philosophy

TBH, I'm not personally very interested in this concept of free will. I think we have to act as though it exists whether or not it actually does. But if, I were, say a moral philosopher, I would probably be very concerned about it because it underpins all my other assumptions about right/wrong.

Often times, there's stuff that's extremely critical to a specialist and less so to a layperson. Literally theorists will stab each other to death over interpretation, meaning and language because that stuff is at the base of all their work.

I'll open it up to anyone to follow up on recommendations because I might be a little over the top with it...I like to read the old texts in the original or plain translation. The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā by Nāgārjuna is what I was thinking of when I wrote up my comment.

I would say to find a translation and commentary (the wiki page has a list), and maybe also watch some video lectures before starting because the Buddhist philosophical tradition is its own beast that you would need context for

I'll see if I can follow up with some video links later

It's required by Christians to resolve The Problem of Evil. There must be some sort of volitional agency that moral actors have that separates them from the deterministic world, otherwise their omnibenevolent god is responsible for anyone sinning and going to hell.

It's a non-sensical solution to a non-sensical problem.

Yeah basically.

Being a bit more rigorous about it, I think philosophically speaking there is some kind of error in the logic and that error gets smuggled in via the ambiguity of the language.

Like, “I” assumes some singular decision making entity exists but if you really want to zoom in to the level of chemical and electrical impulses in the brain and say ahah well there goes your “free will”, well you’ve broken the model because at this zoom level there is no singular decision making entity. There’s some network of synapses etc that fire quasi-independently.

But “I” still exist at a higher level of zoom as some emergent phenomena from those synapses. But “I” am more than just those synapses, I have an experience that cannot really be described by those synapses even if it is emergent from them.

So the error is to confuse levels of abstraction. To deny properties of “I” by zooming down to a level where “I” doesn’t exist anymore and then trying to draw conclusions about what “I” am.

Does this make sense?

Basically the entire concept of me and a self exists at a certain zoom level, and my will or the qualia of my existence only make any sense at all at a certain zoom level.

So zooming in further down to the point of electrical actions is an error. It’s like trying to figure someone’s birthday by studying the atoms they’re made of. It’s nonsense.

Or to skin this cat another way, and remain at this level of abstraction you can still describe the inputs into my decisions at the same level of abstraction at which “I” exist. Like, you can say I’m aggressive because my dad was toxic when I was a child or whatever some quasi-deterministic social factor that influences my behavior, right?

But what am “I” if not the sum of my experiences? By saying that I am controlled by my past experiences and therefore that I can’t make independent decisions, well this is just the same as saying that “I” exist somehow independently of my past. But that’s also nonsense, but here the nonsense is by secretly introducing via sleight of hand another level abstraction which is the metaphysical “I” which transcends my physical existence.

Basically, the question “what does it mean to have free will” always involves some shifting frame of abstraction and it’s the way this frame of abstraction shifts that, I think, is the philosophical error in asking the question.

Agreed, I mostly commented this because I see these models as fully compatible with reality. Sorry I don't have more to contribute. I don't think you're being reductive, but I do feel that modeling freedom of will by repeatedly experimentally observing an actor in a fixed context and condition and summarizing the distribution of their choices doesn't capture some ideas I intuitively associate with the notion of free will (assuming it is not entirely an illusion, though there are results in neuroscience that show that in certain cases, people only become aware of a stimulus after their motor cortex has commanded their muscles to respond to it, so in some cases, free will is either illusory or absent):

-an individual in the experiment may be exercising significant mental effort to prevent an autonomic or habitual response to a repeated stimulus, and if they succeed every time, their sequence of decisions is constant, but it is also constant if they fail every time

can't measure or observe something

maybe we're talking about different things, but here's where I'm coming from: modern experimental neuroscience has developed and continues to churn out new ways of probing self-organizing patterns in neural activity that have meaning encoded in them

I'm thinking of the ghost as neural signals themselves and not their representations in a brain, where I'm modeling a conscious being as the pairing of the representations of said patterns and the feedback loops that perpetuate them, which is physical in the sense that it's implemented in a physical machine, but is non-physical in the same way that these words have meaning in your mind: they're signals.

sorry if I'm being ambiguous/imprecise