It is unlikely that we lack free will in some form

First, It seems that Con has yet to even comment on the emotional awareness aspect of my argument. That said, it seemed rather damning for any argument against free will. I showed that the brain does not require the emotion of pain in order to process the damage that has occurred. Thus there is no reason we should feel the pain emotion unless it is driving behavior. It gives us a personal incentive to avoid pain beyond the unconscious aspects that are detecting the damage. That this shows that there is a free will can be shown in the case of S&M. Some people get off on pain, but we would expect if there was no choice involved, these people could not resist the unconscious urge to avoid bodily harm, but they can override that if they want the pain badly enough. Second, I went through the trouble of demonstrating that a body can function without emotion and consciousness specifically to deal with Con's "spandrel" argument. I am well aware of the fact that some traits can be intrinsically linked to others wither by chromosome linkage or just by virtue of being necessary parts of another system, but my arguments 3, 4, and 5 show that this is not the case for consciousness and emotion. Since he has agreed with my arguments which make his "spandrel" argument impossible, it seems that he should have taken another look at my arguments for a flaw in them, not just accepted them then made an argument that is made impossible by them. I will go even further and say that calling consciousness a spandrel is irrational and he is far too dismissive of my pointing out that behavior is significantly different when we are conscious as opposed to unconscious. Sleepwalking is exceptionally useful to the question of free will because it is a rare time where people are making decisions without any consciousness and while having a fully functional brain. "First, sleepwalking is a disorder, which is the reason why people produce different actions. There are many other disorders that also cause people to behave in completely different ways. This is what we would expect if humans are limited to control by aspects of their brain. A person with and without disorders will act in different ways, but we do not need to bring in free will to state why that is, as it all can be explained by brain functions." The disorder is that your consciousness is not activated while the rest of your brain is activated, and the consequences of this are drastic. Consciousness clearly has an impact on decision making because if it is out of the equation, you make worse decisions. There absolutely is a need to bring in free will because it is only when the options are presented to a mind that can be self aware that the mind selects the best actions. If no free will were involved, then it would make no sense that we need to be conscious to make better decisions. "Second, animals also have sleep disorders (1). It is possible that animals can also experience sleepwalking. Do you argue that animals also have free will, and that their free will is then limited while they sleep?" Yes. " Perhaps one cannot have a living, functioning organism without it having a consciousness that is just a passenger." Except that we can demonstrate that organisms can function without consciousness. As to Con's demand for a causal relationship, I have shown that if you remove consciousness but leave the rest of the brain active, then you get drastically different results than if the conscious portion of the brain is active. This shows that consciousness has a causal impact on our behavior. Con rejects the idea that free will is the ability to filter out choices that we do not like, but his argument for this makes no sense to me. "I would argue that a free will, if it did exist, would be detriemental to a living organism. If an organism had very low intelligence, then its consciousness would inevitably make much more detrimental actions than would an organism that only has the ability to act in such a way that it enhances survival and reproduction. A free will could go against survival and reproduction, and would thus could destroy a species. Luckily, humans do not have a free will." He thinks that this would lead to stupid decisions, but we can see that without consciousness we will commit profoundly stupid actions. Sleepwalkers just do whatever their unconscious mind decides and often end up hurting themselves or others. Additionally, the idea of it as a filter seems to comport with how we think. Thoughts occur to you and you cannot choose to have them, but once they occur to you you either accept or reject them. This is how we most likely are making choices, we are selecting for or against the ideas that our subconscious mind offers to our conscious mind. This again fits the filter I had already proposed. I would say it is lucky that we do have a free will so we can plan for the future and make better decisions. As to the new study that Con posted, Con should have at least tried to explain it. This is possibly the most confusing study I have ever seen and all Con did was copy and paste the abstract. I have looked around online and have yet to find anyone who understands what was being measured in this study. Basically the entire thing is Greek to me except for the actual procedure the participants went through. I have no idea what any of the measurements mean and if they are in any way related to the conclusion, and it is not my responsibility to learn all of these complicated things, it is Con's responsibility to present evidence in a way in which it is reasonable to expect someone to be able to assess it. I would encourage voters to ignore the study since it was not explained and I will have no opportunity to respond if Con decides to actually translate it to something that a non expert in the field can understand. I will do my best, however to address the study in as rudimentary a fashion as I can. They only look at an action that is completely trivial to the participants, so even if I accepted their interpretation of the data, all it would show us is that if we don't care about an action it might not be freely chosen. Really though, all they might have have shown is that certain brain regions correlate with decision making, but they did not demonstrate that this means that consciousness was not involved. I looked up how we measure awareness/consciousness and it appears that the only reliable test we have is literally asking people if they are aware of things. https://en.wikipedia.org... I do have some problems with the validity of this study. It had a very small number of participants, they make no mention of blinding or allocation concealment, and once again there is no power analysis. Thus I can't know if their results were statistically valid. Blinding would be especially important. If the person taking the measurements is aware of whether the participants are in the "free" or "instructed" groups, he might display bias when reading the scans. A power analysis tells you how many people the study needed to have to get statistically significant data and at what level of difference between the groups you could call the date significant. Thus I can neither tell if the data is unbiased nor if it is even statistically significant. I suspect it is not given that their cohort was only 13 people. All I can get from this is a demonstration of certain, unnamed, regions of the brain showing activity with certain actions. Additionally, their data is somewhat corrupted because in the free will branch, they told the participants to try to keep their responses balanced which could have caused them to subconsciously form a plan before the test even started thus invalidating the results. Thus the first study was readable, but does not counter the idea of a filter free will (apparently called a "free won't", I did not know that this was the current way people see free will, but it is cool to me that the possible method of free will that I guessed at actually comports with the current most likely method of free will), and the second study is too convoluted for Con to have reasonably expected me to be able to interpret it and he should have given some explanation, not just posted it as if it proves a point. In summary: Consciousness and emotion have a purpose If either is removed, the choices made by people change, so the purpose must be to influence actions. Consciousness being the part of you that is actually aware of itself would seem to comport with a free will, but this is not definitively proven because we lack the ability to even give a mechanism for consciousness let alone free will. That said, it is exceedingly likely that it is a free will since we know that the mechanistic brain can function without consciousness and when you add in the ability to be aware of the available choices, you tend to make better ones. This is a major point, so I will emphasize it. You make your best choices when and only when you are aware of the options available to you. IF our choices were determined, then awareness should not matter, they should just happen. Since awareness does matter, it is not rational to call behaviors determined.