this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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I feel as if the answer to this is, by general consensus, yes. You have free will.
Like, does Evil exist? Scientifically? No, absolutely not, but the word still has meaning. If I say, "that man is evil!" And you look at him and recognize his terribleness, then, sure: he is IS evil.
Just because something isn't objectively, physically quantifiable, doesn't mean that it's not a valid rational construct.
I think the actual argument which has been making the rounds recently, is not, "do humans have free will?" But, Rather is, "are humans accountable for their actions, given that thier will is significantly biased by factors outside of their control / awareness?"
It's just that doesn't get people's attention.
Ps, I believe that fundamentally, all physical interactions are deterministic in practice. Any conscious or rational being is fundamentally set in motion with the arrow of time, and if you could develop a fuzzy quantum state based intelligence, you'd only succeed in creating a person with slightly more random ideas. There would be no meaningful uplift in "free will." However, I also Believe that this is an absurd deconstruction of heady topics. It's akin to telling someone that a table doesn't exist because it's just a decomposing tree. Free will is a rational idea for human animals, and judged by that standard, fulfills it's purpose in describing the experience of conscious decision making.
For people arguing they have free will, they typically mean they have the ability to do other than what they did do. That is, whenever they make a choice, they do so under the belief that they could have, in principle, made a different choice. As far as science is concerned, such a free will does not exist, because the behaviors you exhibit appear to be completely explainable in terms of the environment impressing upon you, and the effects that impression has on your neural activity. There is no "you" making free decisions in this picture. There's just stuff bumping into other stuff, and how is that free?
Regarding a general consensus of free will, that's just not even an argument anyone should care about. Plenty of people are flatly told they have free will because, "they don't have a choice, God made them with free will". Others/most are simply uneducated or under-read on the subject. That's fine, but it doesn't mean their opinion should weigh on our conclusions. If you show most people an optical illusion and ask them if it appears to be moving, they'd say yes, even though science will tell you there's nothing moving.
I personally am a hard deterministic regarding free will. I think we have a will but nothing about it is free. It is subject to natural laws just as a rock rolling down a cliff. That's fine. There's a related philosophical position of compatibilism, which believes that we have a determined will, but that the truth of the determination does not undercut our ability to talk as if and use the phrase free will as if we really do have such a thing. In this sense, compatibilists would say we don't have the ability to do other than what we are determined to do, but since we might not yet know what we are determined to do, then that ignorance captures what is meant by free will. So compatibilists are determinists, they just think free will as a concept is compatible with that determinism.
I guess a hard determinist would say that humans have as much "free will" as a rock. There is nothing useful to saying these systems are similar in that regard.
This is because there is such a thing as "causal inertia": there is a difference in agency where a human system bases its decisions on a large spatial, time range of experiences (moments to life-long experiences and multi-generation planning, tiny tools all the way to architecture planning, a large number of connections by multiple means to other humans' experiences) to make "decisions". What do you call that?
Because it exists and if it's not called free will, that's probably the closest thing that scientifically can be measured and associated with "free will".
We may just be "transistors" responding to the environment, but we are complex enough to introduce chaos by connecting lots of unrelated things to the point of being as close to being unpredictable as any random system in the universe.
I would call this determinism as much as anything else. Whatever you discover by reflecting on memories, you make your decision based on those memories, ergo there was a reason that determined your choice.
I would just agree that we have a "will". It's the "free" qualifier that's disputed.
Sorry, I can't agree. We have ignorance about the future, but that doesn't mean my decisions are undetermined. As far as I can tell, everything is either determined or not determined. If it's determined, then I was not free to choose it. If it's not determined, then it's random, in which case I again could not have freely chosen it. You seem to be moving towards compatibilism, which accepts determinism but believes determinism can still be compatible with a notion of free will, e.g. our ignorance of the future is what we mean by free will.
Personally, I think life is very interesting bring a wet robot! However, I understand why most reject the concept out of hand.