“I am basically agnostic on the existence of free will. Perhaps it does exist, but I find the arguments against it pretty persuasive, I also can conceive of alternate explanations not involving free will for all the human actions that I see in the world.:
COMMENT: What arguments do you find “pretty persuasive?” So far, you have not identified any such arguments, let alone articulated them and defended them. Are these arguments philosophical? Empirical (evidentiary)? To help you (and others), here is a summary of the free will debate offered by the highly prestigious online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#ArguAgaiRealFreeWillNow, if you have a philosophical or empirical objection to free will, go ahead and state it. Again, to further assist, here is a summary of the common empirical objections as stated in the above cited essay: (I have numbered each objection for convenience.)
“Pereboom’s empirical basis for free will skepticism is very general. Others see support for free will skepticism from specific findings and theories in the human sciences. They point to [1] evidence that we can be unconsciously influenced in the choices we make by a range of factors, including ones that are not motivationally relevant; [2] that we can come to believe that we chose to initiate a behavior that in fact was artificially induced; [3] that people subject to certain neurological disorders will sometimes engage in purposive behavior while sincerely believing that they are not directing them. Finally, [4] a great deal of attention has been given to the work of neuroscientist Benjamin Libet (2002). Libet conducted some simple experiments that seemed to reveal the existence of ‘preparatory’ brain activity (the ‘readiness potential’) shortly before a subject engages in an ostensibly spontaneous action. (Libet interpreted this activity as the brain’s ‘deciding’ what to do before we are consciously settled on a course of action.) Wegner (2002) surveys all of these findings (some of which are due to his own work as a social psychologist) and argues on their basis that the experience of conscious willing is ‘an illusion’. For criticism of such arguments, see Mele (2009); Nahmias (2014); Mudrik et al. (2022); and several contributions to Maoz and Sinnott-Armstrong (2022). Libet’s interpretation of the readiness potential has come in for severe criticism. After extensive subsequent study, neuroscientists are uncertain what it signifies. For thorough review of the evidence, see Schurger et al. (2021).”
The above proposed *cognitive psychological* evidence (objections [1] through [3]) have all be addressed and debunked as grounds to reject free will. (See citations in the essay) The hot button of current free will skepticism still centers around the Libet experiments [4]. Here is the most recent debunking of such evidence, as noted in the last citation above:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8192467/The authors conclude:
“The RP [neuronal readiness potential] continues to be both a methodological tool and an object of study, but there are significant areas about which we remain unsure, despite advances (see Outstanding Questions). If recent models of the RP are on the right track, we cannot infer from the existence of the phenomenon that it reflects an actual signal in the brain that, in individual trials, has the characteristics of the RP, or that has causal efficacy. Because of this, one cannot infer that we lack conscious free will based on the temporal profile of the RP. If these models are correct, they may have implications for our understanding of free will, but none that avoid significant and substantive philosophical commitments. But given all the other reasons that have been raised for rejecting the classical interpretation (e.g. [3,14,16,17]), even if SDMs are mistaken and the RP does reflect a real neural signal, albeit one difficult to detect on individual trials, the RP would still fail to support the classic inference for the inefficacy of conscious will.”
SO, WITH ALL OF THIS SUBSTANTIAL HELP, PLEASE STATE YOUR “PRETTY COMPELLING” ARGUMENTS DENYING FREE WILL.
Again, my suspicion is that you are merely jumping on the bandwagon of materialist, anti-religion, and atheist-oriented philosophers and neuroscientists without any personal understanding of the issues and arguments involved. As such, I submit that you really have no idea what is legitimately and objectively “compelling,” much less sufficiently “extraordinary” to meet Sagan’s requirement that extraordinary evidence is required to support extraordinary claims.
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BoJ: “Specifically, societies do what needs to be done to survive. Those that don't, don't survive, so it is a self-limiting problem. They are no longer around.
The free will issue has little to do with the social sciences per se, except that social policy ultimately requires individual decision-making and action, and thus free will. The central issue in the free will debate has to do with human nature as understood and studied by cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and related philosophy. As such, your “water” analogy is misplaced, to put it kindly.
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BoJ: “The other problem is I really don't know how you prove free will exists. You could have chosen otherwise? How do you know? You were deeply undecided, then made a decision? Why can't being deeply undecided be deterministic?
COMMENT: Well, first, I have never said that free will was provable, or that the denial of free will in favor of determinism, was inconceivable. But more importantly, when you have strongly compelling intuitions that you in fact are a conscious agent; that you in fact are presented with alternative decisions; that you in fact *do* deliberate and weigh such alternative actions; and that you do in fact make such decisions and engage in actions based thereon; and that in fact, such decisions *do* affect the material world and your place in it, including your own life and that of others, where, then, does the burden of proof lie? Really, are you willing to throw out all of what it means to be a human agent out the window because of the mere possibility of determinism. That strikes me as irrational—to say the least.
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“My current thinking is that human decisions are inherently unpredictable, very much like Heisenberg uncertainty. It is not a matter of us not knowing enough. Decisions are unpredictable because it is even in theory impossible to know enough to predict all decisions, even our own. That impossibility does not constitute free will. Not being able to precisely specify the location and velocity of an atom does not mean the atom has free will, does it? [I will not be the least bit surprised if Henry replies "yes, it does!" He can't choose otherwise. ;) ]
COMMENT: No one has ever said that the unpredictability of human behavior justifies an assumption of free will. As chaos theory as taught us, complex deterministic systems are highly also highly unpredictable. The fact that you would attribute such a ludicrous position to me, or anyone else, demonstrates, again, that you do not understand the issues, here. That’s fine. I don’t understand a lot of things, including how to solve complex differential equations.
As one of my college professors once told me many years ago:
“[Henry], you need to learn when you should critically push back on an argument or point of view, and when to just listen, learn, and (God forbid) ask questions. You don't have to like the messenger or commit yourself to his or her message by just listening and learning." (Or words to that effect.)
For me (at age 73), this advice is a potent now as it was when I was a 20-plus year-old graduate student, and I follow it daily, and often with uncomfortable humility. I hope it helps you (and others here on RfM) as well.