this was: at one point my arm put down the food item it was holding to my mouth, and I lay there somewhat puzzled... why wasn't my arm letting me finish it? Then it picked up a juice carton and brought it to my mouth, and I thought "Oh! It wants me to drink something... yeah, that makes sense."
It was a creepy experience, somewhat ameliorated by the fact that I could "take control" if I chose to... letting my arm feed me breakfast was a deliberate choice, I was curious about what would happen.
I think that's what it feels like to not experience myself as having free will, which is I think close enough to your second question.
As for your first question... I think it would feel very much like the way I feel right now.
That is creepy as hell.
Heh. You're telling me? ;-)
Fascinating!
It felt like you couldn't control yourself, but which one of you (two) was really "yourself"? English usually refers to people and minds in the singular, but my mind feels more like a committee. Maybe the stroke drove more a wedge between the committee members than usual.
In this particular case, I don't think so.
I mean, we can go down the rabbit hole about what constitutes a "self," but in pragmatic terms, everything involved in making decisions seemed to be more or less aligned and coordinating as well as it ever does... what was missing was that I didn't have any awareness of it as coordinated.
In other words, it wasn't like my arm was going off and doing stuff that I had no idea why it was doing; rather, it was doing exactly what I would have made it do in the first place... I just didn't have any awareness of actually making it do so.
That said, the more extremely disjointed version does happen... google "alien hand syndrome."
I'd say that you felt that you had free will, along with more severe problems expressing it than usual. I'm guessing that paranoid schizophrenics obeying voices telling them to do things is a better example of a feeling of not having free will.
Not to mention ordinary people who happen to have guns pointed to their heads.
Sounds to me like the left-brain interpreter experiencing lag.
Yeah, that's more or less how I interpreted it... not so much lag, precisely, as a failure to synchronize. There were lots of weird neural effects that turned up during that time that, on consideration, seemed to basically be timing/synchronization failures, whcih makese a lot of sense if various parts of my brain were changing the speed with which they did things as the brain damage healed and the swelling went down.
Of course, it's one thing to know intellectually that my superficially coherent worldview is the result of careful stitching together of outputs from independent modules operating at different rates on different inputs; it's quite another thing to actually experience that coherency breaking down.