Different materialists (thinking here of Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett) say that choice is predetermined by preconscious processes. Ditto with our thoughts. The following thought experiment is my attempted rebuttal.
Imagine that are an engineer assigned the task of making all-purpose machine that can do tasks like washing clothes, cooking food, cleaning house. You are making a robot-servant. You are competing with another engineer, and the bases for judging who will win this competition is the degree to which the robot is made more quickly, less expensively; which machine is less likely to break down, and which machine is more efficient and effective in producing desired results.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that materialism is true and that the technology needed to make a conscious machine is available.
You have two options, you could make a machine that is conscious or one that is unconscious. Both would get the job done equally well, at least when they are working correctly, but the conscious machine costs more. Not only that, it takes up more energy: up to 20% more. Furthermore, the conscious robot is more likely to break down. That is because it is charged with an additional task that often gets in the way of the others.
Clearly, an engineer who opted to make a conscious robot would loose out against one who opted to make one that was not conscious. Natural selection is kind of like an engineer, and animals are kind of like machines (at least to a materialist they are). So it seems to me that that since consciousness and desire are themselves superfluous, that consciousness animals would be at an evolutionary disadvantage to non-conscious ones. Because of their consciousness, they would be more complicated to build genetically and hence more likely to break down, require more food and hence be more likely to starve, etc.
My argument in a nutshell and then restated: if Harris's basis for rejecting free will is correct, then both desire and cognition are superfluous, and if so, then a very costly characteristic of animals is not adaptive.
The contrapositive of the above captures my own position: If cognition and desire are adaptive, then they are not superfluous, then the materialist basis for for rejecting free will is not correct.
Note that even though I am ultimately concerned about free will, the argument that I've just developed applies even to animals that are not thought to be free but do seem to have desire. In other words, the materialist basis for rejecting free will has negative implications for all animals, both the purportedly free and the purportedly unfree, inasmuch as it makes all animal desire superfluous.
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