this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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This is about as philosophical as it gets, I think. Before deciding if you have free will, you have to decide what "free will" means.
You can decide you want pizza or a burger. But your decision will be based on your genes and what you are more familiar with, your past experiences with pizzas and burgers, how recently you had one or the other, and a multitude of other factors leading up to that moment. Do we say you don't have free will because you picked pizza since you had a burger yesterday when your partner picked what to have and therefore that made your decision for you?
It's really just the argument that your genes and experiences make up who you are and theredore what decisions you make, and those genes are outside your control while your experiences are either outside your control or based on decisions you made using factors that are either outside your control or themselves based on your experiences. Basically the interconnectedness of all things.
I think there's a strong philosophical argument that free will doesn't exist. But in practical terms, does that matter? Does the distinction between true free will and decisions based on prior experiences that when it comes down to it are all based on chance, does that distinction actually matter in practical terms? It's just definiting what "free will" means in a way that shows you have no free will. You can easily define free will in a way that means you have free will as well.
I would argue that if you need to dig down into every piece, such that you disassemble each choice to its components, and each component into its components, then "free will" is impossible. But it's purely philosophical, because it doesn't matter.
After listening to the podcast; a lot of his argument boils down to the lack of a "causeless cause" and thus no free will can exist, because every decision was caused by something, which in turn was caused by something else...etc
There could be a very compelling argument about free will being the emergent property of incomputability; as you say if you boil every decision down to the constituent parts then nothing is truly causeless, but precisely by not doing that we get the chaotic interaction of factors that look a lot like free will; chaos is not random but by definition it is not computable.
In this model decisions become probability spaces rather than absolutes.
It's a bit like asking if solid walls exists. You say of course I can see one right there, but then I say but the walls are made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are mostly just empty space. Therefore the wall isn't really there, just empty space with nuclear forces acting to prevent us moving through that space.
Does it matter that everything is made of quarks which are probably just energy and that when you dig into the components walls and the air are the same? Or does the illusion of the wall fulfilling the purpose of a wall mean that walls are real?