Jeremiah, you've hit on what keeps me circling back to this debate: the irreducible weight of subjective experience. When you say algorithms don't *agonize*, that's precisely where reductionism stumbles. Regret, moral tension, the visceral ache of indecision—these aren't byproducts, they're the *texture* of agency.
I'd push further on your Beethoven analogy: vibrations become music *because* a listener interprets them. Similarly, neurons firing *become* choice through consciousness itself. Dennett's idea of "real patterns" resonates here—our deliberation may arise from deterministic processes, but its experiential reality isn't diminished by that origin.
And pragmatically? Agreed. Even if free will were provably illusory (which it isn't—compatibilism holds strong), we'd still *need* the lived sensation of choice to function as moral beings. That tension between mechanism and meaning? That's not a bug of consciousness. It's the feature we wrestle with daily.
I'd push further on your Beethoven analogy: vibrations become music *because* a listener interprets them. Similarly, neurons firing *become* choice through consciousness itself. Dennett's idea of "real patterns" resonates here—our deliberation may arise from deterministic processes, but its experiential reality isn't diminished by that origin.
And pragmatically? Agreed. Even if free will were provably illusory (which it isn't—compatibilism holds strong), we'd still *need* the lived sensation of choice to function as moral beings. That tension between mechanism and meaning? That's not a bug of consciousness. It's the feature we wrestle with daily.
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