Evolving Persons and Free Will

Human beings are masters of deception if they
want to appear superior to others and to suggest that they
have everything under control (see, e.g., Fingarette 2000,
Mele 2000). Such self-delusions might be advantageous,
because those are the most successful liars who believe
their own lies. Although it seems paradoxical at first (for he
who does not tell the untruth intentionally is, strictly
speaking, not a liar at all), it rests upon a much more
radical self-deception which is quite useful – a systematic
and continuous illusion regarding ourselves. Higher-order
forms of self-consciousness, namely I-consciousness, are
based on a feature which is called a self-model. This is an
episodically active representational entity (e.g. a complex
activation pattern in a human brain), the contents of which
are properties of the system itself. It is embedded and
constantly updated in a global model of the world, based
on perceptions, memories, innate information etc.
(Metzinger 1993). But because self-models cannot
represent their own representations as their own
representations as their own representations and so on ad
infinitum, they are semantically transparent, i.e. on the
level of their content they do not contain the information
that they are models. Thus, such systems are not able to
recognize their self-model as a self-model (Van Gulick
1988). The result is an ego-illusion, which is stable,
coherent, and cannot be transcended on the level of
conscious experience itself.