PhD student, HSE University, School of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, Russia, Moscow, mgorbachev@hse.ru
Free will is often considered to be an important or even essential characteristic of a person. The author points out its compatibility with determinism or indeterminism, which has already become traditional and often central to the problem of free will. There are a number of difficulties associated with the question so posed, which makes it hard to solve the presented problem by answering it. In search of a way to overcome the difficulties found, the author suggests paying attention to the formula-tion of the question of phenomenal consciousness from the standpoint of the illu-sionist theory. In the context of free will, it suggests that if beliefs about the exist-ence of free will are based on access to introspective data about what is commonly considered as acts of volition or making an effort of will, then it turns out to be far from obvious that we can consider this foundation to be sufficiently solid, because in this case we may be mistaken that we have free will. To indicate how to approach the problem in this case, the author provides a classification of possible types of introspective distortion, as a result of which it may seem to us that we have free will. Despite the fact that the authorʼs proposed method of posing the question of free will represents a new problem with its own characteristics, he concludes that since this method avoids the limitations of the traditional one and opens up new possibili-ties for solving the problem of free will, it can nevertheless lead the research com-munity to promising results.
free will; illusionism; human; moral responsibility; phenomenal consciousness.
Download textFor citing: Gorbachev M. D. (2024) humanbeing, free will and illusion of phenomenality. Human being: Image and essence. Humanitarian aspects. Moscow. INION RAN.Vol. 4 (60). pp. 114-134. DOI: 10.31249/chel/2024.04.07