Worthy of worship, free will?

[bennyboy]

Star Wars? Don't you mean Star Trek?

Yes the illusoriness of free will is analogous to the illusoriness of the self. That adds to my argument rather than detracing from it.

No it doesn't, and I'll tell you why: ultimate causality is unknowable. You therefore need to establish a context, and judge things to be valid or invalid in that context. In the context of QM, you'll not find numbers, let alone sweet ol' Aunt Em. You'll just find a bunch of wave functions at various densities doing their little magical dance. Nor will you find in them neurons, hormones, or (presumably) qualia.

So the self is illusory in that context, and so (probably) is determinism. And yet it's pretty hard to deny the self once one has had that first cup of coffee in the morning. That's because the human context is one of experience, not quantum mechanics or billiard balls, and in making decisions, we experience free will. Now, whether it is supervenient on mechanistic functions, or on fuzzy QM functions, or on the Word of God or the dust of faires, is irrelevant.

You keep thinking that you are the ultimate cause to buy a snickers bar and that the environment merely effects you in the moment mate. Keep thinkjng that you can isolate any particular instant away from its larger context and that the buck stops when you conveniently want it to. Go ahead.

What's this stuff about ultimate cause? We're not looking for God here, just the ability to interact with one's environment as one chooses. I have that capacity, and use it frequently every day. Complaining that there's a mechanism upon which that process supervenes is like complaining that I can't really drive to Disneyland because my car is the thing that is actually moving. Well, I'm not just coincidentally along for the ride, because I have my hands firmly planted on the steering wheel.

The car, it turns out, doesn't drive me after all.