However, when you go about daily life, you do have a sensation that you can make any number of choices or do things spontaneously. This is unrelated to any philosophy or physics. It’s just psychology.

You could make the same complaint about love. If I wrote an essay saying love was an adaptation to force people to stay together even if better partners were all around them, you could say that there’s no physical force flowing through the universe that attaches people in this way, and so my essay was null.

At some point in history, people probably did think love was some magical, unseen physical force. Hell, some people today probably do. But we’ve mostly figured out that it’s just another bunch of neurotransmitters and circuits. That’s why no one would demand a mechanism from an article that explained love. We’re having the same problem now with free will. It’s just another feeling, but many are confused and think it’s either some physical property of the universe or doesn’t exist at all.

It’s a feeling, like love or greed. We shouldn’t treat it as a philosophical concept or a magical force or whatnot. It’s just a sensation. Asking what free will is and hoping for a scientific answer is like asking what love is and hoping to hear it’s a magical force that can be detected that draws people of similar attractiveness, socioeconomic status, etc. together.

However, knowledge of determinism seems to be driving current trends in science and even justice. The insanity plea, for example, is kind of an acknowledgment of determinism and is certainly a good step in the direction of just justice. Why people have the same religion as their children, why the abused become abusers, and the entire field of evolutionary psychology. Science as a whole is definitely moving toward an implicit acceptance of determinism.

As I said in a later entry, sure, you could try to use science to explain it away (and possibly even find what amounts to a free will gene although I can’t imagine what turning it off would do), but its of little use except in the academic, philosophical sense.

A modified pascal’s wager if you will:

If you believe in determinism and the world is deterministic, you had no choice in the matter.

If you believe in determinism and the world is free, you live a pretty shitty life.

If you believe in free will and the world is deterministic, then you also had no choice in the matter.

If you believe in free will and the world is free, you were pretty much correct.

Thus, the only tenable position is to belive in free will.

As regards to empiricism, sure, you could believe in a god. But this god would have ne evidence of miracles or any influence on the world. According to our best observations, he might as well not exist. If you wan’t to believe in such a god, a watered down deist god, then by all means go ahead. I don’t see exactly how such a thing comforts you.

Notice the person above your reply and my reply to him, “Yeah, there’s probably true randomness at the subatomic level. It doesn’t really affect things as large as neurons, though. Free will is an invalid concept at any scale with any amount of randomness.”

You’re looking at the concept of free will in a fundamentally different way than me. My entire argument is that free will is a feeling to be explained as any other feeling. Love is a result of oxytocin, free will is a result of frame of reference or whatever you like to call my explanation. It is not an algorithm or a proof or a philosophical question. I’m using analogy to explain why we experience this feeling.

Without a definition of free will, your empiricism is on dangerous grounds. I’m not sure what you define useful to be. Encouraging? You could make the same argument about god. If god doesn’t touch the universe, take the most “useful” definition and say he’s there. If empiricism allows these kinds of jumps, I want nothing to do with it.

Quantum theory does nothing to debunk determinism. At the very base level, Quantum IS deterministic to the best of our knowledge, its merely the measurement of quantum effects which is constrained by Heisenburg. However, even if it were random, it still wouldn’t be free will although it wouldn’t be strictly determinism. Instead of billiard balls telling us what to do, instead we have a cosmic dice roller.

My personal take on the free will issue is that I believe in empiricism. Given the fact that whether we have free will or not cannot be detected by everyday empirical experience, it is as much “true” to say we have free will as to say that we do not. Thus, we should take the most useful definition which is that we do have free will. Even if objectively, we do not.

Thats my take on the issue anyhow.

Free will is an invalid concept at any scale with any amount of randomness. It’s this totally preposterous belief that something happens in our brains and nowhere else that allows it to make choices independent of its input.

Similarly, if I make a computer with a true random number generator and have it insert one every few million cycles, would you argue that the computer program has some sort of freedom to select its output?

You didn’t address the theme of the essay.