An exercise I learned from Sam Harris that finally started to convince me that free will is an illusion goes as follows:
1. Choose a movie title
2. Now do it again with your eyes closed and try to figure out precisely how you chose the movie title.
3. Keep doing it.
After a while you realize that stuff just “appears” to us. The same holds true for more than just movie titles. How exactly that process works, or why it appears like as if we have free will is an interesting subject.
"I do not believe in freedom of the will. Schopenhauer's words: "Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills" accompany me in all situations throughout my life." -- Albert Einstein
I can agree that you are factually correct, but I disagree with the conclusion. Namely, "coming-up with something" in your head definitely looks a lot like things are appearing out of nowhere.
But we also make choices and decisions as we encounter situations. I'm not a particularly creative person, so I see my freewill expressed more in the form of the decisions and choices I make. I am fully conscious that if I do this, that is a likely outcome, good or bad. I have emotions that affect my judgment and decisions, but I also have the ability, with my own willpower, to choose to overcome those as well.
To describe this process as just thoughts appearing to me seems overly simplistic. Just because we don't understand a process in intimate detail doesn't mean we can ascribe to it sheer randomness. There are very real things happening, and we acknowledge this through other, more complex emotions like guilt, regret, sadness, and so on based on our actions that go a certain way and then with pride, happiness, and confidence when they go another way.
It seems like an overly complex system for things that just "appear" in out head. The fact that we experience these emotions as a result of choices indicates to me that we are capable of acknowledging when we've made a "right" or "wrong" choice, and sometimes it's also "complicated", like almost everything else in this world is (i.e., somewhat in between).
You really think you didn't choose to engage in and persist in that exercise? You don't think you had any choice in considering the arguments and whether to accept/reject them?
I honestly understand why determinism sounds like a compelling theory, but it's not just experience that defies it. I see no compelling reason to argue for determinism if you sincerely believe in it.
Ok, let's go one level deeper. How do you decide which argument makes sense to you? For example, say you choose 'X' or 'Y' because of criterion 'A'. Why criterion 'A'? What makes you think that that's a suitable criterion in this situation? Repeat ad infinitum."It's obvious", you say in frustration at the end. But is it really? There's a reason we are nowhere near AGI...
Anyway, try defining free will precisely. You'll find that it's an extremely incoherent concept (within our current model of causality) . Try posting your definition and I'll be happy to poke holes in it. There's a reason that the free will vs determinism debate hasn't gone anywhere for thousands of years. Perhaps we need a new way of thinking about causality.
The fact that we use intuition in choice and not some formal rational system seems orthogonal to whether we're making choices or only experience an illusion of choice.
Legally determinism is rejected out of hand, interpersonally we assume that individuals bear responsibility for their choices, it's only in some abstruse metaphysical sense that determinism means anything, and there it's largely meaningless.
While there are qualifiers for things like mental illness, the system assumes free will by default making rare exceptions for responsibility for people in some states of mind. Whatever that is, it's not determinism.
if a person is not held responsible for the actions they carry out, what can the underlying logic be but a rejection of free will? things will get truly interesting this century as we get better at projecting probabilities based on genetics and personal data; if a man is less culpable because of predispositions, why should we even let him out? this is a fundamental tension in our justice system.
Being capable of feeling like an observer to your free will does not make it any less yours in my opinion. Also everything you think of in this moment was seeded in the past by your free will.
And you can use ideological systems, like math or economics or even your impression of another person, to generate endless amounts of ideas. And for each of them you veto all other possible options in order to generate the one you do at the time you do so. Then on top of that you have the conscious power to accept or reject the idea you've generated.
1. Choose a movie title
2. Now do it again with your eyes closed and try to figure out precisely how you chose the movie title.
3. Keep doing it.
After a while you realize that stuff just “appears” to us. The same holds true for more than just movie titles. How exactly that process works, or why it appears like as if we have free will is an interesting subject.