In my joust some time ago with a determinist (he eventually "chose" to leave this blog in a huff, by a delicious irony), I was reminded of what a tangle of contradictions people who think they are "scientific" get into when trying to disprove or mock the idea that humans have free will. I won't rehash all the arguments, but I came across this 2005 study recently, called "What is consciousness for? It is by Lee Pierson and Monroe Trout. The link is here. http://cogprints.org/4482/
Here are some excerpts that I liked:
The subjectivity and intentionality of conscious experience seem pointless outside the context
of volitional action. Automatic actions do not require guidance by subjective, intentional
information, because they can be accomplished by physical chain reactions alone; they need not
be consciously controlled.
3) It would seem likely from the principle of evolutionary continuity that other conscious animals have some form of volition. Like any sophisticated adaptation, such as the eye, volition would probably not have evolved in one sudden stroke. Non-human mammals, particularly primates,
have many neural and behavioral similarities to humans, further suggesting that they may have
some form of volition.
4) Why would the “Blind Watchmaker” of natural selection torture conscious organisms with pain
if they could do nothing, beyond what they do automatically, to avoid the pain? The conscious
experience of pain would have no function without the adaptive benefits of volitional action.
The last point is dead-on. If our consciousness is purely an epiphenomenon, and we have evolved to such a state, what benefit do we get from experiencing nasty things if we could do nothing to avoid them by choice? The importance of human learning and judging information seems to be inextricably linked to the idea of conscious control.
And then there is this knock-down point:
"Volitionally sustained attention is slower, more energy-expensive, and less reliable than nonconsciously controlled attention. What, then, is its adaptive benefit? In a word: flexibility. The flexibility of volitional attention provides benefits that range from conferring sexual selection advantages, to improving error detection, to facilitating perception, to enabling humans to engage in objective conceptual thought. It has often been said that consciousness provides flexibility. This is true, but only because consciousness makes volitional action--action that can go beyond any programming--possible. The adaptive benefit of volition is that it gives the organism the flexibility needed to improve upon the physical chain reactions of a non-conscious creature. This capacity to override its physical chain reactions, i.e., its “programmed”12 actions, enables the volitional organism to take adaptive actions that would not otherwise be possible and to avoid some maladaptive automatic actions as well.
This is not easy reading, but worthwhile. There is also a useful reading list attached to it. Of course, none of what they write will have the slightest impact on the determinist, who sits in a theoretical prison of his own devising.
Here is another link on the "free will" issue that takes on Daniel Dennett. The author of the piece sounds quite a pugilist. http://www.atlassociety.org/da...