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You say "choice", I say there is never a choice. There is no option, no decision to make, nothing you do is of your own volition, or your responsibility. You ar

You say "choice", I say there is never a choice. There is no option, no decision to make, nothing you do is of your own volition, or your responsibility. You are indeed compelled to do everything you will ever do whether that's eating a bacon sandwich or drowning puppies in a bathtub. Understanding is irrelevant and perhaps much of "consciousness" is post-hoc justification. I've brought it back to justice because it's a central pillar of human civilisation, and just looking at the legal system (though my thought is much broader) there are such concepts as "the age of criminal responsibility". What if we say that nobody is responsible for anything? Would we have got where we are now? It's a license to act in an entirely selfish (in the same sense as genes) way.

simiones 3y ago
A decision is understood as any point where an agent takes a course of action based on: its perception of circumstances, its evaluation of available options, its evaluation of possible consequences of each option, and its given logic/values/morals. Nowhere in this kind of definition is there some expectation of a "free" choice (one that doesn't depend on the whole history of the agent so far). You can see this definition in contexts like "decision trees" (which no one believes have consciousness or free will), and in common language about algorithms/programs (where people say the algorithm decides or chooses what to show you, for example - again with no illusions that the algorithm has free will).