Consciousness; philosopher on free will (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, May 20, 2024, 21:28 (186 days ago) @ David Turell

Another approach at a practical level:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/cross-check/my-go-to-arguments-for-free-will/

"By free will, I mean a capacity for deliberate, conscious decisions. Choices. Free will is variable. The more choices you have, the more free will you have. Our choices are constrained by all sorts of factors, physical, biological, social, economic, political, even romantic. My choices, for example, are often overruled by those of my willful girlfriend “Emily,” but that’s okay, because I’m with her by choice. Choices are never entirely free, but that doesn’t mean we lack them.

***

"Free-will deniers tend to be hard-core materialists, who think reality, ultimately, consists of particles pushed and pulled by fundamental forces. This hyper-reductive worldview can’t account for choice. ... It just means materialistic science, which does a splendid job explaining protons and planets, remains baffled by us.

***

"Free will is an idea, a packet of meaning, that cannot be reduced to mere physics. The idea of free will, not its instantiation in my brain, provoked me, my physical self, to type this column... Once I decide to write the column, then I must decide how to write it. That process entails countless choices. They are constrained, limited, by factors such as time, my verbal skills and knowledge, my sense of what readers will like and so on. Like I said, just because free will is never entirely free doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

"Libet’s Experiments Are Bogus. Decades ago, psychologist Benjamin Libet monitored subjects’ neural activity while they chose to hit a button, and he discovered a burst of activity preceding the conscious decision to push the button by a split second. Free-will deniers seized upon Libet’s experiments as evidence that our brains make decisions, and our conscious choices are mere afterthoughts. Hence, no free will.

"First of all, deciding when to push a button is not remotely analogous to genuine choices, like whether to get married, have kids, get divorced. The Libet experiments are profoundly flawed, as psychologist Steve Taylor points out in a recent Scientific American column. The question is, why did anyone ever take seriously the claim that Libet had disproved free will? Why do smart people accept such flimsy evidence?

"You Reading This Sentence Is Proof Too. You don’t have to read this column, do you? Of course not. You choose to read it, freely. More proof of free will! If you’re irritated by the substance or style of this column, and you jump to Twitter to find something more amusing.

***

"You have more free will—more ability to see, weigh and make choices--now than when you were a baby. Right? You have more than if you were suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, or addicted to heroin, or imprisoned for manslaughter. If you are black or female, gay or transgender, and living in a democracy, you have more choices and hence free will than you would have 50, 100 or 200 years ago. If some people and societies have more choices than others—and they obviously do--free will must exist."

Comment: the simple approach recognizing none of us are free from past influences.