Free Will

[bennyboy]

As soon as we start talking about conscious agency, we're talking about a very, very high order of supervenience.  The real question is whether free will can supervene on building blocks which themselves don't have the capacity for freedom.  My answer to that is-- why not?  That's what emergence IS-- the spawning at one level of organization of properties that are nowhere to be found on lower levels.

This in my opinion is a fallacy that many have committed in the argument against free will-- to paraphrase, "As below, so above."

But that supervening version of free will must only be the illusion of free will. Every particle and wave in and outside your body still does whatever its cause makes it do.

Is the sense of self an illusion as well? You could equally argue that every particle and wave in and outside the body is not a human mind. And yet-- here I am, and the sum is greater than the parts. And that is pretty much the definition of supervenience-- that new properties arise at new levels of organization. If the ability to experience qualia can arise on the shoulders of dead matter, then why should not free will arise with it?