Persuasion Is Consciousness

Persuasion is an integral part of conscious free choice since choosing to bond with others is fundamental to not only our own conscious free choices, but the conscious free choices of others as well. As a result, in fact, persuasion is all about free choice. We only know a person is conscious by how they persuade us that they are conscious and they only know we are conscious by how we persuade them that we are conscious. In persuasion, a person freely chooses to tell a story to persuade one or more other people to make or not make a particular free choice or set of choices. Free choice is therefore different from coerced choice. Free choice is how people change the world and so free choice is also how people persuade the free choices that others make to change the world. Free choice as a result of persuasion is therefore what makes free choice what it is since our conscious free choice to persuade is how we change the world.

While it is possible to persuade some people with a good story, that story will not persuade everyone and some people may choose to not even listen to a persuasion and therefore remain unconvinced. The outcome of an unsuccessful persuasion would then be indeterminate. In fact, some people may find a persuasion not only unconvincing, they may also persuade with a story of their own. In fact, when the outcomes are very even, the stories then tend to polarize into factions for and against instead of a negotiation and compromise. After all, free choice reduces all decisions to a binary free choice of either a determinate action or an indeterminate inaction.

There is an argument that our choices are all determined by the persuasion of others and not by our own conscious free choices. This argument suggests that free choice is really an illusion as a result of the determinate persuasion of others, i.e. their conscious free choices. Conscious free choice would then be an illusion of the many determinate ideologies that persuade us to make the conscious free choices that we make. However, we are not born with conscious free choice and must learn conscious free choice by the persuasion of others and when we freely choose and act like them, we too are conscious. We learn conscious free choice from persuasion and so persuasion is completely compatible with an indeterminate free choice and the nature of the conscious free will.

The real illusion, then, is the illusion of a purely determinate universe where we are just subject to fixed fates and always also subject to determinate persuasions. In contrast, there is an irreducible discrete uncertainty in every indeterminate outcome even though there are precursors for both determinate and indeterminate outcomes. This means that there are indeterminate precursors that are not knowable for an outcome even though precursors do exist for even indeterminate outcomes. With free choice, we negotiate with other people all of the time and yet we do not always call all such negotiations persuasion. Free choice and negotiation are highly entangled with persuasion even though we do not normally associate negotiation with free choice. Likewise, we do not usually associate persuasion with free choice, either, but both negotiation and persuasion are necessarily free and not coerced choices.