Do you believe in free will?

[Whateverist]

To me it makes a difference that it is only partly dependent on the processes of the body and it wouldn't make any sense to me if it weren't at least partly dependent.

So what is the other part? If only partly dependent on the electrochemical reactions. Anything else seems like unnecessary 'Wooo'.

That depends on your definition of woo. Do think your 'you' is woo? Do you feel as though your sense of self is nothing but a ghost in the machine? If so, I'd really like to know exactly what this inner critic/analyst is, how your neural activity gives rise to it and what makes you regard it more highly than your ordinary woooey you.

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I suspect there is no capacity of the brain to cognitively initiate chemical reactions which result in action. The thing I can say in favor of believing in free will is that we probably do have the capacity to put the brakes on. I speculate that we are able to tap into the body's mammalian capacity for physical response to squelch or delay that response. I further speculate that our mammalian capacity to learn where the hazards and rewards lay in the environment is able to draw on our cognitive appraisal of where the consequences and opportunities lie in our complex human cultures. We're certainly not unique in this, just an extreme case made all the more so by our capacity for language and abstract thought. We cause nothing. We analyze and that which has always made us responsive to our environment, whatever that may be, does the rest, or else it doesn't. This disconnect is probably helpful in making sense of certain aspects of human behavior, whatever the damage to our naive assumptions.

I am probably being dense, but I see no reason how this is an example of free will over determinism. All of which have a causation. Hence no free will.

I guess that is kind of my point, that our actual free will ain't no big thing. Neither is the sense in which we are completely determined any big deal. It is naive to suppose you have complete independence from your underlying processes and also naive to desire that it was otherwise. But if you begin to doubt that 'you' are anything but unavoidable nose in the system which doesn't require you anyway .. then in my opinion you are the one who has passed over into wooo. Who is it that is having these thoughts or are they having you? Wooo wooo indeed.