My cat chooses to sleep cuddled up next to me almost every night. Almost. Sometimes, she goes to the top level of her cat tower to sleep.
Is this choice evidence of free will in cats? What about when a dog waits till you’re not looking to steal your pork chop?
It seems to me that if you believe humans have free will, you have to think animals do as well. Unless, of course, humans are the one exception. And if you think humans have free will but animals don’t, you have to account, somehow, for this exception. God, perhaps?
I tend to think that animals merely APPEAR to make free choices but are really responding to physical goings on in their brain and nervous system that they are unaware of and have no control over.
Just like humans.
If I start thinking cats and dogs have free will…okay, what about birds? Reptiles and amphibians? Do lizards and newts have free will? Fish? Guppies and Tuna? Spiders and insects? Crustaceans? Where to stop?
Of course, there is no actual coherent definition of free will, so one can either hide behind that shield of vagary or see it for what it is: nonsense, jibber-jabber.
I don’t deny that we have free will because I have empirical evidence against it, but because what it is is never set forth coherently enough to be denied. You can only deny something to the extent it’s expounded. I just have evidence against some of the claims made for it, like the idea that one can always do something other than what one does.
But, if I truly have free will, then why not my cat, your dog, or the salmon swimming upstream because they decided to return to the place they were born?