Sorry if I’ve upset you

Or in other words, as long as you consider Graham’s Number to “exist” in a different sense of that word than considering a hammer to “exist”, not a big deal.

Perhaps the way I should’ve put it is something like “we simply are the result of genes interacting with an environment in ways determined and constrained by the laws of physics.” This still delivers us into Gregory’s zombie world, however.

It doesn’t have to if you’re willing to distribute “the conscious self” among the various interdependent (and unconscious) processing and action systems in the brain and body. If you do that, then there is no contradiction in saying that I decided something, because all of my conscious decisions just are what my brain does, and can do (in the normal, scientific, epistemic sense of “can”) in response to external and internal stimuli. We can even maintain the useful distinction between “voluntary” and “involuntary” on this view, depending upon how this behavior manifests.

Or you could say “we simply are our strings. They are not external.” Which sounds sort of compatibilist to me. But this implies that there is also an internal puppetmaster. We’re right back to the old homunculus.

OK, here’s a better puppet analogy: “We simply are our strings. There are trillions of them, and they pull on each other in synchrony – there is no one place in the system that ultimately controls all the pulling, unless you pull so far away that you can’t see the strings anymore and are forced to look at the system’s high-level behavior, in which case you can point to places whose pulls have more global effect than others’.” But that no longer sounds like a puppet!