It is unlikely that we lack free will in some form

I was very clear in the first post that I would not be arguing for a mechanism for free will because I do not know of one. I am arguing that it exists, not that I know how it works. I even gave examples showing that we can know that a thing is true without knowing how. We know beta blockers work for heart failure(which is not their intended purpose and something for which many places still list them as contraindicated), but we do not know how. We know that we have consciousness, but we have no idea how it is that atoms could be self aware. I am under no obligation to provide a mechanism and I stated from the outset that I would not try to provide one. "You have five arguments that argue in favor of consciousness and emotion. However, one can have consciousness/emotion without the result of a free will." No, my 5 arguments assumed consciousness and emotion, they did not argue for them. The point of the arguments should be clear but I will repeat it here. "Now we know that the traits of emotion and consciousness persist, that they are easily removed without damaging the rest of the person(Argument 5), that they are not necessary for a functioning information processing system(Arguments 4 and 5), and that if they serve no purpose they would not exist(Argument 2)." I demonstrated though those 5 arguments that consciousness and emotion must serve a purpose. Con then goes on to suggest that perhaps our consciousness renders us as mere passengers, but that was already shown to be exceedingly unlikely by my 5 arguments. " However, one can have consciousness/emotion without the result of a free will. As an analogy, imagine that you are a passenger in a self driving vehicle. Although you are aware of all that is happening around you, and you have specific information for being inside of the car, you are not the one controlling it. In a similar way, it may be true that we have consciousness, but that may not have any CAUSUAL relations to actions that we take." (I think he meant Causal relationships in that last sentence) If we are just observers, then consciousness/emotional awareness has no purpose related to survival and it would be weeded out. I demonstrated through my 5 arguments that consciousness/emotional awareness is unnecessary for proper survival function and Con agreed with my arguments later in his reply. Because he agreed with arguments that clearly demonstrate that his passenger analogy is unreasonable, I find it especially puzzling that he would suggest that his passenger version of consciousness is reasonable. I am not actually very impressed with the study Con posted(which I had to find a real copy of because Con's link is just an abstract unless I want to buy the article). They do a terrible job of presenting their findings and give me no information to determine if their results have any statistical significance. They did not do a power analysis, they provided no confidence intervals, and they gave no explanation for how they were determining when it is that we become aware of a choice being made. I can't tell if this study is valid or not because the authors did not give me enough information to possibly determine that. What I can say is that from what I see they say that certain areas of the brain light up on an fMRI before ones associated with consciousness. Given that the patients were conscious the whole time, they really needed to explain what they meant by this since, presumably, the areas of the brain relating to consciousness are generally active when we are awake. Maybe they meant they get even more active, presumably it was some area that got extra active when making button pressing decisions. The results they did post were in graphic form and show that at best, you can use data from certain parts of the brain to make a slightly better than 50% guess as to what decision a person will make when given only 2 choices. Basically they did not show that the decision is made before we are aware of it, but they might have shown that one choice or another is slightly more likely to be the one we make before we become aware of the decision making process that we are undertaking. Here is the link I used. If Con can provide me the supplementary date I will look at it, but so far this is not usable evidence. http://www.rifters.com... "To add to this point, I want to argue that even adding consciousness/emotional awareness to a system will not alter the behavior of the system. The system will still act as it was programmed to do. Recall the car analogy. The person in the car may have a specific internal experience that no one from the outside of the car will see, however, that specific internal experience does not have any causal relation to the motion of the car." That claim is not justified. You would need to demonstrate that behavior is not altered after removal of consciousness and emotion to give that claim weight. Sleepwalking people are not conscious and they do some really strange stuff, so it seems like consciousness actually has a major effect on your actions. "Sleepwalkers arise from the slow wave sleep stage in a state of low consciousness and perform activities that are usually performed during a state of full consciousness. These activities can be as benign as sitting up in bed, walking to a bathroom, and cleaning, or as hazardous as cooking, driving,[3] violent gestures, grabbing at hallucinated objects,[4] or even homicide." https://en.wikipedia.org... "As it turns out, I have agreed with the conclusions of the 5 arguments from my opponent. However, these arguments do not necessitate the conclusion that we have a free will. They do argue that we have a consciousness, and that there may be a use for it. I have no issues with conceding that the consciousness may have some use, as it does allow biological systems to have specific internal experiences." I am sorry, but you have clearly misunderstood my arguments. I stated that consciousness/emotional awareness exists as a premise. Specifically it is part of premise 2 of argument 2. I NEVER argued that consciousness/emotional awareness exists, I assumed it. Your proposed usage of having internal experiences is not something that qualifies as a purpose in natural selection. A purpose is something that enhances survival. Wasting energy giving you a fun video of the world would get weeded out. My arguments demonstrate that consciousness/emotional awareness must have some effect on our fitness and that effect can not be as a necessary part of a functioning information processing unit. That does not, however show that it cannot interact with the information processing unit, and in fact that is the only possible utility it could have. Consciousness/emotional awareness will not make you stronger physically, more virile, faster, or cause any other change to your mechanical abilities. Consciousness/emotional awareness are products of parts of the larger information processing system. I would propose then that consciousness could act as a sort of filter to weed out really stupid decisions, and emotional awareness could act as a modifier of that filter. I have no idea of any mechanism for this function, but I never claimed I could provide mechanisms. Besides, we still don't even have a mechanism for consciousness, so it would be incredibly arrogant of me to claim to have a second level mechanism like one for how consciousness affects the rest of the brain. That explanation of them as a filter would actually fit the study Con posted pretty well if the study is valid(which I can't tell from the data available to me). The decision is made in a preliminary sense then the conscious mind can accept or reject it which would explain the timing differential seen in the study.