We don’t have a Philosophy forum (maybe we should?), so I post far away from the Science forum, because most scientists probably don’t believe in free will in the hard sense, maybe at most nodding to a kind of compatibilism, which itself depends upon an adulterated, mongrelized version of free will.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of philosophical lore. While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of something gently rapping, rapping at my mental door. It turned out to be a question which I’ve never heard anyone ask before.
But first, generally, there are three approaches to how we make choices. 1) We make them as a direct and irresistible result of antecedent and present conditions acting on our brain, 2) subatomic quantum randomness sits at the head of what then becomes an equally deterministic causal chain, and 3) free will is simply compatible with 1) and 2), which is accomplished by the adoption of a watered down version of free will (free will lite, as it were) that says, if there’s no gun at your head and you’re not acting out of an irresistible mental compulsion, we’ll just call that free enough, to engage in praise and blame and even to send someone to the gallows.
But here’s the question: If there is free will, what causes it? Give us a description of how it works.
Let me head off one objection to get it out of the way? “We can’t describe how consciousness works, either, yet we know we have it.”
The reply is, of course, “And likewise, we feel we have free will, and yet we may not, which makes it very different from consciousness.”
So, off we go…
Unseen 3 years, 8 months ago.
