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.
How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
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