Before we continue this argument, could someone perhaps explain to me what "free will" is?
If you define it as "events without a cause", then you are not talking about free will, you are talking about randomness.
If you define it as "an event which takes place due to the conscious intentions of a self", then we are talking about free will, and yes, we have it.
Raise your left arm!
Did you do it? Whether you did or not, you made a
choice to do it. You did not find to your horror that your arm leapt up on its own accord! Not did you find it completely paralysed when you attempted to move it (at least I hope not!
)
On this level you have exercised free will, you made a choice.
As it happens the cause of your consciousness and your choice were the result of deterministic physical reactions (or perhaps ones with random elements?).
Yes each neuron in your brain is acting according to physical laws...laws over which your have no power...but the resulting behaviour of these physical laws, is conscious perception, the perception of making a choice, and the resultant behaviour.
Perhaps I am not expressing myself very clearly. It is all clear in my mind...but explaining such an abstract thing is not very easy for me.
Let me analogise...are you ALIVE?
Think about it. Can you define yourself as being alive? Most certainly you can...but think deeper! Ultimately your body is just made up of various subsystems, which in turn are made up of dead chemicals.
Where is the spark of life!? Surely we are forced to conclude that we are in fact not alive at all!?
Of course not! We realise that life is not a "thing"; there is no "life stuff". Rather we conclude that life is a
process.
Just as we don't need "life stuff" in order to have life, we don't need "free will stuff" in order to have free will.
Life emerges out of a highly complex interaction of dead materials.
Free will emerges out of a highly complex interaction of deterministic elements.
So, to reiterate my previous post, I don't believe that we have free will in the naive sense. We don't have Cartesian homunculi beaming instructions into our brain from a level of existence outside of our normal experience (and hence outside of physical law).
But we do have free will on a deeper level. If you raise your left arm, it is YOU who decides to do it, nobody else! We have free will because we have intentions, beliefs, opinions, goals, feelings, all of which inform us, and help us come to a decision.
I think the reason that, as degrawj said, people “NEVER agree on this subject”, is because of a misconception of what “free will” is.
And this confusion of what free will is, stems from a confusion of what the “self” is.