There are those that believe that you can not have free will without being conscious. Most will accept that you can be conscious but have no free will. I won't get into the Ontological portion of the argument in this post (but will eventually I am sure). I maintain that one could be either conscious or have a free will but it is not necessary to have both. To clarify, I can be conscious but have no free will, and I can have free will and have no consciousness.
The first part is easy to support. But how can one have free will and not be conscious? If monkeys do not have consciousness (many believe that humans are the only conscious things), and you put a banana to the left and right of them and they select a banana, then they have free will without consciousness. Could this apply to humans? Certainly. We make choices all the time (free will) but have no real viable means of detecting if we are actually conscious.
i did not know that many believe that humans are the only conscious things. hm.
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