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Philosophy

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  • I think this answer explains it very well. If a creature has no consciousness it is easy to see that there is no free will and that creature is just reacting to stimuli. If it had the ability to remember one piece of information, say that a particular mushroom made it sick after eating it, that could help it survive and reproduce. Extrapolate that to something that can remember thousands of things and it is clearly an advantage. Take that even further with humans and you have a being who can manipulate people & environment in order to survive and reproduce. But it doesn't mean it has free will Commented Aug 14, 2020 at 14:20
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    @grinch Thanks. If you haven't seen it, your last sentence is best exmplified by the movie Ex Machina, where the criteria for consciousness is much stronger than the Turing test. Commented Aug 14, 2020 at 14:23
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    Yeah that was a great movie! And yes, exactly. Just because something can remember lots of things and use that data along with inputs from the environment to make decisions, it does not mean that it had any true choice in the decision it makes. The decision making process is just super complex but still deterministic. Under these exact inputs it comes to this decision. Which might be another reason it is selected for. If something is so complex it is hard to figure out how to manipulate it. Much like how in Ex Machina the human was manipulated by the computer and not the other way around. Commented Aug 14, 2020 at 14:27