Is free will real?

It is non-deterministic. Though "freewill" != "not deterministic" which is what that person is getting at I think.

the point is that even though it's probabilistic, it doesn't disprove the idea of no free will.

Who chose to raise my hand? Me, as the sum of my brain activity, or did some configuration of neurons "decide" for themselves? Do you really think the macro-level of a system cannot influence the micro?

Only the urge to act and not the action itself. This is like saying a bundle of neurons choose to express their love for my mother when I decide to kiss her good night, instead, of you know, my consciousness, the total system that I am and not its bits and pieces

>Only the urge to act and not the action itself.
urge is just how we perceive something getting calculated by the brain.

And I decide whether or not to act on it, ergo there is a higher order of determination where I am not determined by deep biological strata but determine myself in relation to these

The freedom of choice still exists from the perspective of the person making the choice. He can't predict the permutations of his decisions, past or present, flawlessly, nor really comprehend every circumstance that led to them through the nigh infinite chain of events leading back to beginning of time. Even if he is aware of this, and believes in predeterminism, he's still shackled with free will due to these limitations.

Free will only fails to exist from a fictional perspective that does not exist.

...Or if you want to argue that it does, then only God lacks free will.

Oh God why do people keep posting these?

It is plainly impossible to prove either wrong.

Determinists can claim your decisions are the result of an external influence or biological proccess outside your control.

Free-will supporters can claim that they still have the power of choice for action and/or are responsible for the aforementioned proccess

Ergo, both parties end up buried on circular logic. Just stop it, This kind of thread never worked and never will.

"you" are just your brain. And "decision" is a way that the brain rationalizes a choice, which, by the way, has been proven to be after the actual decision is made.
what you perceive as decision is just what the brain subconsciously calculated to be the decision that has the highest priority.
You loved your mom because your genetic code told you that it was preferable to any other though process in the given context.
You thought about that in a certain way because you'd think about it that way in that context with the knowledge you have no matter what. this isn't self-determination.

>implying causality can't accommodate both strict determinism in lower organisms and freedom of self in the higher

And that decision is yet another biological process. Placed in the same situation, with the same memories, you will make the same decision, every time.

Still doesn't mean you don't have free will from your own perspective - just means that a laplace demon would be able to predict everything you would ever do.

What autism. My brain is my consciousness, and my consciousness is a first-person perception of the world on which I base my decisions. Yes, many are determined by biological causes that are opaque to them, no a bundle of neurons is not reacting to art, I am, my "I" is. How could a neuron , by itself, possibly have a reaction to a subjective experience you're claiming is epiphenomenal anyway? Lord almighty.

One either automatically identifies with all the movements of his mind or can observe them and minimize the strictly deterministic. Identifying with anxiety vs. understanding it as a mere physiological reaction. Both are biological, the latter exhibits much more freedom

Well, if you can prove your consciousness isn't derived from a complex neurological process, then you can feel free to scoop your brains out with no worries.

But, empirically speaking, your body and your environment seem to be what makes you, you, and all of that is subject to determinism.

You can still claim free will due to a limited perspective, but in the grand scheme of things, everything you have done or will do is already determined by a nigh infinite complex series of events, both internal and external.

I mean, yeah, you can drag the soul into it, but this is Veeky Forums. Even in that regard, we've yet to determine any behavior that isn't tied to a physical biological process, and can alter your consciousness in a myriad of ways by messing with the physical mechanisms which give rise to it. If souls exist, they seem to have nothing to do with what actions you might take, or at least are powerless to change any action your physical body may be set upon.

That's merely the brain's reasoning capacity overriding its emotional state - something we do all the time, simply to function, but is still, in the end, no less determined than the motion of a falling rock. Yes, it makes us more dynamic, self adjusting, and complex, but it doesn't extract us from the chain of cause and effect.

Unlock the rock, you have a perspective, and that grants you free will, but only because that perspective isn't omniscient.

You're not getting what I'm saying. Determinism can accommodate enough freedom of the will that the question is pretty much null. I am determined as a body in space and time, I am determined as an inhabitant of nature, but in my own mind I can overcome determinations. I am a biological system that regulates its own phenomenology in and through the act of perceiving that phenomenology.

That is what has always has been meant by soul you dunce, that factor in man (its being biological is irrelevant) that allows him to understand himself as a body subject to necessity and in that knowledge, overcome that conditioning as far as he is able

I am equivalent with my brain, it is not prior to me, it is me. If I decide to take the scenic route, you're telling rudimentary networks of neurons have suddenly developed aesthetic taste or maybe the consciousness that I am, as the total product of all brain activity, has made the decision itself? You seem to believe any amount of neurons can replicate the decision making capacity of a full and healthy brain all by themselves. The part is not equivalent to the whole

Your mind is also an inhabitant of nature. What you think, what you feel, and what you do, are all determined by the reactions within your biological mind. Exposed to the same conditions and the same memories in the same state, it will repeat the same process, over and over again, as we often see in people stick in "time loops" by short term memory loss.

The soul does not, generally, reference this entirely predetermined process, but something beyond nature, and thus separate from the chain of reactions that make up nature. Something which there is, of course, no evidence for, save perhaps unprovable personal perspective.

Software that can make decisions due to changes in its environment yet is not thought to have free will, as it has no capacity for perspective near as we can tell. That perspective is the only thing that separates the two phenomena of decision making processes. Either way, in both cases, each decision, be it a self driving car reacting to a pothole, or a man behind a wheel doing the same, they are still equally inevitabile at any point in time, only the chain of reactions that lead to that decision is more complex.

I'm not saying anything about the number of neurons involved. I'm simply saying, regardless of how much you complicate the process - even if your brain consisted of all the neurons of every living thing on the planet, a billion times over, or even if there's just two, each and every chain of reaction between them is still determined by a series of cause of effect and the effects of the surrounding environment has upon them as dictated by physical laws.

Yes, it takes a lot of complex action to give rise to "consciousness" as we would coin it, but until you give credence to something supernatural, that system's actions are still predetermined, regardless of how simple or how complex it maybe. All you can say is that the object in question is or is not aware of its actions and is or is not able to make decisions, that it does or does not have free will from its own perspective. Yet, regardless of its awareness and what it thinks of them, both its thoughts and its actions are still inevitabilities in the grander scheme.

it's predetermined but there are orders of determination and so saying consciousness is le predetermined is just saying consciousness has a ruleset like everything else, well durr no shit

Depends on how you define "free will"

Yes I can consciously decide if I want to eat pizza or not tonight, so you can say its "free" but my decision is conditionated to a very high degree by so many pre-existing variables that you could even predict what someone is going to do with like 99.9% of success if you knew all the variables. The 0.1% percent is basically wrong by chance.

>PhD in Philosophy - Harvard