Consciousness is freedom
A few months ago I sketched out a model of consciousness, and I think there are scales of free will that map to it. The model included:
- T1) an agent’s real-time perception of an arena (at ### frames per second);
- T2) their phenomenological degrees of freedom (their different options of cognition in any scenario, whether it be abstraction, projection, remembering, solving, ignoring, acting, etc.), and then;
- T3) a feedback loop, where their decision is logged to memory, affecting how they'll engage with the arena in the future.
"Degrees of freedom" (T2) is about your free will in any given moment. Can you control how you react to situations? This is the most basic level, the thing any human can prove to have. Then, the "feedback loop" (T3) is about understanding your feedback loop over longer time horizons, designing your psychological scripts so that you have more affordances in the future. This is much harder. This taps into transcendentalism, cybernetics, self-development, all revolving around being able to control your own evolution. Then the hardest level of free well is being able to manipulate your arena (T1) according to your preferences. This is less about using force to get what you want, but more so bending the world towards your intentions. This reminds me of Dune 2, or the Rick and Morty episode, where someone has mystical foresight to say and do the exact things to unlock the world around them. This last mode is ethically ambiguous, because the question arises of what manipulation is; does your gain have to be at the peril of others, or can there be win-win outcomes?
What's interesting is how every tier comes back to free will, and so maybe the simplest answer of the fuzziest phenomenological concept (consciousness) is the fuzzy philosophical concept (free will). Consciousness is freedom. I don't think this is an original claim, but it certainly isn't a common one.
As you move from T2>T3>T1, you upshift a dimension. T2 is about free will within a particular moment; T3 is about free will across time; T1 is about leveraging free will into a shared space.