[Skybird]

Free will in the context talked about by Harris, and in the context I usually base on, means not more and not less than the assumed freedom of man to chose between two or more alternatives. I would not go any further than this, because going further means, as I see it, to step on slippery ground.

Do we form such choices outside any brain context? Well, take away the brain, and what you are left with is a bunch of meat.

If there is the freedom to make a choice in the above meaning, thehn the question is: what is it that has this freedom?

If on the other hand the brain forms - by a pattern of complex predetermination, if you want - the decision on what the organism does, chooses, prefers next, and then afterwards the organism starts to interpret this as its "free decision" that was made without and outside of that pattern of complex predetermination: then this obviously has consequences for the way we understand ourselves, think of ourselves, and define ourselves.

On a sidenote, there is a comparable discussion, since the dawn of psychology and psychophysiology as academic disciplines in the 19th century: the relation between body and emotion. Does the body cry and produces tears in the eyes, because the person feels sadness - or does the body produce the emotion named sadness because it cries and produces tears in the eyes? When I started to study psychology in the early nineties, this question still was not finally answered.

Both issues - free will and emotions - obviously are closely linked to brain. Without a brain there is neither the one nor the other. The brain is what creates our conscience and our awareness. Our ego, our identity, our "self" - it results from brain's activity. Without brain, no "person", no individual.

I once heare dsombody saiyng "The brain is the greatest adventure for man in the entire universe". I full-heartly agree. Even the depth of space and the unembracable and unimaginable size of the universe - are conceptions formed in iur brains, and whether these conceptions have anything to do with somehign that we usually claim to be "outside" the skin's border of your bodies - the world beyond ourselves, we cannot even say for sure. I tend to consider it possible that space travelling also is a form of mind travelling since it is our conceptions of what we think "Space" is that we are dealing with. The inner space of mind, the outer space of stellar space - can we really be sure that it is two entities our qualities that meet here, the one observing and being aware of the other?

If one asks whether there is a free will, then the question necessarily arises: who is it who thinks to have a free will? And if one tends to answer that with something like that all that is just an immaterial condensate of physical variables and neural processes, a residual only, then the next question would be: what function for the organism does it serve, why is it there? Is the illusion of a free will maybe of any advantage for the organism that is not that naturally apparent to the eye?