Dennett's reliance upon Benjamin Libet's experiment shows how pathetically ignorant he is of where freedom of the will is be found. He thinks it's about acting for no reason; whereas it's acting for a reason, i.e., for a goal. Moving a hand at an unassigned moment is one of the least suitable examples of the exercise of free will that could be conjured up. For free will is an act of choosing between two alternatives that are intelligibly different. Try as I may, I just can't see anything intelligible about the difference between moving my hand now and not moving my hand now. That sort of choice looks less like the product of typical deliberation than it looks like the attempt to act indeliberately, randomly.
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
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