When comparing human intellectual capability to that of the "lower" animals are we looking at a difference of degree or a difference of kind. Is there some sort of threshold that is passed when we move from simple sentience, the ability to feel, to sapience, the ability to reason. Does the presence of both sentience and sapience in man suggest some form of higher power or influence or do they exist simply because they are the evolutionary driven essential parts of a survival mechanism? Is man limited to finding out what the rules of existence are or are we free to make the rules by reason of our sapience?

$5Au is in favor of any gold standard.

I have to laugh every time I see an article in which someone is purported to have determined what makes humans superior to all other creatures. First it was tools, until we discovered that even some species of birds make and use tools, then it was self awareness, until we found that porpoises recognize themselves, and that cetaceans actually identify with names. So now it's "free will", loosely described as the ability to make choices and communicate those choices. I hate to break it to everyone, but the crows and ravens have demonstrated the ability to make choices, develop situation-dependent solutions to problems, and pass that discovery to others of their species. Maybe what makes us unique is our obsession with continually trying (and failing) to justify our claim to "superiority" instead of just enjoying being at the top of the food chain?

Nice article. Thanks for sharing. I like the approach: start simple and work up from there.

Since this was 'his' walk, the bright spot of his day I tried to make it his decision and not give any clues as to my preference. Of course I can't be sure -- although there were a couple of times I didn't really want to do the longer walk and he chose it anyway.

I think Donway is referring to Allan (not Allen) Blumenthal, and he is a psychiatrist (not a psychologist), who, if memory serves, was part of the inner circle (not merely the “original circle”) with Ayn Rand and he is a cousin of Nathaniel Branden (whose birth name was Nathan Blumenthal).

All this trivia aside, and as interesting as it is to learn how the brain functions, the issue of free will is established in that any attempt to disprove free will requires the use of free will, thus qualifying it as an axiom.

I don't want to go off on a tangent (too late?) but perhaps your dog was trying to discern what he should do to make his master happy, trying to understand YOUR consciousness. I guess that is different than trying to understand one's own consciousness, to which Kurzweil expressed his own lack.

In signal theory we talk about the maximum amount of information that can be contained in a given 'channel', and I compare this to the ability of a single human mind to understand everything about itself. In essence, "where would you store the information?" and it becomes an unsolvable divergently recursive problem.

Interesting.

If your boxer was anything like my older lab, it wouldn't be so much of free will as it would be which way smelled like greater possibility of food that night. :)

An interesting article -- caused me to sign up for Kurzweil's newsletter from the link. After he talks about the technical discoveries he says "Consciousness is actual. It has its own nature. It cannot be equated with, reduced to, any movements of neurons, however complex—even if my consciousness, which I readily admit, may depend for its existence on these brain processes." But that's just his opinion without any support in the material.

We are interacting via computers and the internet which relies on very low level hardware steps just as simple and yields incredibly complex activities. Such complex activity can make it seem disconnected from the underlying simple operations, but it CAN be reduced to them -- a very very large number of them.

So may it be with the brain. The key question, of course, is whether we are mechanistic, with incredibly complex but entirely physical characteristics or if there is something non-physical in the mind. Here we move into the realm of spirituality, an area that I'm uncomfortable relying on.

I suspect it all can be reduced to the individual steps -- or at least we must assume that it can until we have proof otherwise.

As to free will, my old boxer who finally died this last summer and I would go out for walks every night. We had two courses we followed, one slightly shorter and one slightly longer -- the longer one with a hill. On pleasant nights when I wasn't in a rush I would let him decide. He would sometimes sit at the corner and look both ways for several seconds before deciding which way to go. It sure looked like free will to me.