Biological machines

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This is intended to be another free will topic but with a twist. I would like to leave the free part out of it, because I think it only confuses the issue, and address the question of is there any such thing as human will at all.

Many years ago, back when I was programming, my employer sent the computer operator to some programming classes (which I thought was a waist of money) because they wanted to give him a chance to improve himself. Soon after he started asking me almost philosophical type questions like “how does the computer know if a>5?”. I would respond with brief technical answers and he informed me that that's not what he was looking for when he said “I'm trying to get inside the computers head”. I managed to hold on to my patience and explained to him once again that “the computer doesn't have a head, it doesn't have a heart, it doesn't have any feelings, it doesn't have any emotions, it doesn't have any desires. IT'S A MACHINE. Why do you find that so difficult to understand?”

I tell that story in the hope that it will illustrate, in a reverse sort of way, how it appears to me that some people seem to see themselves as biological machines with no control over their input, no control over their processing, no control over their output, and in most cases, no designer or programmer.

Do I have that right?

Easily, asking questions is in our "programming". Most models of human beings as machines involve human beings also having a program that can be modified by things that happened, and in which there are natural tendencies. In the latter, we end up having "curiosity", and this interacts with the environment to become question-asking.

Since the average computer is a machine lacking many of the capabilities of the human machine it is not surprising it cannot be evaluated in the same way. A thermostat is a machine sensitive to temperature and reacts to that. A gyroscopic direction finder is generally insensitive to things a thermostat would react to and vice versa. Different machines have different capabilities.

Fascinating topic.... My belief is that "Will" along with "free will" is emergent. Thus some level of will should likely be manifest before free will begins to emerge. It would go through the stages of a "pseudo will" hrm... what could that pseudo will be? Perhaps emotional/hormonal responses to input? Could then the de-pseudo-fying (sorry for the made up word) of will be maybe a "conscious control" over those hormonal and emotional responses?

Hormones are what creates a desire (or lack thereof) to do something. If there is will, I see them as the conduit to it.

Computers do not have hormones. But they COULD be programmed, as WE are, with a system that would be the equivalent. The complexity of it would be far too much to actually programme, so if it were possible it would have to be something that "evolved" from a replicating system.... just as our programming was made from.

We can want to do something.
We can resist doing things we want to do... And we use IDEAS to resist acting as our desires dictate.
For our ideas to be able to alter what our physical bodies do, to something outside of it's physical hard-wired programming... That is WILL. Is it free will? that's not the question being asked here... but I DO view it as human will.

I would go so far as to say many animals, especially domesticated animals can demonstrate this concept, though in much reduced versions.

Ever seen a dog that wants to bark, but knows it'll get a swat if it does... it uses the idea of getting a swat to control it's actions... it still WANTS to bark, but it isn't doing it.

I would have liked a few more responses to this topic from the many people on this forum who deny free will before responding myself. The fact that there were only two responses acknowledging the human machine reinforces my opinion that the free nature of the free will debates is an attempt to deny human will on the grounds that it is not entirely free.

I used the computer analogy in my opening post as an example of what we would be like if we had no will. My former co-worker had difficultly understanding that a computer has no will of its own but simply executes a set of instructions that he was trying to learn how to create. It is not so much that they have no reason to think JetLag, as they don't have the ability; I would not call Fuzzy's example of firmware overriding the BIOS thinking.

Of course thinking has something to do with the state of the body-mind condition Sand, but the question is, is it totally controlled by it? Are you truly incapable of overcoming your resistance to ideas you consider to be silly or delusional and think about them or is this a choice of yours?

We have a will ,or an execution of action , and it is going to follow a 'consistent rule' to: adapt to an environment i.e.,self sustain , reproduce,make choices ,etc.

Imagining if I were a feral child raised by wolves , my will would be to adapt to this environment and I would surely get down on all fours and bond with the animals. If I lived my life entirely in this predicament, I wouldn't and couldn't advance to anything more than the input from my immediate senses and unconscious programming .
My 'will' would dove-tail with the wolves due to this "BIOS"; and I would experience "will" confined to this sphere of activity.

If one could make an entire neuronal schematic of the brain , there would be logic modules in an organization , and it would follow a rule on every given input.
There would be a chain or series of events to every given stimuli and given enough information(albeit nearly infinitely voluminous) , one could predict what I or You would do or say before any event transpired.

-If a neurosurgeon could in some way insert a probe into my noggin , and influence a certain region of the brain ; in that he induces hunger (and this action is hidden), I would experience "will" and would get up to get something to eat .

-And if I acquired Alzheimer's , I would slowly lose all data , but I would experience free will within the context of the lost data until everything was gone .

There is nothing about us that is not bio-mechanical .

I've noted good responses to this in this thread , and in other similar threads in this forum, as comparative with other forums that I have perused in this discussion of will ( free will) or not.

I think that if our human minds were no more than biochemical machines with a bunch of atoms in a particular configuration, we would then undoubtedly lack the self-determining freedom to decide on or pick out one thing over another. We certainly couldn't be self-determining without a "self" inside our minds; and we certainly wouldn't have a "self" inside our minds if we were only machines.

And once again if we were just machines and nothing more, the process of our minds and our behaviors could be explained only in terms of cause and affect and not by free will, motivation, and self-determination. And without the self-determination factor, we could not logically be held responsible for our thoughts and actions. And also if we were just machines, and for that cause just a product of our environment and bad-renegade genes, we could not logically be held accountable for any of the bad outcomes that may come about from bad decision making and bad choices.