The linkage of free will, consciousness, and morality

The scientific worldview has been dramatically successful in explaining how things work and letting us build technology to vastly improve our lives. The one mystery it has no idea how to explain is consciousness -- the fact that we all feel a "seemingness" to life.

Science also holds that free will is impossible -- the idea that there is a "self" that makes decisions for reasons other than a causal interplay of physical processes. As I see it, consciousness is essential to our concept of free will. If we are unaware of having alternatives and choosing one of them, then we did not exercise our will. On the other hand, consider a very sophisticated computer program. We can point to inputs from the program's environment, which could include truly random inputs like radioactive decay, interwoven with an extremely complicated series of computations. Despite all the complexity, we still wouldn't say that the computer had free will.

Science also has nothing to say about the idea of values -- what's worthwhile or what's not. It is only one aspect of the human mind and brain. You could build into a program some abstract notions like, "complexity is better than simplicity", and derive from that the desirability of preserving complex ecosystems and preferring complex civilizations to simple ones. Most of morality concerns the experiences of beings that we assume to be conscious and experiencing the world the same we do in the relevant respects (more on that below). But essential to the very idea of morality is choice -- free will. If something happened that was beyond our control, we cannot be said to have moral responsibility for it.

Moral responsibility as we humans think of it requires free will. Free will requires consciousness. All three are fundamentally foreign to the scientific method and central to our conscious experience, and all seem foreign to science and inherent to our lived experience in exactly the same way.

The requirements do not run in the opposite direction. We can imagine conscious experience without free will -- we can imagine having no control over what we think about. It does however sound very alien to our own experience -- even if we were completely deprived of sensory input or the ability to influence the outside world in any way, we could still decide what to think about. We can also easily imagine free will without morality -- we can choose our actions based on anything at all. But moral responsibility requires the other two.

As a footnote, most of morality concerns the experiences of beings that we assume to be conscious. At the heart of reducing animal suffering is the idea that animals are conscious and experience suffering -- if they don't, then there is no obstacle to doing things to them that we would hate. When we hear them cry or whimper, our concern is that they are feeling the way we feel when we cry or whimper. On the other hand, if someone builds a very sophisticated robot that emulates an animal, then we congratulate the builder if it cries or whimpers when an animal would, but we don't think the robot is suffering. To the extent we feel some sympathy for HAL as Dave disassembles him in "2001: A Space Odyssey", it is because we assume HAL is truly conscious, as when he says "I can feel it". When it comes to human beings, we have a very elaborate sense of moral and immoral ways to treat each other, based primarily on assuming their conscious experience is just like ours. The common assumption that others experience the world as we do and that this guides our moral action is interesting, but not part of the main thrust of my argument.